moving. Kracauer, towards the end of his book, continues:“Where photogra-
phy ends, film, much more inclusive, takes over”.Jean Brunhes’s view,“the
precious discovery of cinema adds to the form the expression of movement it-
self, that is the rhythm of life”, also portrays media differences as a simple addi-
tion, securing a seemingly fluent transition from the still to the moving in the
archive. Just as the accounts of the famous Lumière screening at Grand Café in
tell us that it started with the projection of a still image that suddenly burst
into motion, redeeming the movement of the masses leaving the Lumière fac-
tory, it proposes a media genealogy that obliterates the coexistence and, hence,
the differences between the still and the time-based image in the archive. In
practice, however, the Kahn archive displays the gaps and tensions that exist
between still photography and the moving image in the archive.
Another property of Kracauer’s account is that it sees in cinema technology
the very condition for its subject–the masses. At least, the“instrument of re-
production came into being simultaneously with one of its main subjects”.If
Kracauer here makes a connection between social life and technology, he
doesn’t establish a causal relationship. However, as is made clear by Walter
Benjamin and other Frankfurt School theorists, the masses, as a part of the social
technologies of industrialization and urbanization, were constituted well before
the introduction of cinematography. This is exactly the reason why filmmakers
Jean-Luc Godard and Harun Farocki suggest that cinema“came too late”to
have any influence on the formation of the political life of high capitalism.
When cinema was introduced at the end of theth century, the political, social
and economic structures of Fordist capitalism was already established and im-
plemented.
Jacques Rancière gives another account of the genealogy of the visible crowd,
when he claims that it was literature, and not cinema, that shed light on the
masses. It was the attention to the infinitely small detail, the grain of dust, the
anonymous people and the everyday routine in the works of Flaubert, Balzac,
Dostoyevsky and Zola that made the masses visible. Rancière goes even further
to say that it was this turn in literature that made photography and especially
cinema accepted as an art form, and not only as a technique.Cinema only
gives a physical image to a visibility that has already been established through
literary description, and consequently he has no reason to lament cinema’s be-
lated arrival on the scene of the masses.
The consequences of Rancière’s assessment regarding the issue of technicity
are huge. It would, for instance, imply that the rupture in the archive from a
place that stores texts to one that also encompasses time-based media is dimin-
ished. Theth-century novel and cinema describe different kinds of move-
ment, however. These differences could be investigated through various per-
spectives, as that of montage, of psychotechnics or intermedial configurations.
“The Archives of the Planet”and Montage 213