a culture poses stylistic questions about distance, angles, framing, movement
etc., but also about how the relationsbetweenthe media are designed and
conceived.- Secondly, the film material was (with few exceptions) never edited together.
This means that it was not given a narrative or a persuasive force through
editing, but remained as raw shots,‘rushes’, with the whole of the shots
length intact. The montage of shots and intersections of media remained to
be decided, as possible connections, and consequently open to future re-ar-
rangements. This aspect of the Kahn films clearly sets them apart from the
newsreel tradition that emerged during that period (Pathé Journalinand
Gaumont Actualitésin). - Thirdly, Kahn’s archival impulse was formed by the anticipation of an ap-
proaching catastrophe, or at least of the disappearance of the cultures and
social life, the signs of which he was collecting. Kahn made an archive for
the time to come, after many of the cultures and modes of social life docu-
mented had ceased to exist. It was only then that this raw material could
receive a reading, a montage.
Throughout theyears the material was collected, Kahn remained with the
multiple media model of films and autochromes. In addition, aboutstereo-
scopic plates were collected in the early years, and according to the Albert Kahn
Museum exhibition, a phonograph was brought along for Kahn’s first trip, but
was never replaced after it was broken during the first part of the journey. Why
did the archive keep with this media architecture? If these media were under-
stood as true slices of reality, wouldn’t the autochromes be sufficient? Or just the
films? The media used in the archive demonstrates that none of them could give
a full and accurate account of any one event. Kahn equipped his photographers
and cinematographers with both still and moving image cameras because they
complement each other. The visual modes of these techniques store different
things, and are consequently techniques for the selection of information: color
photography lacks movement, films lack not only color (except for the color
film footage shot in the lates) but also that frozen moment in time. Films
were an essential part of the archive, however. In the phrasing of Jean Brunhes,
the director of the archive,“the precious discovery of cinema adds to the form
the expression of movement itself, that is the rhythm of life”.
This points to an important factor in the discussion of cinema as well as of the
role of the image in the archive at the time. If Boleslas Matuszewski was already
inarguing that films were”a new source of history”,the post-Gutenberg
Galaxy archive, where sound is stored as sound and visual events as moving
images, produces an awareness that what is seen is different from what is said,
that texts tell other stories than images. The heterogeneity of the archive is a key
210 Trond Lundemo