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Architecture, Urban Space and War: The Destruction and Reconstruction of Sarajevo (Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict)
by Mirjana RisticThis book investigates architectural and urban dimensions of the ethnic-nationalist conflict in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, during and after the siege of 1992–1995. Focusing on the wartime destruction of a portion of the cityscape in central Sarajevo and its post-war reconstruction, re-inscription and memorialization, the book reveals how such spatial transformations become complicit in the struggle for reconfiguration of the city’s territory, boundaries and place identity. Drawing on original research, the study highlights the capacities of architecture and urban space to mediate terror, violence and resistance, and to deal with heritage of the war and act a catalyst for ethnic segregation or reconciliation. Based on a multi-disciplinary methodological approach grounded in architectural and urban theory, the spatial turn in critical social theory and assemblage thinking, as well as techniques of spatial analysis, in particular morphological mapping, the book provides an innovative spatial framework for analyzing the political role of contemporary cities.
Architecture: A Visual History
by Jonathan GlanceyDiscover the beautiful details, principal elements, and decorative features of every architectural style, from the Great Pyramid of Giza, Machu Picchu, and the Colosseum to the Sydney Opera House, the Gherkin, and Burj Khalifa. Architecture offers a truly worldwide look at historical and contemporary buildings, with breathtaking photography and intriguing cross-sections to enhance your view. See how and why certain features were common in specific time periods and how these amazing buildings have stood the test of time.
Architecture: From Prehistory To Post Modernity
by Isabelle Hyman Marvin TrachtenbergMoving back and forth between the long view of historical trends and close-ups on major works and crucial architectural themes, this lavishly-illustrated survey explains specific qualities of periods in depth and the complex illuminating differences between them in social, intellectual, and aesthetic terms.
Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency (Pelican Books)
by Barnabas CalderA groundbreaking history of architecture told through the relationship between buildings and energyThe story of architecture is the story of humanity. The buildings we live in, from the humblest pre-historic huts to today's skyscrapers, reveal our priorities and ambitions, our family structures and power structures. And to an extent that hasn't been explored until now, architecture has been shaped in every era by our access to energy, from fire to farming to fossil fuels.In this ground-breaking history of world architecture, Barnabas Calder takes us on a dazzling tour of some of the most astonishing buildings of the past fifteen thousand years, from Uruk, via Ancient Rome and Victorian Liverpool, to China's booming megacities. He reveals how every building - from the Parthenon to the Great Mosque of Damascus to a typical Georgian house - was influenced by the energy available to its architects, and why this matters.Today architecture consumes so much energy that 40% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions come from the construction and running of buildings. If we are to avoid catastrophic climate change then now, more than ever, we need beautiful but also intelligent buildings, and to retrofit - not demolish - those that remain. Both a celebration of human ingenuity and a passionate call for greater sustainability, this is a history of architecture for our times.
Architecture: The Definitive Visual Guide (DK Definitive Cultural Histories)
by DKFrom ancient dwellings to modern high-tech skyscrapers, discover everything there is to know about the history of architecture worldwide.Covering over 6,000 years of human history, Architecture charts the most important developments in building materials, technology, design, and the social changes that have shaped the architectural landscape. Explore every significant architectural period and style in depth through critical examples. Take a tour of some of the world&’s most iconic buildings, beautifully illustrated with brilliant photography and specially commissioned CGI artworks. Dive deep into the pages of this inspiring architecture book to discover:- An innovative approach to the story of architecture using iconic examples. - Explores buildings throughout history and across the world.- A combination of creative photography and specially commissioned CGI artworks to analyze every significant architectural style.- Profiles of the latest developments in architectural practice, including &“green&” technology, such as living façades.- Published in association with the Smithsonian Institution in the US.- Optional 56-page reference section profiles key architects and contains profiles of additional important buildings.Find out why so many ancient Roman structures have withstood the test of time. Learn how the soaring ceilings of Gothic cathedrals are held up. And discover the architectural innovations that are helping to combat climate change. Architecture is the perfect book for anyone fascinated by the built world – its visual character and the factors that have formed it – and who wants to understand more.
Architectures of Economic Subjectivity: The Philosophical Foundations of the Subject in the History of Economic Thought (Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy)
by Sonya ScottThe history of European economic thought has long been written by those seeking to prove or disprove the truth-value of the theories they describe. This work takes a different approach. It explores the philosophical groundwork of the theoretical structure within which economic subjects are presented. Demonstrating how the subjects of economic texts tend to be defined in and through their relationship to knowledge, this study addresses the epistemological constitution of subjectivity in economic thought.
Architectures of Festival in Early Modern Europe: Fashioning and Re-fashioning Urban and Courtly Space (European Festival Studies: 1450-1700)
by Krista De Jonge J. R. Mulryne R.L.M. Morris Pieter MartensThis fourth volume in the European Festival Studies, 1450–1700 series breaks with precedent in stemming from a joint conference (Venice, 2013) between the Society for European Festivals Research and the PALATIUM project supported by the European Science Foundation. The volume draws on up-to-date research by a Europe-wide group of academic scholars and museum and gallery curators to provide a unique, intellectually-stimulating and beautifully-illustrated account of temporary architecture created for festivals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, together with permanent architecture pressed into service for festival occasions across major European locations including Italian, French, Austrian, Scottish and German. Appealing and vigorous in style, the essays look towards classical sources while evoking political and practical circumstances and intellectual concerns – from re-shaping and re-conceptualizing early sixteenth-century Rome, through providing for the well-being and political allegiance of Medici-era Florentines and exploring the teasing aesthetics of performance at Versailles to accommodating players and spectators in seventeenth-century Paris and at royal and ducal events for the Habsburg, French and English crowns. The volume is unique in its field in the diversity of its topics and the range of its scholarship and fascinating in its account of the intellectual and political life of Early Modern Europe.
Architectures of Hiding: Crafting Concealment | Omission | Deception | Erasure | Silence
by Federica Goffi Rana Abughannam Émélie Desrochers-Turgeon Pallavi SwaranjaliArchitecture manifests as a space of concealment and unconcealment, lethe and alêtheia, enclosure and disclosure, where its making and agency are both hidden and revealed. With an urgency to amplify narratives that are overlooked, silenced and unacknowledged in and by architectural spaces, histories and theories, this book contends the need for a critical study of hiding in the context of architectural processes. It urges the understanding of inherent opportunities, power structures and covert strategies, whether socio-cultural, geo-political, environmental or economic, as they are related to their hidescapes – the constructed landscapes of our built environments participating in the architectures of hiding. Looking at and beyond the intentions and agency that architects possess, architectural spaces lend themselves as apparatuses for various forms of hiding and un(hiding). The examples explored in this book and the creative works presented in the interviews enclosed in the interludes of this publication cover a broad range of geographic and cultural contexts, discursively disclosing hidden aspects of architectural meaning. The book investigates the imaginative intrigue of concealing and revealing in design processes, along with moral responsibilities and ethical dilemmas inherent in crafting concealment through the making and reception of architecture.
Architectures of Refusal (Architectural Design)
by Jill Stoner Ozayr SaloojeeGuest-edited by Jill Stoner and Ozayr Saloojee Over the past decade, and in a more concentrated form over the past two years, there has been increasing recognition of architecture’s systemic complicity in constructing and upholding hierarchies of race and class, and privileging colonial paradigms that perpetuate spatial and economic inequity. This AD issue reveals how designers, practitioners, scholars and architects are participating in dismantling the major canons of Western architecture. The work is both literal and figural: taking buildings apart and reconstituting them, and challenging mythologies that include drawing-as-analogue, building-as object, architect-as-hero and nature-as-other. Architecture has both potential and responsibility for political agency in the public realm. The contributions to this issue foreground emancipatory spatial ideas and practices from around the world, demonstrating that refusal is no longer just absence and denial, but a constructive mode of resistance and action that needs to be approached through subversive urban works, design pedagogy and alliances across multiple disciplines. Contributors: Piper Bernbaum, Carwil Bjork-James, Thiresh Govender, Lucia Jalón Oyarzun, Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers, Cong Chi Nguyen, Quilian Riano, Hannah Le Roux, Alberto de Salvatierra, Cathy Smith, Chat Travieso, and Ilze Wolff.
Architectures of Slavery: Ruins and Reconstructions (Race, Place, and Justice)
by Nathaniel Robert Walker Rachel Ama Asaa EngmannThe material legacies of slavery across the Atlantic world Atlantic slavery has bequeathed architectural legacies from the plantation ruins that fill the valleys of Cuba to the servant&’s quarters of middle-class apartment housing in Brazil; from picturesque New England waterfronts to the modernist ranch-house suburbs of Savannah; and from the castle-studded coastline of Ghana to steel-framed commercial high-rises in South Carolina. The stories of these places are woven together by historical threads stretched across the past five hundred years, connecting them first through empire and forced migration, then by modern economic development and heritage tourism. Architectures of Slavery brings new clarity and critical insight to these visible injustices that still haunt so many societies in the Atlantic world, empowering its people to build more democratic and just places in the future.
Architectures of Spatial Justice
by Dana CuffA field-defining work that demonstrates how architects are breaking with professional conventions to advance spatial justice and design more equitable buildings and cities.As state violence, the pandemic, and environmental collapse have exposed systemic inequities, architects and urbanists have been pushed to confront how their actions contribute to racism and climate crisis—and how they can effect change. Establishing an ethics of spatial justice to lead architecture forward, Dana Cuff shows why the discipline requires critical examination—in relation to not only buildings and the capital required to realize them but privilege, power, aesthetics, and sociality. That is, it requires a reevaluation of architecture&’s fundamental tenets.Organized around projects and topics, Architectures of Spatial Justice is a compelling blend of theory, history, and applied practice that focuses on two foundational conditions of architecture: its relation to the public and its dependence on capital. The book draws on studies of architectural projects from around the world, with instructive case studies from Chile, Mexico, Japan, and the United States that focus in particular on urban centers, where architecture is most directly engaged with social justice issues.Emerging from more than two decades of the author&’s own project-based research, Architectures of Spatial Justice examines ethically driven practices that break with professional conventions to correct long-standing inequities in the built environment, uncovering architecture&’s limits—and its potential.
Architectures of Transversality: Paul Klee, Louis Kahn and the Persian Imagination (Routledge Research in Architecture)
by Shima MohajeriArchitectures of Transversality investigates the relationship between modernity, space, power, and culture in Iran. Focusing on Paul Klee’s Persian-inspired miniature series and Louis Kahn’s unbuilt blueprint for a democratic public space in Tehran, it traces the architectonics of the present as a way of moving beyond universalist and nationalist accounts of modernism. Transversality is a form of spatial production and practice that addresses the three important questions of the self, objects, and power. Using Deleuzian and Heideggerian theory, the book introduces the practices of Klee and Kahn as transversal spatial responses to the dialectical tension between existential and political territories and, in doing so, situates the history of the silent, unrepresented and the unbuilt – constructed from the works of Klee and Kahn – as a possible solution to the crisis of modernity and identity-based politics in Iran.
Architektur, Atmosphäre, Wahrnehmung: Die römische Villa als Chance für das Bauen heute
by Christian Illies Andreas Grüner Martin Düchs Sabine Vogt„Nach Rom Architekturstudenten zu schicken heißt, sie für ihr ganzes Leben zu ruinieren.“ (Le Corbusier 1922). Im Sinne dieses Verdikts hat sich die Architekturmoderne radikal von der klassizistischen Tradition abgewandt, in der die antike Baukunst als Schulung, Folie und Muster galt, indem man ihre Formen, Strukturen und Proportionen formalästhetisch analysierte und nachahmte. Doch gab es bereits in der Antike ein anderes Konzept von Architekturverständnis: das sinnliche Erleben von Raumsequenzen und die Gestaltung von Atmosphären. Vorgeführt wird uns ein solches Verständnis in Bauten wie der Villa Hadriana aber auch in den „Villenbriefen“ des römischen Senators Plinius d. J. (um 100 n. Chr.). Von Architekten wurden Letztere lebhaft diskutiert, bis die Moderne jede Beschäftigung mit der Antike „untersagte“.Der Band „Architektur, Atmosphäre, Wahrnehmung“ versammelt nun zehn Beiträge, die wieder alle –mehr oder weniger intensiv – als Ausgangsbasis die Villenbriefe nutzen, allerdings nicht, um mit ihnen einen formalästhetischen Zugriff auf die Antike wiederzubeleben, sondern, weil der von Plinius vorgeführte und in der Forschung bis dato vernachlässigte Blick auf die römische Villa unter dem Aspekt einer sequentiellen Sinnlichkeit eine „Chance für das Bauen heute“ ist.Im Ergebnis kann man festhalten: Egal ob man Architekturstudenten nach Rom schickt oder nicht – in jedem Fall sollte man sie Plinius lesen lassen.
Architektur, Atmosphäre, Wahrnehmung: Die römische Villa als Chance für das Bauen heute (Interdisziplinäre Architektur-Wissenschaft: Praxis – Theorie – Methodologie – Forschung)
by Christian Illies Andreas Grüner Martin Düchs Sabine Vogt„Nach Rom Architekturstudenten zu schicken heißt, sie für ihr ganzes Leben zu ruinieren.“ (Le Corbusier 1922). Im Sinne dieses Verdikts hat sich die Architekturmoderne radikal von der klassizistischen Tradition abgewandt, in der die antike Baukunst als Schulung, Folie und Muster galt, indem man ihre Formen, Strukturen und Proportionen formalästhetisch analysierte und nachahmte. Doch gab es bereits in der Antike ein anderes Konzept von Architekturverständnis: das sinnliche Erleben von Raumsequenzen und die Gestaltung von Atmosphären. Vorgeführt wird uns ein solches Verständnis in Bauten wie der Villa Hadriana aber auch in den „Villenbriefen“ des römischen Senators Plinius d. J. (um 100 n. Chr.). Von Architekten wurden Letztere lebhaft diskutiert, bis die Moderne jede Beschäftigung mit der Antike „untersagte“.Der Band „Architektur, Atmosphäre, Wahrnehmung“ versammelt nun zehn Beiträge, die wieder alle –mehr oder weniger intensiv – als Ausgangsbasis die Villenbriefe nutzen, allerdings nicht, um mit ihnen einen formalästhetischen Zugriff auf die Antike wiederzubeleben, sondern, weil der von Plinius vorgeführte und in der Forschung bis dato vernachlässigte Blick auf die römische Villa unter dem Aspekt einer sequentiellen Sinnlichkeit eine „Chance für das Bauen heute“ ist.Im Ergebnis kann man festhalten: Egal ob man Architekturstudenten nach Rom schickt oder nicht – in jedem Fall sollte man sie Plinius lesen lassen.
Archival Communities: Constructing the Past in the Early United States
by Derek Kane O'LearyThe story behind the creation of the first archives in the new United States Archives, the foundational resource for historical research, do not emerge from a vacuum. The records, documents, and data that make up the historian&’s quarry are never neutral but are themselves the product of historical forces and individual choices. What materials are included in the archive, and why? Whose voices are preserved for posterity, and whose are silenced? In recent years, scholars have increasingly made archives themselves the subject of investigation. With Archival Communities, Derek Kane O&’Leary takes up this crucial task for the era of the early United States, arguing that key components of America&’s archives emerged from within an Atlantic world of circulating scholars, evidence, practices, and ideas. As he shows, US archives—and the historical narratives spawned by the documents preserved within them—drew their initial materials and meaning from this international context. And while demonstrating the disproportionate imprint of powerful men, O&’Leary&’s Atlantic frame reveals a far broader community of people who engaged in early archival efforts on the national, state, and local levels, including women who influenced the act of collection and public perceptions of the young nation&’s historical record.
Archival Material: Early Papers on History, Volume 25 (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan #25)
by Lonergan Research InstituteIn the mid- to late-1930s, while he was a student at the Gregorian University in Rome, Bernard Lonergan wrote a series of eight essays on the philosophy and theology of history. These essays foreshadow a number of the major themes in his life’s work. The significance of these essays is enormous, not only for an understanding of the later trajectory of Lonergan’s own work but also for the development of a contemporary systematic theology. In an important entry from 1965 in his archival papers, Lonergan wrote that the "mediated object" of systematics is Geschichte or the history that is lived and written about. In the same entry, he stated that the "doctrines" that this systematic theology would attempt to understand are focused on "redemption." The seeds of such a theology are planted in the current volume, where the formulae that are so pronounced in his later work first appear. Students of Lonergan’s work will find their understanding of his philosophy profoundly affected by the essays in this volume.
Archival Resources of Republican China in North America
by Chengzhi Wang Su ChenNorth America maintains the largest collection of archival materials relating to the Chinese Republican era (1911–1949) outside of China. Most of the archival materials are also unique, and the collections contain special materials supplementing historical records in China and Taiwan. In many cases, North America's holdings represent the best and only public access to the tumultuous Republican government and society of the first half of the twentieth century. <P><P>An essential guide for researchers and students of Republican China, this volume, presented in both English and Chinese, covers personal papers, correspondences, memoirs, diaries, photographs, moving images, and other materials held at academic and research institutions across the United States and Canada. It includes concise descriptions of the people, organizations, and events connected to each entry and notes when certain collections are closely related and when materials are digitized for online access. The book corrects common errors associated with the library records of many archives and updates or completes information on the objects of these records. More than a straightforward itemization, this book adds significant depth to any research on the history and global import of China's modern development.
Archival Silences: Missing, Lost and, Uncreated Archives
by David Thomas Michael MossArchival Silences demonstrates emphatically that archival absences exist all over the globe. The book questions whether benign ‘silence’ is an appropriate label for the variety of destructions, concealment and absences that can be identified within archival collections. Including contributions from archivists and scholars working around the world, this truly international collection examines archives in Australia, Brazil, Denmark, England, India, Iceland, Jamaica, Malawi, The Philippines, Scotland, Turkey and the United States. Making a clear link between autocratic regimes and the failure to record often horrendous crimes against humanity, the volume demonstrates that the failure of governments to create records, or to allow access to records, appears to be universal. Arguing that this helps to establish a hegemonic narrative that excludes the ‘other’, this book showcases the actions historians and archivists have taken to ensure that gaps in archives are filled. Yet the book also claims that silences in archives are inevitable and argues not only that recordkeeping should be mandated by international courts and bodies, but that we need to develop other ways of reading archives broadly conceived to compensate for absences. Archival Silences addresses fundamental issues of access to the written record around the world. It is directed at those with a concern for social justice, particularly scholars and students of archival studies, history, sociology, international relations, international law, business administration and information science.
Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History
by Antoinette BurtonDespite the importance of archives to the profession of history, there is very little written about actual encounters with them--about the effect that the researcher's race, gender, or class may have on her experience within them or about the impact that archival surveillance, architecture, or bureaucracy might have on the histories that are ultimately written. This provocative collection initiates a vital conversation about how archives around the world are constructed, policed, manipulated, and experienced. It challenges the claims to objectivity associated with the traditional archive by telling stories that illuminate its power to shape the narratives that are "found" there. Archive Stories brings together ethnographies of the archival world, most of which are written by historians. Some contributors recount their own experiences. One offers a moving reflection on how the relative wealth and prestige of Western researchers can gain them entry to collections such as Uzbekistan's newly formed Central State Archive, which severely limits the access of Uzbek researchers. Others explore the genealogies of specific archives, from one of the most influential archival institutions in the modern West, the Archives nationales in Paris, to the significant archives of the Bakunin family in Russia, which were saved largely through the efforts of one family member. Still others explore the impact of current events on the analysis of particular archives. A contributor tells of researching the 1976 Soweto riots in the politically charged atmosphere of the early 1990s, just as apartheid in South Africa was coming to an end. A number of the essays question what counts as an archive--and what counts as history--as they consider oral histories, cyberspace, fiction, and plans for streets and buildings that were never built, for histories that never materialized. Contributors. Tony Ballantyne, Marilyn Booth, Antoinette Burton, Ann Curthoys, Peter Fritzsche, Durba Ghosh, Laura Mayhall, Jennifer S. Milligan, Kathryn J. Oberdeck, Adele Perry, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, John Randolph, Craig Robertson, Horacio N. Roque Ramrez, Jeff Sahadeo, Rene Sentilles
Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for U.S. Surveys, 1850-1890
by Robin KelseyThis imaginative study of American visual culture reveals how the political predicaments of a few small bureaucracies once fostered pictures of an extraordinary style. U.S. geographical and geological surveys of the late nineteenth century produced photographs and drawings of topography, American Indians, geologic features, botanical specimens, and specialists at work in the field. Some of these pictures have long been celebrated for their anticipation of a modernist aesthetic, but Robin Kelsey, in this abundantly illustrated volume, traces their modernistic qualities to archival ingenuity. The technical and promotional needs of surveys, Kelsey argues, fostered the emergence of a taut, graphic pictorial style that imitated the informational clarity of diagrams and maps. As this book demonstrates, these pictures became sites of struggle as well as innovation when three brilliant survey artists and photographers subtly resisted the programs they were hired to serve. Discovering a politics of style behind the modernist look of survey pictures, Kelsey offers a fresh interpretation of canonical western expedition photographs by Timothy H. O'Sullivan and introduces two exceptional but largely forgotten sets of pictures: views of the U.S.-Mexico boundary from the 1850s by Arthur Scott and photographs of the Charleston earthquake of 1886 by C. C. Jones.
Archive That, Comrade!: Left Legacies and the Counter Culture of Remembrance (KAIROS)
by Phil CohenAfter a brief introduction that sets the contemporary scene of "archive fever," this book considers the political legacy of 1960s counterculture for what it reveals about the process of commemoration. How far can the archive serve as a platform for dialogue and debate between different generations of activists in a culture that fetishizes the evanescent present, practices a profound amnesia about its counterfactual past, and forecloses the sociological imagination of an alternative future? Can the Left establish its own autonomous model of commemoration?
Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia (Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures)
by Rosie BsheerThe production of history is premised on the selective erasure of certain pasts and the artifacts that stand witness to them. From the elision of archival documents to the demolition of sacred and secular spaces, each act of destruction is also an act of state building. Following the 1991 Gulf War, political elites in Saudi Arabia pursued these dual projects of historical commemoration and state formation with greater fervor to enforce their postwar vision for state, nation, and economy. Seeing Islamist movements as the leading threat to state power, they sought to de-center religion from educational, cultural, and spatial policies. With this book, Rosie Bsheer explores the increasing secularization of the postwar Saudi state and how it manifested in assembling a national archive and reordering urban space in Riyadh and Mecca. The elites' project was rife with ironies: in Riyadh, they employed world-renowned experts to fashion an imagined history, while at the same time in Mecca they were overseeing the obliteration of a thousand-year-old topography and its replacement with commercial megaprojects. Archive Wars shows how the Saudi state's response to the challenges of the Gulf War served to historicize a national space, territorialize a national history, and ultimately refract both through new modes of capital accumulation.
Archive as Detour: Historical Re-enactment in Artist Archive and Archival Art Practices of Contemporary Hong Kong (Contemporary East Asian Visual Cultures, Societies and Politics)
by Sau Wai Vennes ChengThe book brings a new approach to see the art history of Hong Kong as a historical mediator and offers alternative perspective to discern the current hype of archive research and archival art practices, which informs the commitment in the constant production of socio-political meanings through arts. The book addresses the current social-political crises of Hong Kong by connecting art, memory, history, and political participation together through the site of archive and contextualises in both local and global perspectives, it also focuses on the artist archive, namely Ha Bik Chuen Archive, and archival art practices of contemporary Hong Kong, particularly in the social and political unrests, however, it ripples resonance and reflection not only in the local context but also to the region. The book is intended to the readers who are interested in both representational and interpretational nature of art and searching for alternatives means to perceive histories.
Archive, Slow Ideology and Egodocuments as Microhistorical Autobiography: Potential History
by Sigurður Gylfi MagnússonThis book aims to demonstrate how scholars in recent times have been utilizing egodocuments from various angles and providing an opening for the multivocality of the sources to be fully appreciated. The first part of the book is concerned with the significance of egodocuments, both for the individual him/herself who creates such documents, and also for the other, who receives them. The author approaches the subject on the basis of his own personal experience, and goes on to discuss the importance of such documents for the academic world, emphasizing more general questions and issues within the fields of historiography, philosophy of history, microhistory, and memory studies. The second part of the book is based upon a photographic collection – an archive – that belonged to the author’s grandfather, who over decades accumulated photographs of vagabonds and outsiders. This part seeks to explore what kind of knowledge can be applied when a single source – an archive, document, letter, illustration, etc. – is examined, and whether the knowledge derived may not be quite as good in its own context as in the broader perspective.
Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices (a Camera Obscura Book)
by Catherine RussellIn 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.