“The Archives of the Planet”and Montage:
The Movement of the Crowd and“the
Rhythm of Life”
Trond Lundemo
The French-Jewish banker Albert Kahn (-) created his“les Archives de la
planète”in the periodtousing color photography, film and, to a lesser
extent, black-and-white photography and stereography. This means that this
archive, conceptually as well as its physical holdings, depends on connections
and divisions between still and moving images. The intersections between the
still and the moving depict a constituting heterogeneity in the archive after the
introduction of time-based media. These changes towards the storage of move-
ment in the media architecture of the archive accommodate and coincide with
the entrance of the anonymous and the everyday into the visible. The entrance
of the masses into the“archives of the planet”is conditioned by the very same
techniques as those that will eventually make the modes of everyday life stored
there disappear. In this text, I propose that these constellations of media could
lead to a different understanding of montage in an age of the archive; one based
on gaps and dissociations between images and media as well as their intersec-
tions. This can perhaps be seen as a“montage at a distance”,ora“soft mon-
tage”:one that is present as a possibility in the future and still to be concluded.
It offers the material conditions for montage without its execution, and is conse-
quently always a“montage to come”. The configuration of visual media in the
Albert Kahn archive is designed, as in any archive, with a future use in mind.
The archival image becomes the object of future connections between images,
instead of being restricted to playing a role in a single, fixed work. This, in turn,
has consequences for how one thinks about the position of the moving image in
archival constructions and its relation to history.
Albert Kahn was one of Europe’s richest men as a consequence of his invest-
ments in diamond mines in South Africa and in Japan’s emerging economy at
the turn of theth century.His philanthropic interests were formed by the
colonialism and pacifism of his time: he was part of the intellectual life of France
and a close friend of Henri Bergson.“Les Archives de la planète”was begun in
latewhen Albert Kahn made a trip around the world. While visiting the
United States, Japan and China, he had his chauffeur take photographs and
films of the trip. This material is included in the archive, and, for this reason,