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Archiveology
Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices
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Book Presentation:
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.
About the Author:
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.
Press Reviews:
"Moving through a careful, rigorous, and nuanced reading of Walter Benjamin's work, Catherine Russell's new book explores the remarkable range of 'archiveology' as a creative engagement with technologies of storing and accessing. About the formation and critique of collective memories and histories at the intersection of the avant-garde and documentaries, this superb study is, more importantly perhaps, about the present and future of contemporary media culture." - Timothy Corrigan, author of The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker
"Showing how Benjamin's insights remain especially timely and relevant for early twenty-first-century archival film practices, Archiveology makes an important contribution to critical and feminist film theory while offering a compelling approach to contemporary moving image art in ways that traverse experimental, documentary, and new media platforms." - Patrice Petro, author of Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History
"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." - Davina Quinlivan, Times Higher Education
"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." - Kristen E. Muenz, Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies
"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." - Cesar Ustarroz, Found Footage
"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." - Joshua Wiebe, Film and History
"This book advances a new archival language, with which to renew the history of twentieth-century representation. Archiveology, indeed, enables thinking about the constantly evolving nature of images, by informing not only the way they work but also the way we look at the present time." - Catherine Russell, Frames Cinema Journal
See the publisher website: Duke University Press
> From the same author:
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (2025)
Subject: One Film > When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck (2023)
Twenty-six Short Essays on a Working Star
Subject: Actor > Barbara Stanwyck
> On a related topic:
Exploring Past Images in a Digital Age (2023)
Reinventing the Archive
Dir. Nezih Erdogan and Ebru Kayaalp
Subject: Economics
The Past Is a Moving Picture (2014)
Preserving the Twentieth Century on Film
by Janna Jones
Subject: Economics
The Image and the Witness (2007)
Trauma, Memory, and Visual Culture
Dir. Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas
Subject: Theory
Counter-Archive (2010)
Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn's Archives de la Planète
by Paula Amad
Subject: Genre > Documentary
The Fiaf Disaster Handbook (2024)
Disaster Preparedness and Recovery for Audio-Visual Archives
Dir. David Walsh
Subject: Economics
Accidental Archivism (2023)
Shaping Cinema’s Futures with Remnants of the Past
Dir. Stefanie Schulte Strathaus and Vinzenz Hediger
Subject: History of Cinema
How the Movies Got a Past (2023)
A Historiography of American Cinema, 1894-1930
Subject: Silent Cinema
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