(Download) "Film and the Archive: Nation, Heritage, Resistance (Essay)" by Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Film and the Archive: Nation, Heritage, Resistance (Essay)
- Author : Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 215 KB
Description
The cinematographic print, unrolled between a light source and a white sheet,' wrote Boleslas Matuszewski in 1898, 'makes the dead and gone get up and walk, this simple ribbon of imprinted celluloid constitutes not only a historic document, but a piece of history, a history that has not vanished and needs no genie to resuscitate it. It is there, scarcely sleeping, and--like those elementary organisms that, living in a latent state, revive after years given a bit of heat and moisture--it only requires, to reawaken it and relive those hours of the past, a little light passing through a lens in the darkness!' (1) Notwithstanding the naivety that the contemporary reader might discern in the epistemological equivalence that this early advocate of film preservation strikes between the filmic image and the event it portrays, Matuszewski's words are strongly evocative of the eerie defiance of death and the drive towards immortality that many observers of early cinema identified in the new medium's capacity to register, represent and archive time and movement. (2) They also suggest a new, visceral immediacy in the relationship between the modern subject and history. By this account, history is no longer the redoubt of distant and rigid narratives and of 'vague description in books' (NSH 322), but rather a dormant organism that is not simply written about in the past tense, but which actually and physically exists, imprinted into celluloid, within the present moment.