claim is that the montage of images that could produce a way of thinking about
these events were missing at the time. An image is neveronein Godard’s theory
of cinema, it is always a juxtaposition. The image of the Shoah is not the image
that captures the gas chambers, but on the contrary one that shows what one
cannot see. The montage, as“a form that thinks”according to Godard in part
a: La monnaie de l’absolueofHistoire(s) du cinéma, relies on putting images,
sounds and texts of various sorts together, and its exemplary experimental field
is in many waysHistoire(s) du cinéma. The work in the archive is exactly this; to
juxtapose media and fragments of different sorts to construct a dimension that
is not in the archival document alone. These gaps and fissures between the ar-
chival parts take on a new dimension with the introduction of the time-based
media in the archive. As its images largely remained unedited, it is clear that the
Archives of the Planet is not this type of montage construction. But exactlybe-
causeit was not edited for exploitation, because it was kept as raw footage al-
most as a time capsule, it still maintained a virtual dimension for eventual con-
nections and juxtapositions. Because these images were made for a time to
come, after the end of the existence of the modes of social life portrayed in the
images, the connecting points between the events and places depicted were still
not resolved. The miraculous survival of the images of the Kahn archive even
during the Vichy regime–one would expect that an archive established by an
international Jewish banker would have been seen as politically suspect and
economically valuable–constitute a rare case where the images of theth cen-
tury have not yet received a reading through established connecting points.
The Digital Return
We are moving from the analog to the digital. The conversion of“les Archives de
la planèteinto the FAKIR (Fonds Albert-Kahn Informatisée pour la Recherche)
database is part of a development that often–maybe far too often–leads to
discussions of the role of the indexical and the loss of the link to physical reality.
This version of digitization is grossly simplified. Digitization doesn’t mean that
film preservation becomes obsolete, and the unedited films ofles Archives de la
planèteremain intact. Despite many of the programmatic statements typical of
our current period of transition, the conversion to digital files doesn’t mean the
end of the film base, which remains unchallenged as the superior storage me-
dium for moving images. FAKIR does not eliminate all of the material links
with the events and cultures in the archive. What we are moving into is an age
of“compound”archives, where film-base and digital files of the same material
co-exist and are connected in specific ways. The task of contemporary archive
“The Archives of the Planet”and Montage 219