Cinema is connected to other media in different ways than the literature that
came before it, or the digital that came after. Also on a very basic material level,
the movement of the crowd in literature is of a different kind than in cinema.
The intermittent movement of the film strip through the camera and the projec-
tor belongs to a different logic of time and space than literary description. Gior-
gio Agamben has observed how gestures are submitted to an intermittent, jerky
logic at the end of theth century, and that cinema offers a new gestural re-
gime.This is what makes cinema ethical and political besides its aesthetical
dimensions, according to Agamben. Rancière, instead, sees the movement of
the masses abstracted from technology. This indistinction between modes of
movement in different technical media is also a common shortcoming in today’s
analysis of the conversion from cinematic movement to digital video compres-
sion, where many consider digital technology only as a means of access to a
‘content’. We should instead speak of different‘rhythms of life’in these cases.
In order to examine the issue of media configuration further, it is interesting
to note how the Kahn archive was seen as an undertaking that depended on the
new technologies of color photography and cinema in order tofixthe modes of
human activity. Thedispositifsare clearly seen as the condition for the subjects of
the archive, the crowd and everyday life, but they are also the agents of this
“disappearance, which is only a matter of time”. The technologies that make
the crowd and everyday life visible are also the tools of globalization. It is well
known how the Lumière brothers, in particular but also their various competi-
tors, sent cameramen to many countries around the world in the months follow-
ing the introduction of the Cinematograph to shoot material in these places.
They also organized screenings of material from other places while they were
there. Cinema and sound recordings are part of a powerful globalization move-
ment at the turn of theth century.
Kahn’s archive does not only use the technologies that make the crowd visi-
ble, but also the ones that homogenize it. Cinema and photography are part of a
larger network of world-encompassing techniques of control that regulated the
local as part of a global system. Kahn’s inventory of the cultures of the world
cooperates with the standardization of time, telephone networks, world fairs
and new means of travel to allow the local modes of life to adapt to a world-
wide system of representation. The tools for capturing the modes of human ac-
tivity are simultaneously the tools that make them disappear through economic,
technological and social change. This is the disappearance that Kahn himself is
stating as the reason for creating the archive. There is clearly a sense of loss in
Kahn’s archival impulse, as the disappearance of the modes of life are only a
question of time, but there are no real signs of nostalgia on Kahn’s part. His
various philanthropic projects strove to create a better world of universal under-
standing and cooperation.
214 Trond Lundemo