Archiveology

In Archiveology Catherine Russell uses the work of Walter Benjamin to explore how the practice of archiveology—the reuse, recycling, appropriation, and borrowing of archival sounds and images by filmmakers—provides ways to imagine the past and the future. Noting how the film archive does not function simply as a place where moving images are preserved, Russell examines a range of films alongside Benjamin's conceptions of memory, document, excavation, and historiography. She shows how city films such as Nicole Védrès's Paris 1900 (1947) and Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) reconstruct notions of urban life and uses Christian Marclay's The Clock (2010) to draw parallels between critical cinephilia and Benjamin's theory of the phantasmagoria. Russell also discusses practices of collecting in archiveological film and rereads films by Joseph Cornell and Rania Stephan to explore an archival practice that dislocates and relocates the female image in film. In so doing, she not only shows how Benjamin's work is as relevant to film theory as ever; she shows how archiveology can awaken artists and audiences to critical forms of history and memory.

"Archiveology opens up yet more rich and very pertinent questions relating to film-making as an archival practice in which themes of time, memory and imagination are fluidly interwoven and fleshed out as new cinematic experiences.", "Archiveology is a refreshing for film archivists looking to expand their horizons and better understand potential users. . . . Catherine Russell’s masterful explanations ensure that the book remains accessible to readers from all disciplines.", "Archiveology offers insightful analyses enlightened by Benjamin's legacy. . . . Catherine Russell adds authority to a new model of cultural intelligibility that we can use to rescue voices relegated to oblivion.", "Archiveology is. . . one of the few books of film theory and criticism that takes Benjamin seriously in all of his complexity, and, more importantly and innovatively, shows us the mechanics of what one can do with the concepts in an era of disturbingly unstable media."

Catherine Russell is Professor of Cinema at Concordia University and the author of The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity and Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video, both also published by Duke University Press, as well as Classical Japanese Cinema Revisited.