come, where these cultures and modes of social life would have been irretrieva-
bly lost. This apprehension of an unknown future invests the archive with a
complex temporality.
The Image and History
The temporal figures of the Archives of the Planet lead us to the issue of the
philosophy of history at work in this archival theory. The survival of these
images into a time when these modes of human life have disappeared depends
on their montage being open to future connections. These images are not–or
notsolely–images with a stable signification of pastness within a secure histori-
cal continuum because their temporality is split between the media of the ar-
chive–the still and the moving–and the fixation of a time lost. Since the film
shots and stills were not edited together or organized for exhibition, the materi-
al establishes virtual connecting points between the images. This is a potential
for a montage still to be executed. Film editing and photographic displays are
archival work in that it entails the selection of the material to be included, and
the discarding of things not considered part of the work or the exhibition. The
Archives of the Planet is a special case, since this selection process never hap-
pened. All of the material has been kept independent of these selections, and
without being edited into any defined context. These images surprise us with
an unfamiliar look and freshness due to their unusual color and the primacy
they give everyday life. However, just as striking is their unfinished character
due to the fact that they were never edited. They were, and remain to this day,
images for an unknown future.
Walter Benjamin, in hisTheses on Historyunderstood the historical articula-
tion of the past as“to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of
danger”.This image is an alluring one for the description of the relation of
the past to the present in the Archives of the Planet. It would be tempting to see
the ghost-like appearances of the autochromes of parades and passing people
on the streets as the memory“as it flashes in a moment of danger”.Itisan
emblematic image of the masses slowly becoming visible. The crowd also leaves
the regime of the visible, as they have passed only as a flash at a certain moment
that is shorter than the time of exposure of the image. It presents the entrance of
the anonymous crowd into the visible followed by their subsequent dispersal
into individual users and customers in the media sphere of the post-Fordist so-
ciety. The ghostly figures of the image are“a monstrous abbreviation”(”einer
ungeheueren Abbreviatur”), of these two historical regimes of visibility.
216 Trond Lundemo