place or an event, either produced for earlier TV productions or special screen-
ings. Sometimes, the shots by the Kahn cameramen are intercut with other
kinds of archival and stock footage. The autochromes are linked in succession,
almost in PowerPoint mode, according to place or event. The user is also pre-
sented with a narrative in the Kahn Museum in Boulogne, where geographical
unity of the stills and the occasional film montage is the structuring principle
(recent topics being the Maghreb,“Infinitely India”and Japan). The BBC series
Edwardians in Colour: The Wonderful World of Albert Kahnmakes use of parts of
the material intercut with new shots and other archival materials as well as with
explanatory interviews to tell the stories of events and places. This is the only
access to the archive made possible for the public. The raw shot quality of the
archive, which makes it stand out from all other film collections and archives,
where the beginning and end of each shot is still intact, is only accessible to the
researcher of the analog material. The image alone, without a commentary, the
shot without an adjoining shot, is a horror for archive culture. It is seen as de-
void of public interest by archives, meaningless by the public and a disturbance
of database design. The image always seems to come supplied with a nametag,
a place and date of birth, to make it possible to embed in a historical narrative
and in an educational and political project.
The computer media environments provide a setting determined by another
logic than the globalization movement of the film and the photographs of the
archive. The digital database provides a mode of media connectivity“after”the
heterogeneity of theparadigm of the archive, where the gaps and conflicts
resulting from the juxtaposition of the temporal image and the still are no long-
er present. In the digital database, the local and communal modes of human
activity of which Kahn set out to make an inventory have disappeared. The
globalized image of the mass in film and photography has dispersed into indi-
vidual units with a user name, a password and a customer profile. Addressing
the forms of globalization pertaining to the digital code of the control society
depends on understanding how media form our life environments. The media
ecology of“universal machines”condition other kinds of media interrelations
than those of the age where the crowd remained visible. While the masses en-
tered into the visible through the medium of the moving image, as discussed in
different ways by Kahn and Kracauer, the media environments of the computer
age are accompanied by a dispersal of the masses. Post-Fordist production no
longer requires workers in a factory, but relies on individualized work patterns
in front of screens and computers.
This is an age of the archive where the analog exists with a digital“alias”,
where everything returns twice. The photographic and filmic are superimposed
with the digital files of the same events. The communities and people at the
center of Kahn’s archival project were on the brink of disappearance. The fleet-
“The Archives of the Planet”and Montage 221