tion of the past depends not on the single image, however, but on virtual mon-
tage and future connections: these flashes occur in‘inter-mediary’places. They
occur in the spaces between the media. It is too simple to assign to these images
a Benjaminian materialist historicity in their own right. The image as a flash is
what one cannot see in one image alone. Even if these images are invested with
a split temporality, and they could be said to display movement at the same
time as they are still, the flashes thatarethe media exist in the virtual connec-
tions between the still image and the moving.
This virtual montage is already suggested in the heterogeneity of the tempo-
ral modes of the images of the archive: the phantoms of the still color photo-
graphs relate to the film shots of the same subjects and places at the same time.
These images establish distant points of connection to each other, as well as to
other images of this and other archives. Instead of illustrating Benjamin’s flash
of memory in a moment of danger, the autochromes demonstrate how any ar-
chival medium remains incomplete and fragmented. It produces distant con-
nections, intermedial spaces, gaps and ruptures. The connecting points between
the stills and the editing of one image after another are absent in this archive.
This is a“soft montage”, as the connections are only fleeting and temporary. It
is a montage at a distance, in the sense that its elements are physically separated
and only associated in thought. If we see these virtual connections in the Kahn
archive as a form of montage, it could be one that oscillates between the still and
the moving in similar ways as Benjamin’s theses on history, between an image to
be retained and the evanescence of a flash. It is a montage made of the memory
of images, suddenly and momentarily associated and disconnected at the same
moment. The montage, consequently, always remains in the future, in new si-
tuations and intermediary configurations.
“Memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger”is for Benjamin anErlösungof
the past: This redemption of physical reality is what Kracauer found in cin-
ema.The redemption is, however, not in the single image itself but in mon-
tage. French art theorist Georges Didi-Huberman discussed the relevance of
montage in an attempt to understand the role of the image in the archive.The
issue is whether the archive image tells us anything about the horrors of war.
Didi-Huberman argues that even if the image doesn’t tell us everything, even if
it is notallof an event, it is still an essential part in the process where one con-
structs a knowledge about an event. Didi-Huberman evokes Godard’s claim in
Histoire(s) du cinémathat there are no images of the Nazi extermination camps in
cinema, and that this is where cinema failed to fulfill its mission: To make the
Third Reich extermination camps known and understood.This is the field
where the questions raised in relation to the Kahn archive become essential.
Of course, there are many documentary images of the camps, of the mass
graves and of the horrors of the genocides. What Godard is implying with his
218 Trond Lundemo