Counter-Archive

Counter-Archive brilliantly reflects the visual character of philosophy, geography, and historiography in twentieth-century France. Organized hermetically and crafted meticulously, this volume offers a wealth of information as it considers film theory. -- Tom Conley, Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and chair of visual and environmental studies, Harvard University This impressive book carves out a field of interest that, prior to Amad's scrutiny, did not exist. Amad displays extraordinary erudition, assembling a remarkable bibliography of primary sources. She invites us to ponder her ideas in relation to our own digital, counter-archival, image overload. -- Antonia Lant, Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University, editor of Red Velvet Seat: Women's Writings on the First Fifty Years of Cinema. Amad handles the technical details with flourish and mastery, and the research in the French archives is exhilarating. -- Donald Crafton, Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame "Amad's book is far more than an unusually successful effort to recover and analyze Kahn's unique dream of "archiving the planet." It stages a theoretical interrogation of the terms archive, everyday life, and modernity, arguing that the emergence of motion pictures produced a revisionist concept of the archive or what she calls the counter-archive. Her book ultimately mounts a highly original methodological exploration of the intersection of history and theory." -- Richard Abel, Robert Altman Collegiate Professor of Film Studies, University of Michigan

Tucked away in a garden on the edge of Paris is a multimedia archive like no other: Albert Kahn's Archives de la Planete (1908-1931). Kahn's vast photo-cinematographic experiment preserved world memory through the privileged lens of everyday life, and Counter-Archive situates this project in its biographic, intellectual, and cinematic contexts. Tracing the archive's key influences, such as the philosopher Henri Bergson, the geographer Jean Brunhes, and the biologist Jean Comandon, Paula Amad maps an alternative landscape of French cultural modernity in which vitalist philosophy cross-pollinated with early film theory, documentary film with the avant-garde, cinematic models of temporality with the early Annales school of history, and film's appropriation of the planet with human geography and colonial ideology. At the heart of the book is an insightful meditation upon the transformed concept of the archive in the age of cinema and an innovative argument about film's counter-archival challenge to history. The first comprehensive study of Kahn's films, Counter-Archive also offers a vital historical perspective on debates involving archives, media, and memory.