movement into the visible as occurring somewhereearlyin theth century.
However, with the moving image as an object of storage and repetition, this
“entrance of the population into light”takes on a new dimension, as is amply
demonstrated by the films in the Archives of the Planet. As I will shortly return
to, it may also simultaneously anticipate the reversal of this very movement,
towards a retreat from visibility.
When Siegfried Kracauer in hisTheory of Filmdiscusses cinema as“the
Establishment of Physical Existence”, he interestingly devotes much attention to
“the big”among“things normally unseen”.The crowd, or in his phrasing,
‘The Masses’, is such a large phenomenon that it demands a new optic to prop-
erly capture it:
At the time of its emergence, the mass, this giant animal, was a new and upsetting
experience. As might be expected, the traditional arts proved unable to encompass
and render it. Where they failed, photography easily succeeded; it was technically
equipped to portray crowds as the accidental agglomerations they are. Yet only film,
the fulfillment of photography in a sense, was equal to the task of capturing them in
motion. In this case, the instrument of reproduction came into being almost simulta-
neously with one of its main subjects. Hence the attraction which masses exerted on
still and motion picture cameras from the outset.Kracauer goes on to mention the films of Lumière, early Italian cinema, D.W.
Griffith and“the Russians”, and then turns to the question of montage. Kra-
cauer’s account of the history of media is worth further attention here: Firstly,
cinema supplies still photography with motion, with the“rhythm of life”, to use
Jean Brunhes’s words. The movement of the mass is portrayed as a supplement
to photography, a redemption of the movement of physical reality. This results
in an account of media constellations as fluent transitions from one level to the
next in a progression of technologies. If Kracauer places the emergence of
photography and film more or less at the same time–“they came into being
almost simultaneously with”the crowd–it is probably because early photogra-
phy didn’t have the capacity to“capture”the movement of the crowd. The
images would become blurred, just as in the autochrome process. Instantaneous
photography wasn’t technically available until later in the century. With the
higher levels of light sensitivity that allow for shorter exposure times, we are
already on the way towards chronophotography, so often portrayed as some-
thing that smoothly led to the movement of film in traditional cinema histories.
This is probably the background for Kracauer’s conflation between the time of
the“coming into being”of photography and film.
This account of matters, besides the obvious problems connected with teleo-
logical historical narratives, conflates what is so interesting in the composition
of media divisions in the Kahn archive: the differences between the still and the
212 Trond Lundemo