Author Archive for: ‘Frances Guerin’
Film as an Archive for Photography: The Portraitist as Witness to the Holocaust
Harun Farocki reflects on the filmstrip-as-archive in a handful of films and writings from the 1990s.[1] In films such as Der Ausdruck der Hände (The Expression of Hands, 1997) and Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik (Workers Leaving the Factory, 1995), Farocki’s film-archives are, in his own words, a form of classification, a “future library for moving images, in which one can …
Read MoreThe energy of disappearing: problems of recycling Nazi amateur film footage
The fragment, as fragments, tends to dissolve the totality which it presupposes and which it carries off toward the dissolution from which it does not (properly speaking) form, but to which it exposes itself in order, disappearing— and along with it, all identity—to maintain itself as the energy of disappearing: a repetitive energy, the limit that bears upon limitation (Maurice …
Read MorePicturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and the Silent Cinema
Kristen Whissel, Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and the Silent Cinema. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4201-4 US$22.95 (pb) 288pp (Review copy supplied by Duke University Press) Kristen Whissel’s Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and the Silent Cinema takes us deep into the world of cinema and cultural modernity at the turn of the twentieth century, a world that …
Read More