tance to people in the films as well as in the color photographs. Part of the ex-
plicit ideological background of the archive was to show the universality of
mankind within the disparate cultures documented by the new technologies.
Much of the research on this archive has been concerned with its role as a
source of history, and has been devoted to identifying the events, people and
places documented. Film scholars like Tom Gunning, Paula Amad, François de
la Breteque and Teresa Castro have analyzed its film archive and its position
within film history, particularly in relation to the documentary tradition. Tom
Gunning has identified the footage as largely belonging to a pre-documentary
“view”aesthetic, whereas Paula Amad refers to it as an anthology of film
styles.Teresa Castro has sought to save the material from‘the primitive mode’
by inferring a mental montage already anticipated in the shots while de la Bre-
tèque relates it to various movements in non-fiction cinema, like the films of
Lumière as well as those of Vertov and the European avant-garde.Amad has
approached the archive from the perspective of its representation of transient,
everyday events, claiming it to be a“counter-archive”because of the privilege it
accords to the anonymous and the everyday.In her outstanding recent mono-
graph on the archive, she situates the“counter-archival”in a Bergsonist reading
of cinematic memory.
The tendency of the research on this archive has been to focus on single
events or on one medium, and few scholars, with the notable exception of Paula
Amad, have approached the theoretical questions emerging from the use of
multi-media. This discussion will focus on the configuration of the media in the
archive. Kahn’s project is interesting from an analytical point of view regarding
the“connections”between the moving image and other media in this physical
archive as well as in the“archive”as a theoretical concept. The role of the mov-
ing image within larger media environments can also be approached in a con-
temporary context through Kahn’s archive, as it is currently being digitized and
made available as a database called FAKIR (Fonds Albert-Kahn Informatisée
pour la Recherche).
There are three properties of the Archives of the Planet that makes it of particu-
lar interest to questions of media configurations in the archive:
- Firstly, it is not a collection of existing films and photographs, even if Kahn at
some points augmented his collection by acquiring existing newsreel footage
from Pathé or other newsreel companies. It differs, in this respect, from
many of the discussions of the day about archiving existing films as histori-
cal sources. Kahn’s archive is not a collection of existing films and photo-
graphs as a source of knowledge, but seeks to acquire knowledge through
the act of shooting. Film is ameansto make”an inventory of the surface of
the globe”, and not the object of collection itself. This idea of the recording of
“The Archives of the Planet”and Montage 209