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I am
interested in archives because it is where I work. I am
interested in contemporary culture because it is where I
live. Between the two, "history" as a discipline and a
way of thinking is the mediating concern. The question I
will address in this article lies in that in-between: how
does the current interest in the hypertextual
organization of visual experience -- produced and
promoted by the development of new electronic media such
as the Internet and other digital technologies such as
CD/DVD-ROM or computer games -- relate to the historicity
of visual culture? This is a question of cultural
philosophy. By raising it, I aim to explore how I can be
loyal to "history" as an endeavor and a mode of inquiry,
as well as to my cultural habitat, which is the present.
It will guide me in an enterprise of construction: of
articulating what an "archival poetics" can be, and what
it can do for such a bi-temporal history. The unstable
but important relationship between the real archive that
is my starting point and place of work, and the
conceptual metaphor of "the archive" -- or "archival" --
as a cultural model, is in need of explication. Because
it is metaphoric and conceptual, I will term this
relationship "archival poetics," a term I coined in
analogy to such poetics based on semiotic systems:
narrative poetics; on foci of attention: a poetics of
gender; on periods: Renaissance poetics; or conceptual
metaphors such as mine: a poetics of place. By mobilizing
this slightly dated term "poetics" I aim to reflect on
the connections between objects, systems within which
they can be understood, and the cultural life in the
present within which such "readability" functions, in
terms of poetics' etymological sense of making.
The current interest in hypertextual discursive
organization will serve as an underlying, orienting
heuristic metaphor that will help me articulate an
archival poetics helpful for actual analysis of early
screen culture, in other words, for screening the past. I
will examine the "hypertextual" manner in which a
pre-digital medium such as early film organizes visual
experience. This metaphor helps me simultaneously to
probe the question of archive and the question of how to
decipher the material objects stored there. Instead of
linear, hypertextual documents are structured for a
reader/viewer to enter, and to choose his or her own
trajectory. Similarly -- but of course, not identically
-- film in its early days was already a medium of
explicit polysemic address. While it was not structured
for the viewer to enter and organize at liberty, it was
part of a practice of showings programmed at liberty by
the exhibitors. Both provide opportunities for "virtual
travel" demanding choices that occur in specific,
virtually unique moments in time. In this sense, both
hypertexts and early cinema only exist in unique
performances.[3] In the
following section, I argue for a reading of archival
fragments on the basis of the comparison with
hypertextuality. Then, I speculate that the archival
model is a necessary sequel of the archaeological one,
used from Freud to Foucault. From this conclusion, I then
move on, in the next section, to an example of the
archival-poetic move that suspends the distinction
between fragment and whole. In the last section, the
prominent place of narrativity in archival poetics is
foregrounded. This importance further explains the
exemplary status of the early Western in the history of
cinema. My conclusion, therefore, offers some reflections
on the relevance of archival poetics to a self-aware
historiography for today. I start in the
material place of the archive and find there my object of
such a conceptual and material interpretation, called
"Bits & Pieces" the Archive of Nederlands Filmmuseum
(NFM) in Amsterdam, "Bits & Pieces" is the term used
in the catalogue to refer to fragments rather than
complete films. My primary object of analysis in this
article is a variety of such bits and pieces, a selection
from the total of more than 450 bits preserved by the
archive. I take this selection both as the arbitrary
collection of fragments it really is, and as a
retrospectively constructed "whole" the organization of
which is comparable to a hypertext. I aim to read such
indications as "Bits & Pieces," and the archival
reality they cover, in relation to a sense in which
fragmentation also characterizes the "complete" films of
the time of early cinema from which they stem, and whose
traces, leftovers, ruins, or antiquities, the archive
holds -- has put on hold. In other
words, the name used today becomes a metaphor for the
most typical feature of the cinematic culture of the
time. I am speaking of the time, roughly between 1895 and
1915, when cinema made its debut in Western culture. I
draw upon a study I am currently conducting, in which I
examine bits and pieces of what has later become "the
Western," not coincidentally evoking and invoking the
fantasies and myths freshly forged about the past of a
wilderness that was, at that very moment, becoming
obsolete.[4]
The becoming-obsolete also characterizes the materiality
of what lies dormant in archives at a stage of screen
culture where the standard state of being is a kind of
fugitivity of reception. Not that the Internet and the
computer do not allow to "save" images, but the speed and
overload of information makes the act of accessing and
processing overwhelmingly more important than
preservation. This notion of
Bits & Pieces can serve to set up the
conceptualization of cinema as a representation of the
other seen through the eyes of a self --
modern urban culture -- subjected to fragmentation due to
modernity. I will argue that "Bits & Pieces" is more
than the title for what has neither name nor identity in
the cinematic archive: unclassifiable leftovers, too good
to throw away, not good enough to be archived,
catalogued, identified, and stored for future use.
Unwittingly, the NFM bestowed on these humble strips of
celluloid the honorable function to embody and
emblematize the secret to a culture no longer alive. To
uncover that secret, they must be decoded, made readable.
Thus the small, barely appreciated treasures of the NFM
become the bearers of an archival poetics. To understand
the current fascination with the archival, moreover, that
readability must enable us to "translate" the meanings of
the Bits & Pieces into interests, anxieties and
desires that run through the beginning of the
twenty-first century and its culture of novelty.
Novelty and the anxiety over loss of what is also
rejected, characterizes both the early and the late
twentieth century. This ambivalence underlies current
"archivalism." If anachronism is as inevitable as it is,
necessary, even, to exist in a fugitive present through a
vested interest in our self-constructed past, the
cultural state that informs the interest in the archival
might well be the digital revolution with the Internet's
fundamentally different sense of "text," than the task we
now know to be hopeless, to restore. We are
looking, here, at things belonging to the earliest days
of cinema, and the network of genres within it. But
"early" should not be seen stylistically, as an
indication of the historical position of my material as
"early", in the sense of immature. On the contrary, I
contend that the fragmentation is not at all a symptom of
immaturity of the medium, nor of the "genre" of, for
instance, the Western, even if my material stems from an
early stage of both cinema and genre. There are three
reasons why this would be a misconception: the error that
threatens the project of defining an archival
poetics, or a post-enlightenment raison
d'être for archival work and its usefulness for
an interest in the archival in our time. All three
reasons qualify that interest. The first inflects the
self-definition of history, the second, of
epistemology, the third of our (post-)modern
sense of self. Archival poetics, then, will be
considered as an approach to culture that combines
cultural history, methodological reflection on the
production of knowledge, and philosophy. First, there
is a purely practical, material reason. The bits and
pieces that the Bits & Pieces consist of are material
leftovers of objects irremediably lost in the
present. The phrase is therefore, rather, a metaphor
for the lacunary access we have, in our time, to
the past we wish to recover as part of our sense of self.
This gives pause to the historian. For, second, this
material deficit is a symptom not of the historical
material itself but of cultural history and our
(historical) epistemic limitations. Moreover, the
fragmentation that I claim to be characteristic of the
films is often self-conscious and self-reflective as it
was an accepted part of contemporary production and
exhibition practice. This speaks to preoccupations of our
own time. As Kaja Silverman has argued in a different
context, the valorization of unity at the cost of
fragmentation is not in itself beyond scrutiny. Indeed,
only a culture that anxiously put primacy on unity in
order to hold off the risk of a fragmentation that it
knows to be inherent in it, will cast the fragmented out
as its own abject.[5]
I contend that current dis-ease with that anxiety and a
desire to establish more nourishing as well as less
utopian (because unifying) connections with the past,
informs the interest in the archival in today's
culture. The notion of
Bits & Pieces also helps to explain that what seems
to be an archaeology of early screen culture, in this
case Westerns, is not an attempt to follow through the
archaeological metaphor in all its aspects. On the
contrary, the "archival" qualifies the archaeological.
There is no project of digging into the depth of a lost
culture; rather cinema is often considered the most
"superficial" form of cultural self-expression. There is
no attempt to unify fragments to rebuild "structures" or
"shapes"; this is not always possible, and given the
amount of glue required, the restoration risks making the
historical object all but invisible. As is well known
from archaeology, sometimes the dilemma to either restore
beyond recognition, or to celebrate ruins as if they were
authentic, is better left aside altogether. Thus, in my
case, the fragments are valuable in themselves. Only from
the unreflective anachronistic vantage point of the
present in which the ideal film requires causality,
coherence and (often) approximates 90 minutes projection
time, can we decide that the short bits that take only
seconds or minutes are in fact not whole. Rather,
fragmentation characterizes the films as they were made
and watched in their own time. Hence, conserving the bits
and pieces as such comes as close to making their
"nature" visible as attempts at physically restoring
them, if not, in some cases, as hyperbolic instances,
closer. Given the
still-predominant cultural status of narrative in film,
television, and written text, albeit under siege in the
unstable structure of hypertextuality and hypermedia, I
consider the fragmented state of my samples of Bits &
Pieces through the question of narrative.[6]
What we find in the archives is primarily pieces of
nitrate that are somehow associated with "the Western."
Nothing remotely "whole," "coherent," self-enclosed can
be detected. Yet, what we see, today, as "the Western" is
a filmic genre in which certain typical plots are
conventionalized, hence, "naturalized" to a high degree.
We expect fights, chases, abductions and rescues. In
other words, narratives. The importance
of narrative becomes evident when we consider the
generically relevant scene type of the chase. I see the
chase as a form first of all, and probe its unfolding in
films such as The hold-up of the rocky mountain
express (AM&B, 1906, Library of Congress) as a
hybrid and Indiaan grijpt kidnapper [NFM
title] [Indian seizes kidnapper]
(Pathé Frères, c.1910, NFM) as "pure" chase
films. In contrast, The cowboy and the school-marm
(Bison, 1910, NFM) is an example of an integrated
chase film. Here, the role of the scene type as a means
of constructing narrativity is important. In this last
film there is a noticeable narrative that is based on the
chase but not solely structured as chase
anymore.[7]
The comparison of these three films highlights the
narrative aspect of movement, speed, and causality, and
their relationship to display. The relationship between
subject and object is especially relevant in this
respect. In this relationship, the question of what the
focalized object is, determines what kind of subjectivity
and objectivity is programmed in the representation.
Display, view, and attraction turn out to be
counter-forces to narrative. The narrativity that emerges
from this inquiry, then, is the direct product of the
archival poetics considered as such, so that it can
become a model not for retrieval of the past but for a
future understanding of the past in terms of the
encounter staged by the archival discourse Bits &
Pieces. But for the
corpus of early films that this paper is concerned with,
this expectation of narrative inflected as narratives of
chases, rescues, fighting and the like, does not
necessarily hold. The presence and the place of chases in
the cited examples vary and expecting them to furnish the
basic narrativity of the films is an anachronistic
projection. Hence, a cultural history of this corpus that
avoids as much as possible the kind of anachronistic
projection that promotes evolutionistic arrogance in any
encounter with something "old," is best off starting from
this clash between what we expect and what we see.
Through that confrontation, I contend, the historian's
archive can become an "archival poetics" for our
time. At first
sight, narrativity means movement, time, and coherence.
In what is without a doubt the most cited and followed
definition of narrative, Poetics, Aristotle
defines a plot as a series of actions, with a beginning,
middle and end. Not that this definition says much. But
for this inquiry, it becomes unexpectedly relevant if we
consider that even this most general of definitions falls
short of describing the artifacts epitomized by the Bits
& Pieces. It also falls short in the face of
hypertextuality and its logic of association and collage,
structured by hyperlinks. For the definition takes for
granted a wholeness that my corpus de-naturalizes.
By clearing away this age-old narrative poetics, I aim to
make visible what the archive as such offers as a poetics
of bits and pieces. A first
ambiguity resides in the site of those things: in the
film's fabula, as we are accustomed to think, or in the
viewer's need to construct them. Reader-oriented
criticism has made us aware of the indispensable input of
the viewer. Reception study is not limited to counting
visitors, but also seeks to account for what visitors
do.[8]
But there are no records of our films other than reviews,
and the archive's Bits & Pieces do not get reviewed.
Hence, your own viewing experience is the only means of
gaining access, even indirectly. But here is the catch --
which is also the way out of the dilemma of cultural
history. The archival material is only anything
"cultural" if it is viewed. And the viewing of
bits one after another makes whatever you see into
actions, simply because the images succeed each
other. This turns
narrativity from a text-immanent, structuralist concept
to a reader-based cultural mode, questioned by new media
and the dis-unified, fugitive and user-dependent status
of narrativity therein. Even if there is no clear fabula
that structures an internal logic, a sense of
narrative emerges and captures you. Between Bits &
Pieces -- archival dust -- and a sense of film, culture,
genre, or what have you, narrative emerges out of the
time-travel of the encounter that cannot be situated
firmly either in the past or in the present, but that
momentarily if without illusion, fulfills the deep desire
for unity. I submit that this dynamic of fragmentation
and provisional, subject-made, hence, fundamentally
diverse wholeness through narrativity, constitutes the
attraction of the archival in present-day culture. It
consoles for loss of unity by empowering the cultural
participant to construct a composition, or bricolage, out
of material pieces from the past. This is how the
archive, and the Bits & Pieces most characteristic of
it, tell stories. After a
long-standing fascination with depth and digging, then,
the archaeological metaphor is currently being superceded
by the archival -- for truly historical reasons
concerning the history of the present. In this
section I attempt to explain why this change is
necessary. I cite the metaphor of archaeology for a
reason besides the obvious association with the
metaphorical label "Bits & Pieces" in the catalogue
of the Nederlands Filmmuseum. In the introduction to
Le western: archéologie d'un genre
[The western: archaeology of a genre]
Jean-Louis Leutrat proposes, as his title reveals, an
archaeology of the Western genre.[9]
The Western, he argues, does
not exist as a "natural object" ("objet naturel").
Archaeology, as a process of reconstruction, is needed to
replace a history of natural objects: Il faut
substituer à l'histoire d'un objet naturel celle
des objectivations qui ont reconstruit ce domaine
où les connexions, les rencontres, les alliances,
les jeux de force, les stratégies, ont, à
un moment donné, formé ce qui a pu
fonctionner presque immédiatement parfois comme
évidence. [It is
necessary to substitute for the history of a natural
object, the history of the objectifications through which
we have constructed that domain where connections,
encounters, alliances, the play of forces and strategies
have at some point shaped what was then able to function,
almost instantly, as self-evident.][10] Leutrat
suggests that it is precisely the multiple origins
that constituted the generic shape of the Western, that
cause a need for an archaeological endeavor when the
investigation of the "origin" of the Western is at stake.
The structure of this argument has become famous through
the work of Michel Foucault. Leutrat quotes Foucault who
points out how genealogy has as its mission to preserve a
sense of disparity that belongs to the object from the
past ("maintenir ce qui s'est passé dans la
dispersion qui lui est propre"; "to hold on to what has
happened in the dispersal that characterizes the past").
In other words, genealogy, as "method" that goes with the
archaeological enterprise, must lay bare the multiplicity
of origins, or originary diversity, of the object of
investigation thereby maintaining this diversity. In
Foucault's negative formulation: La
généalogie ne prétend pas remonter
le temps pour rétablir une grande
continuité par-delà la dispersion d'oubli;
sa tâche n'est pas de montrer que le passé
est encore là, bien vivant dans le présent,
l'animant encore en secret, après avoir
imposé à toutes les traverses du parcours
une forme dessinée dès le départ.
(... Suivre la filière complexe de la provenance,
c'est au contraire maintenir ce qui s'est passé
dans la dispersion qui lui est propre. [Genealogy
does not claim to go back in time in order to restore a
grand continuity beyond the dispersal of forgetting; its
task is not to demonstrate that the past is still with
us, alive in the present that it animates secretly, after
having imposed through the course of time a shape that it
had designed from the beginning.][11] In view of
this insight, it is necessary to adopt a
post-archaeological attitude, inflecting it into
an archival one that endorses fragmentation instead of
attempting to overcome it, and this, not only on the
level of generic categories such as "Western." Nor is
this "archivalism" merely a way out of preservation
problems in the archive. Although classification and
cataloguing determines accessibility, it is not only on
that level that fragmentation manifests itself. Rather,
fragmentation is, here, a metaphor for the
three-dimensional fragmentation of my object of study:
the broken body of early Westerns. The
fragmentation holds on three levels simultaneously: a
physical fragmentation (the often unidentified
fragmentary filmstrips in the archive), a generic
fragmentation, as a result of the fragmentation of an
historical screen culture, and the resulting archival
fragmentation. Hence, the inadequacy of generic
classification for these films, so unsuitable
given the inherent fragmentation of the texts of early
cinema. Like the changing shapes of the glass snippets in
a kaleidoscope, these texts are reconfigured in the
ever-changing programming format in which the films were
exhibited. Leutrat and
other historians of early cinema have proposed a history
of their object in these terms borrowed from Foucault.
They invoke archaeology as metaphor for a historical
investigation that preserves the multiplicity of origin,
that avoids linear thought, and that proposes a new
perspective on chronology. The historiography of early
cinema is infused with these thoughts. For example, in
his introduction of Early cinema: space, frame,
narrative Thomas Elsaesser refers to Walter
Benjamin's often-quoted text "The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction", in which Benjamin argues
that, in Elsaesser's words, "the very existence of cinema
necessitated a new archeology of the artwork [..." In
the wake of Benjamin, Elsaesser introduces the term
"archeology," a term Benjamin himself did not use, to
offer a general positioning of the approaches to early
cinema as paradigmatically different from film history in
general.[12]
I situate my own project within this paradigm. But this
positioning often remains very quick and general, without
reflection on how this historical approach can be worked
out within the analyses of the historical object.
I would propose analyses that are integrated in this
theoretical positioning of the historian, so that a more
fleshed-out picture emerges. Only then can such a view
truly model, shape, a connection between the
present of hypertextuality and the fragmented past, a
connection that also integrates a textual, structural
analysis to a cultural one. This
integration is part of my "archival poetics." For if the
former analysis fails to account for the cultural
meanings of its objects, a cultural-historical one tends
to fail to probe, and learn from, those objects'
specificity. I find the Film Museum's act of preserving
these shreds under this title an extraordinarily
stimulating move on the part of an institution that is,
by all accounts, an archive. In a Foucauldian view, an
archive is not just a place but also the ensemble of
discursive practices that enable "utterances" by and on
the objects preserved there, so that they can constitute
a "field." This view implies that the archive is
discursive. It also implies that all those who
"use" the archive, research the material preserved there,
"speak" its discourse and contribute to the further
extension and deployment of that discourse. The
mechanisms of selection are part of the archive's
discourse. Preserving only what seems, to our eyes,
"whole," would be to "speak" an anachronistic discourse
about the material, thus constituting the object rather
than merely preserving it. Such decisions determine the
legitimacy of the objects stored, categorized, catalogued
and studied -- or not. Here lies
another element of archival poetics. Objects are not
oeuvres in the sense in which we now speak of the oeuvres
of John Ford or Sam Peckinpah, or, to stay with early
cinema, D.W. Griffith, or C.B. DeMille. In this sense,
the fragments-objects also stand for a change in our
perception of things from the past in a culture where
authorship is becoming collective, anonymous, and
dynamic.[13]
In order to drive that point home, the NFM chose to
preserve also the unidentified, seemingly useless,
fragments -- only made meaningful if viewers act upon
them. But the very notion of the fragment questions the
status of the result of this archival gesture. For
fragments are by definition bits of larger wholes, even
when these wholes are lost beyond recovery. This
necessitates the move from the archaeological to the
archival poetics that this paper advocates. The second
part of my article sketches that move through a detailed
case. The fragments
are very short, in fact, they are too short to project
them individually. The archive has made longer "montages"
on several film reels that contain multiple fragments. By
grouping these bits and pieces in order to be able to
present them, the Nederlands Filmmuseum has done more
than merely preserving fragments. Moreover, the archive
has made collections of these fragments on videotape, to
make them available for close scrutiny by researchers.
Its "poetics" -- its gesture of "making" -- is this: it
has changed their status from fragments to
details. This may be a necessary, inevitable act, but
it is not neutral. Now, the shreds are parts of a new
whole such as the projection reels or the research tapes.
This gesture is also a "speech act," an act performed
within a discursive practice. The ambiguous status of the
bits, as fragments of lost wholes and as details of
larger whole on a video tape, makes them "orphans" of
cinema history.[14]
This status shows in a variety of ways. For example, in
addition to the un-glorious title of the tape, the bits
are numbered (roughly "Bits & Pieces 1 to 449", but
since the tapes hold an open category, the number will
increase during the history of the archive (and may even
have changed while I am writing this), not categorized by
content. By this emphatic presentation of the bits as
fragments, yet re-constituted as details, the archive
poses us questions regarding the relationship between
present and past. Sometimes the
rubric of Bits & Pieces is used in order to be able
to preserve a fragment of a larger film that is not
available for preservation. Initial cataloguing
categories can be replaced with the rubric Bits &
Pieces. An instructive example is the following film,
initially catalogued thus (in my translation from
Dutch): Record
12669 TITEL orig. :
Redding, De (g) [The Rescue] given title :
Redding, De CONTENT genre : Fiction. Western description:
Small child runs away from home and is
recovered PRODUKTION
country: United States year: 1911 -
1913 ACTORS: Harry Meyers [?] old vault
number: B4233 (has become Bits & Pieces nr. 429,
added to B11207) As an
incomplete and unidentified film this fragment is first
catalogued as an individual film, but due to its
incompleteness it is taken up in the category of Bits
& Pieces. It loses the given name ("De Redding"
[The Rescue]), based on the narrative content of
the fragment, is given a number ("has become Bits
&Pieces nr. 429"), and is added to a longer
collection of fragments ("added to B11207"). As such, it
receives a new role within the collection. This new role,
I submit, projects the role of this new "character" as a
potential "hero" in the narrative produced by the
archival poetics. As a fragment the bit is a whole, as
whole as fragments can possibly be; as an individual
title, it remained incomplete. The labor of cataloguing
such small bits might seem futile to the amateur as well
as to the historian looking for mute things willing to
yield to historiographic pressure. But it is in fact
absolutely important that the museum decided to take them
so seriously. For one of the researcher's most relevant
criteria for selection is determined by the accessibility
of material in the archive, and the key that unlocks this
treasury is its catalogue. The
"promotion" of fragments to details is an act of great
consequence.[15]
Emphatically, details are not fragments. Each kind of
"bit" has a different function, a different relationship
to wholeness and unity. For the historian, a fragment
points to a whole; it can be a clue in identification.
The decision to consider something a fragment puts an
epistemological attitude in place. The goal of looking at
objects as fragments is the dream of the whole behind it.
The detail, in contrast, is a snippet that is a point of
analysis. It is not broken off but considered as if
through a magnifying glass. Its status as detail enables
analysis. In this sense, a detail is in fact "larger"
than the whole. This can be put in another way. A
fragment poses questions, a detail answers them. This
is why the decision of the NFM to preserve the bits, but
to mount them together on one tape for accessibility,
carries consequences in two directions. Together, these
consequences define what I suggest here as an archival
poetics. It puts forward the double status of this old
material: by offering the fragments as documents
-- for example, to reconstitute the history of ideas --
the museum has simultaneously, also, elevated them into
monuments through the act of embedding them
within, hence, making them part of, a discourse, and
positioned them in the present.[16] Here, the
first section that re-conceptualized the archive joins
this second one that makes that conception concrete. For,
it is a major contention of this paper that fragmentation
is the "originary" status of the early Western and that
this makes the archival a suitable model for the
present. It is because of that state that this
(not-)genre can model our sense of culture in the age of
electronic media. The two are not structurally similar as
artifacts but they are similar in the structure of their
cultural functioning. This contention requires in the
first place a serious engagement with the bits and
pieces, in order to at least be able to characterize the
"genre," including its three dimensions, provisionally,
if only metaphorically, or rather, synecdochally. If
metaphor, the transport or translation of a vehicle onto
a tenor, characterizes the relationship between the
archive and contemporary fragmented culture, synechdoche,
the extension of meaning from bit to whole is the logic
that underlies the deployment of the Western for an
understanding of present-day's fascination with the
archival. The bits and pieces stand for the "whole," not
of their "parent"-films, which may never have existed,
but of the culture from which they were broken off when
they ended up in the archive. Synecdoche, after all, is
the figure where the part -- fragment -- stands for the
whole. Even if, we can now see, the whole does not exist
and may never have existed as a film; the fragment does
not exist as a leftover of the whole, but means
"whole." Meaning is at the level at which the fragment
operates; as a cultural intervention. For, as a culture,
a visual subculture including the specific exhibition
practices for the amazement and delight of urban people,
the "whole" did exist. How can we write the history of
early Westerns on the basis of such fragments? This
question poses the methodological issue that any attempt
to define a genre, such as the Western, also
poses. I have argued
elsewhere that genealogical decisions are just that:
decisions, not divisions inherent in the objects but
epistemological decisions performed by the
historian.[17]
There, I deploy the Wittgensteinian concept of "family
resemblance" to foreground the indecisive, provisional
status of such decisions. This is necessary in order to
protect the objects, of which we know so little, from
reifying denominations. Now, if family resemblance is the
more appropriate entrance into the genre, and if, on the
other hand, fragmentation is a constitutive feature of
the objects in all their dimensions -- their material
status, their narrativity, and their viewing culture --
then this should enable me to establish a status for the
fragments qua details. In other words, the family
resemblance between fragments turns them into "details,"
that is, small elements provided with "family features"
that may be points of recognition. In the next section, I
will perform a small exercise in this grouping in order
to demonstrate the productivity of a notion of archival
poetics as a bridge between a structural analysis that
ignores cultural practice and a cultural study that
ignores the objects on which that practice acts. If my
arbitrarily selected Bits & Pieces begin to move,
move you, the case will have been made for their status
as characters, actants, perhaps even heroes, in a new
narrative told by old things, directed -- as in
"mise-en-scène", or film making -- by the
archive. It will have consoled us today for the loss of
unity by providing us with a new sense of narrative as,
at long last, post-Aristotelian. Beginning, middle and
end are no longer "in the text" but of our making, of our
own poiesis. The archival poetics, then, will have
emerged. Its hero is the
fragment-turned-detail. Bits &
Pieces nr. 66 is listed in the catalogue with a
description that is at the same time the sub-title of the
unidentified film which lacks an original title: "Woman
and children are assaulted by gang of
criminals."[18]
The fragment runs
approximately 2 minutes (on video). The opening shot
shows the woman and the frightened children in a room
with a window. Through the window we can see a painted
view of a tree and a telegraph pole. The room is on the
second floor. The woman, whom we, as narrativizing
cultural agents, "appoint" as the mother of the two
girls, looks out of the window. The next shot shows what
is happening downstairs. Three robbers are holding down a
man while they are busy robbing the place. Back to the
upstairs room. The woman closes the window, opens it
again and waves her handkerchief out of the window. The
next shot shows the waving from an opposite perspective.
Seeing the outside view of the house, we can deduct that
the house is in fact a train station. We see her waving
from the perspective of the possible viewer from who the
woman tries to get attention. A train is approaching. The
bandits enter the room and pull the woman and children
with them. Crosscutting to the outside perspective, we
see that, at the same time, the train is approaching.
Tension builds up. The three are taken downstairs. A long
shot shows the train arriving. A few men exit the train
and hurry towards the station. They capture the bad guys.
The woman and children hug one of the men: a family
reunited? Here, the
fragment stops. The narrative is closed. This is an
almost complete narrative, which leaves few questions
unanswered. Is this really a fragment, or is it a concise
summary, bringing a more elaborate narrative back to the
essential course of events? It seems to be complete,
containing the most elementary part of a last-minute
rescue. The generic recognition of suspense and closure
in the form of a happy ending, leaves nothing unsolved.
Like The lonedale operator (Biograph, 1911) the
story is about a hold-up of a train station and the
suspense of the approaching rescue is shown in similar
style, by cross-cutting back and forth between the
assaulted woman and the rescue by train. As a summary,
only lacking the exposition, the film may be better than
in complete form, for it literally cuts right to the
chase. Another
fragment, Bits & Pieces nr. 21, seems to stops
where nr. 66 began. According to the summary title
in the catalogue it shows a hunting expedition in an open
landscape.[19]
This suggests a non-fiction
film. We see, however, four men in costume, riding
horses. In the front, two men are dressed up as colonial
hunters, with white helmet and white clothing. Two men
behind them are dressed up as cowboys. The relationship
between the four men is immediately established. The two
men in white riding in front are superior; the two men
anonymously in the back are positioned as their
subordinates. The two white men dismount their horses and
walk through the Western-like landscape with guns and
lassos. Suddenly they stop. One man kneels and points to
something off-screen. Excitement. They start to prepare
for something to happen. Here the fragment stops. At this
moment of suspense, the abrupt ending of the fragment
emphasizes the structure of narrative. With the tension
that has been created in these few seconds, the lack of
resolve and the open ending emphasize the missing part of
the film. Like the
previous film, nr. 66, about the robbers and the
train, this fragment poses the question of what is
complete, showing what is missing precisely by not
showing what is missing. This establishes the
productivity of incompleteness, its performance as
poiesis or making, is thus established. Also, the
question of selection is left dangling in this absence.
Why are these two examples possibly relevant for my
corpus -- or my other eagerness, that of a viewer in the
present -- and how does the archival act help put that
relevance on the table? The fragments
are relevant as a potential group. The following
example adds to establishing this group. Bits &
Pieces nr. 104, described as "Cowboy hangs enemy on a
rope above abyss. Under the rope he burns a candle.
United States" shows a fragment of an exciting adventure
story.[20]
The part of the narrative that
is shown here is almost a focused, blown-up detail of the
first robbery fragment, that could follow (temporally)
the second example. Thus, if we choose to watch nrs.
21, 66, and 104 as one hypertextual
path on which we click, this snippet shows the climax,
following a suspenseful event. The cowboy in a cabin ties
a man to a rope, and hangs him dangling from a rock. A
medium shot functions as a close-up. We see the made-up
face of the victim. He looks like the conventional
representation of a Mexican. The cowboy in the cabin
positions a candle under the rope. Here the fragment
stops. We know that something awful is about to happen,
but we do not know if there will be a last-minute rescue.
Because of the tragedy that could happen, the fall
from the victim in the ravine, we can deduct that the
cowboy in the cabin is probably a criminal. The victim
has to be "good." But this is uncertain again when we
consider the fact that the victim is made-up as a Mexican
and that usually -- according to conventions of
the Western -- Mexicans belong to the category of
criminals. Generic conventions instruct us here to
position the fragment into a specific type of narrative.
The prologue of this fragment that we mentally,
hypertextually, add to the remaining images has built up
the tension that these images ultimately take to a
climax. The climax itself, the "answer" to the question
whether the Mexican is, in fact, a victim or not, is
never given. But the question, not the answer, builds the
narrative. What makes the story is that we ask ourselves,
will the rope snap? But "tension"
is only one path in my hypertextual reading of the
collection of bits. Visual marvel is another one.
Therefore, let me now click on another example, which
further elaborates my archival poetics and its attraction
for the present by an emphasis on vision. For it poses
less the question of completion and narrativity, but more
of spectacle. Bits & Pieces nr. 319, "Een
fantastisch duel," shows the visually spectacular
collision of two trains, in front of a stadium full of
spectators. The intertitle that opens the fragment
announces and describes this spectacle: "A fantastic
duel. Two locomotives run against each other at a speed
of 100 kilometers in the presence of the inhabitants of
Indianapolis."[21]
The footage shows two trains and a stand filled with
spectators. "Conductors and stokers jump off the
locomotives a moment before the
collision."[22]
A train is shown moving through the frame. Next shot: the
collision. For quite some time, several seconds of the
total duration of the fragment of only two minutes, we
see the explosion and the burning remains, prolonging the
moment of collision. Here the fragment ends. This is not
so much a fragment of a narrative but, within my chosen
trajectory, a pure and self-contained act of a play:
spectacle in its essence. Yet, although on this path I am
focusing on visual marvels, a build-up in tension is also
produced here. The intertitles lead up to a very literal
climax. The shot of the burning trains functions as a
close-up of the result of the collision. If I had put
this bit in the trajectory of the previous group, it
would have functioned perfectly there. One way to
deal with the ambiguity of this short piece which hovers
undecidedly between fragment and complete film -- a
possibility that is acceptable once we unlearn to expect
set length -- without explaining that same ambiguity
away, is to look at it as, also, generically ambiguous.
For all its spectacularity, the sort of footage this is
belongs to a form of non-fiction. Documentary footage is
often edited-in within scenes of a more fictional (i.e.
narrative) kind. This is also the case in films we
consider complete. For example, The hold-up of the
rocky mountain express (AM&B, 1906) that I
mentioned before, is a "phantom ride" film. This type of
film, essentially the dynamic display of landscape
through a point-of-view shot taken from a moving train,
is part of the Cinema of Attractions. This film is shot
in the same year by the same company as Into the
Haunts of Rip van Winkle, In the Heart of the
Catskills, Grand Hotel to Big India, to name a
few of its "peers," and is part of a collection of early
Biograph films that were re-issued in 1906 for exhibition
in the railroad car theaters of Hale's Tours. These railroad
films are mentioned in the Biograph Bulletins, nr.
73 (June 3, 1906). Many of the titles listed there are
preserved today by the Library of Congress in Washington,
DC. The Bulletin heads: "Hale Tour runs attractive
Railroad Pictures which have been found highly successful
with tour car schemes." The Hold-Up of the Rocky
Mountain Express is printed in bold letters and
stands out in this listing of forty-four
titles: This film is
concededly the greatest crowd-drawer of them all. It gets
the money when everything else fails, and no other film
offers such opportunities for front display. Ran for five
weeks continuously at the headquarters of the Brady
Grossman Co. 46 east 14th Street, New York City, and
still running on the issuance of this bulletin. The
action shows a railroad run, an interior comedy scene,
the hold-up as viewed from the inside, then on the track,
finishing with a race between the train and the bandits,
who first take to a hand car and then to a horse and
wagon. The robbers are captured at the crossing for an
exciting finish. A "railroad
run," which is a phantom ride type of film, is quite
suitable for the Hale Tours exhibition, which took place
within the train car. Here, the run is combined with a
simple plot, including characters, actions, motivation,
building up suspense, and satisfying closure. Within the
context of this argument, I speculate that this film
might have been the pride of Biograph, and the most
successful with the public, because it has such an
elaborate narrative. It stands out among the titles in
this list that are mostly "mere" phantom rides. The
enumaration of the segments of the action, in the
Bulletin, suggests that the film is composed of bits like
the one in the Bits & Pieces collection. This
disproportionate length of the run, of a chase --
disproportionate from the point of view of today -- in an
otherwise rudimentary plot, shows that the "balance"
between elements was very different then compared to
present-day cinematic discourse. This difference was
emphatically related to the place of the chase as not
simply a typical scene but as one that produced the
narrativity that it was subsequently to exploit. Other
films of this group include digressions from the phantom
ride display of landscape in the form of a short
narrative. This happens, for example, in In the Haunts
of Rip Van Winkle. The review mentions "Magnificent
mountain scenery in the Catskills, introducing an amusing
comedy feature of a tramp who goes to sleep on the
track." Or, I can mention The valley of the
Esopus, considered "An amusing fishing picture" that
"figures as the feature of this film, which shows a run
through the site of New York's new $161,000,000 reservoir
in the Catskill Mountains." Keeping this
generic wavering in mind while viewing our Bits &
Pieces in the archive, I suggest that the spectacle of
the colliding trains in the bit nr. 319 has a
similar function to such insertion footage. Thus, just as
much as the allegedly complete, reviewed films of the
time, this bit offers a glimpse into the aesthetic of
early cinema. The similarity of the intertitles between
this piece and many longer films in which documentary
footage is inserted, is striking. For example, the
numbers of miles and the speed of the trains are
specified. Similarly, in the case of an oil find, the
numbers of gallons would be spelled out. In order to
grasp the significance of such insertions for the
characterization of the Western of the period as
fundamentally heterogeneous, as well as, in that
heterogeneity, congruent with the present state of
culture, I find it crucial to pay special attention to
breaks, to the absence of attempts to make the
documentary footage blend in harmoniously with the rest
of the film. This aesthetic is also evident in another
aspect that makes fragmentation visible, namely attention
to abrupt endings. These endings, we can now see, are
neither more nor less abrupt than the cut-off points in
the Bits, or the insertion points in the films like
The Hold-Up of the Rocky Mountain Express. If
these breaks turn out to pertain to an aesthetic rather
than the result of accidents, it is no longer reasonable
to decide between "fragment" and "complete" film.
Conversely, there is no strict reason to believe in the
completeness of the latter in any absolute sense. The act
of the archive -- its poetics or making -- has now
visually "explicated" the primary characteristic of the
ancient material. It has done this, I contend, through
making the Bits & Pieces available for an utterly
modern reading, according to the variable model -- not
the reality -- of hypertext. All this,
then, belongs to the double-edged story emerging from the
archival act of "preserving" bits and pieces by grouping
and naming them Bits & Pieces. A story of history,
and a story in history. In other words, the story of the
encounter between present and past uniquely brought to
light by the archive's humble labor. To further probe the
yield of this labor as well as to honor it, I will
continue on the track it projects for the historian
desiring to understand the visual culture of a century
ago, and the cultural analyst desirous to mobilize this
understanding to illuminate another moment of intense
intertwinement of cultural and technological
innovation. The act of
considering these bits in terms of archival poetics can
now be taken to function as a meta-poetics: as a
model for the understanding of a more extended corpus of
films, for the historical position and motivation for the
search for this understanding, and for the sense of
culture in the present that demands such understandings.
As we have seen, narrativity is not to be taken for
granted in these films; the tension between narrative
movement in the plot or in the fabula does not bear
comparison with the kind of harmony between these that we
take for "natural" in present-day cinema. But when
considered not as structure per se but as
solicitation, the tension suspends that viewing habit by
putting forward the aim of that strategy -- that blending
-- so that it becomes denaturalized and can be seen as
one among other possible strategies, not the only
"natural" one. This is one
way in which an "archival poetics" can help the historian
while, at the same time, also explaining current
fascination. On the basis of the narrativity emerging
from the purely sequential presentation of Bits &
Pieces, establishing a connection between narrative as a
textual feature and its effect in captivating the viewer,
it sustains the desire to know and understand, in fact,
to have a past, preserved, available, and riveting
in its unreadability, in the archive. Ultimately,
archival poetics is both narratively propelling and
anti-narratively frustrating; there lies its specificity
and its significance. I understand the subject of
narration as concerning both how film "tells a
story" and how film "tells a story," that is, in
terms of semiotic mode as well as content. From that
vantage point, I now explore two questions
simultaneously. The first concerns narrative strategies
invented to convey narration as a mode of showing things,
of captivating spectators; of turning the moving image
into an image moving (its spectators). The second,
altogether different question follows the cultural
process in which the object of that show, of that
narration, became a story rather than an idea, or a
spectacle such as landscape only. I have been interested
above all, here, in finding a way to analyze the crossing
of these two strands. For that crossing, that trussing
together ties narrativity to an idea of the generic
development of narration conceived as not "natural" but
as something that could as well have evolved in a
different direction -- according to different links in
hypertext. In order to
demonstrate the relevance of archival poetics for the
history of early cinema, let me go back to my earlier
example, the chase. The chase is narrativity in its most
characteristic, perhaps even essential form. It is also
quintessentially filmic. Yet, come to think of it,
precisely this essential event of the intricacies of
narrative and film within a "Western" theme is anything
but "natural." For the chase does not exist visually, one
can only experience a chase, but never
witness a chase in full, only in filmic
representation. For one thing, the event happens too fast
and cannot be registered from one point of view. For
another, in "real life," a chase only happens in the body
and consciousness of each one of the participants,
rigorously limiting it to "being followed at high speed"
and "being afraid" or "following in order to capture."
Neither of these "moments" or elements of the chase can
be visually shown; one feel fear, and one rides fast, but
the connection between the two is inferred, not
seen. As we learned
from the bit of the woman waving a flag at a window, it
is only when a camera cuts from the one to the other,
from the one of the run and the one following, that the
narrativity of the scene can be established, the theme
"persecution" conveyed as a series of small actions
producing (sub-)events, together forming the string we
now automatically read as "chase." It is only
after the fact -- after the habit of seeing such
sequences has been established -- that the chase film can
be considered narratively defined. The chase, thus, is a
narrative form of display. However, the
type of narrativity emblematized by the chase is also
generic, exemplifying the problematic status of the
genre-avant-the-genre so to speak. it gives us a
preview of the genre that follows the inventions
of the captivating, suspenseful effects that can be
achieved by cutting from one participant in such an event
to the other, focusing on the dust on the road and the
sweat of the horse, the backward glances of the victim
and the determined face of the follower, the fast-moving
trees that are lines up as mute spectators of the event,
all, together, saying "this is a chase." In the summary
of The hold-up of the rocky mountain express
quoted above, the reviewer emphasized how the film is
a combination of "types of scenes", a generic
kaleidoscope. He mentioned "a railroad run", "an interior
comedy", "the hold-up", "a race." This enumeration does
more than just provide us with a list of scenes
considered typical at the time. It also demonstrates how
strongly the reception of the films qua narrative
was bound up with the string of such scenes that held
them together. Read through archival poetics, the
importance of this list, therefore, as a ground for a
characterization of the place of narrativity in the
establishment of generic conventions, cannot be
over-estimated. Establishment as process, not seen,
retrospectively, as its result, but, with the review as
witness, caught in the act. Here is my own
description of the film: It begins at a train station.
Some turbulence occurs from unclear causes. Perhaps the
man who comes running in is late, and his friends who
were waiting for him to wave him goodbye, are relieved.
Suddenly the camera begins to move. It turns out a train
was waiting, at least, there is a suggestion that this is
the case. Hence, I infer, the man has barely made it to
the train. People wave along the track. This is followed
by a beautiful panning shot of a typical phantom ride, or
just a train ride, while the landscape glides by. The
camera is mounted high on top of the train. At first some
houses can still be seen, later only the landscape: the
train has left town, moving from civilization to nature.
The scenery becomes more and more rocky. Then the
narrative part begins. A cardboard interior shows men and
women in the wagon. A spinster-type woman is sitting by
herself. Two men and two women are sitting next to each
other. The lone woman attempts to attract attention. The
men and the women pair up, however, and she remains
alone. A black servant enters. The woman traveling alone
beats him up. A homeless person enters; the spinster
tries to kiss him. Quite a weird scene, all in
all. The film moves
to the outside again. A tree trunk is lying on the track,
signaling the narrative scene to come. The train stops,
two men remove the trunk, but then Two bandits appear and
keep the men under fire. One of the bandits goes inside
and demands the loot. He has the looks of a cowboy. The
film moves to the outside again. A carriage approaches.
Brief gunfire occurs and the bandits take the carriage
and the people on it, holding them hostage. The train
accelerates and pursues the bandits. Down at the bottom
of the track they bypass a wagon and horse. They jump
from the carriage onto the wagon and hence, they take --
steal -- these. They continue to ride along the track.
The chase continues. There are now three subsequent
relays of chasing: the bandits running, riding on the
carriage, riding on the wagon, each means of
transportation increasing their speed. The road ends at a
railroad crossing with a house. Some people exit the
house with shotguns and capture the bandits. The
End. This film
offers the mix of nonfiction display of landscape and the
train with narrative fiction of the hold-up and the chase
that I mentioned before as more characteristic of the
Western at the time than the harmonious blend of
predominant narrative in later Westerns. This
characterization is emphatically not to be
construed as an "early" stage in a linear development.
Instead, seen through the lens of the hypertextual model,
I suggest it is a paradigmatic example of the kind of
display narrative the reign of archival poetics has
imposed on the Bits & Pieces. For example,
short and "simple" as the film may strike us, it is quite
an ambitious film. However simple in narrative structure,
confined to the predictable sequence of one hold-up, one
chase, one capture, it features a wide range of themes
that can be considered typical. In quick succession and
simultaneous display we witness versions of the themes of
an opposition between civilization and nature, of racism,
and sexism, narratively intertwined when the scorned
woman is also the one who beats up the black servant and
acts out her sexual frustration by assaulting the tramp.
This kind of narrative economy is itself a case of
non-integration, however, if we consider that there
remains a clear division between the "decent couples" who
are ordinary, therefore boring, therefore simple
background, objects of display but narratively speaking,
not viable; and the group of narratively active agents,
consisting of the social rejects: the spinster, the black
man, and the tramp. Moreover, the film plays with the
mixing of genres, narrative strategies and possible
camera positions. All this can
be summed up in the words through which Gunning argues
that the chase format is essential for the development of
narrative form: The chase
[... plays a pivotal role in the transition from a
cinema of attractions to a cinema organized around
storytelling. It provided a model for narrative causality
and linearity extending over several shots and
established the continuity of space and time that
subtended narrative action.[23] What is
archival about this? Time -- slow emergence, not
ready-made presence -- and dispersal; conservationism and
reconstructionism superceded by engagement and
solicitation. I have not established this model suddenly.
It had to be retrieved from various reiterated bits.
After the beginning -- after seeing the Bits & Pieces
in the archive of the NFM we know that this is a skill
that is not natural but can be learned, culturally
acquired. The symbolic form of the chase, only
semiotically possible once it is recognizable qua
chase because technicalities have become invisible,
hiding behind predictable effects, turns it into a
narrative chase, as opposed to, say, a
display-chase. The grouping,
found once I embarked on the chosen path of narrative,
revealed the broken theme. Properly narrative elements of
the content of this symbolic form are the theme of
loss and recovery and, of course, the last-minute rescue.
And, as it happens, these themes are abundant in the
Western genre. This is how, then, we can speak of
specific forms of narrativity as form plus content
toward effect, as defining the genre-to-be, or the
not-yet-genre in the making. The making turns this
view into a poetics; the effect targets the
present; the diachronic perspective makes it
historical, not just structural; and the work that makes
sense of all this, is archival. What does this
discussion mean for the historian of cinema. To make my
case for an archival poetics as truly poetics -- as
making, forging what it presumably only stores --
I put forward the claim, hyperbolic as it may sound, that
the act of making the tape Bits & Pieces is a
creative act of discursivity, making visible, hence,
speakable, something that only later could become "the
Western." That later Western is now firmly a thing of the
past. But as such we need it in the present. The
archive's bits, in contrast, are meaningful as models of
such a retrospective hold on the past to sustain us in a
present that is just as confusing, exciting and yielding
on the condition of being, constantly, made: that
of the new media. Therefore, I end this paper with a
speculation on some general features of narrativity in
the films that explain why their archival status itself
would be attractive as a model for current screen
culture. For it is
thanks to the paradoxes and tensions around narrativity
that the archivally produced "early Western" can stand as
both an emblem of archival poetics and a model for a
history of the present, where "the archive" fascinates a
culture suffering from amnesia and caught up in new
narrativities that, like this emerging and unstable
genre, lack pre-existing plots, forms, or
structures. In order for narrativity to be activated, a
certain continuity is expected by the viewer -- an
expectation that must, first, be solicited by
reiterating instances of narrativity. Moreover, a plot
development is required to achieve closure. But
according to the hypertext model, this closure can only
be produced by the viewer, the cultural agent in charge
of the making. Thirdly, the level of narration
requires a narrativity that the medium itself already
implies, but that, within the framework of narrativity,
can be exploited, displayed, and integrated. On the one
hand, narrative continuity is challenged by the tension,
or alternation, between elements of the fabula -- events
-- and the display of setting and elements of show. On
the other hand, narrativity is required for the
manageability of the mission of Westerns of the period,
to translate the representation of space (elsewhere),
time (elsewhen), and people (the other) into a story that
is moving in the two senses of the word: moving
images that move their audiences. Crucial for
early cinema's narrative techniques is a heavy reliance
on intertextual knowledge and the use of conventions such
as easily recognizable character types and familiar plot
structures. Commentary in the press on these conventions
reveals this, but also criticize it and show an
increasing demand of a "new" mode of narration. This is
the case with present cultural modes and practices as
well. But today, that intertextual knowledge has become
unmanageable, so that the hypertextual model foregrounds
the need and the liberty for the viewer to make choices
in her construction work. The cultural
work of archival poetics is profound, necessary, and
emotionally intense. The nostalgic element in our looking
back at the past is also invested in the materiality of
the bits that testify to a time now gone when "behind"
the screen were things. The obsoleteness of that object
status turns the archive into a place of worship, whereas
the fragmentary state that reigns there, "objectively,"
reassures us about the fragmented state of present screen
culture. The object of longing and mourning resists
absolute loss when it can be integrated in a similarity
with today. This task is attributed to the de-authorized
narrativity that binds archivalism to hypertextuality. In
the dialectic between the force of narrative, the motor
that propels the film, and the viewing of it, a dialectic
where narrativity is the counterforce of display,
landscape may serve as a metaphor and narrative as a
connector. Hence, then, the exemplary role played in my
story by the genre that integrates landscape and
narrative: the Western -- genre of the future, narration
of the past. (To
return to your place in the text, simply click on the
endnote number) [1]
"Fugitive," not in the material sense,
although the material status of electronic information is
fundamentally different from paper and celluloid; but in
the sense that too much comes in to bother preserving
it. [2]
Of the many recent publications on cultural memory,
Andreas Huyssen's Twilight Memory: Marking Time in a
Culture of Amnesia, (New York: Routledge,
1995) remains a good starting point. [3]
I use the definition of hypertext and hypermedia as
analysed and defined by George P. Landow. See especially
his Hypertext 2.0: The convergence of contemporary
critical theory and technology (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997). I do make a distinction
between hypertext as structural model of a text
and hypertext as text. Where "hypertext" as term
may be ambiguous I use "hypertextual document" for
hypertext as texts [4]
Nanna Verhoeff, After the beginning: cinema and the
American West before 1915. 2000, Utrecht University:
Ph.D. dissertation. [5]
On this particular argument, in relation to the Lacanian
fantasy of the body in bits and pieces, see Kaja
Silverman, The threshold of the visible world,
(New York: Routledge, 1996 (esp. 20-27)). [6]
I take standard narrative theory, mostly in the
structuralist heritage, as a starting point, but not
endpoint. See for example, Mieke Bal, Narratology:
introduction to the theory of narrative (Toronto: The
University of Toronto Press, 1997) for terminology.
[7]
A "chase oriented trajectory film" is what Gunning calls
his example of The adventures of Dollie (AM&B
1908) (D.W. Griffith and the origins of early
narrative film: the early years at Biograph, Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1991, 68). [8]
Aristotle's Poetics was already
aware of this, as its author demonstrated in his
theorization of catharsis as the wholesome effect
of tragedy on its viewers. [9]
Jean Louis Leutrat, Le Western. Archéologie
d'un genre. (Lyon: Presses UdL,1987). [10]
Leutrat, Le Western: 5. My translation. [11]
Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, la généalogie,
l'histoire." Hommage à Jean Hyppolite.
(Paris: P.U.F, 1971), 152. My translation. [12]
See Thomas Elaesser, Early cinema: space, frame,
narrative, (London: BFI Publishing, 1990),
1. [13]
I take my cue from Landow's analysis of how hypertext
blurs the distincition between author and reader. See his
Hypertext 2.0. , especially his chapter 4:
"Reconfiguring the author." [14]
I borrow this name from the 1999 symposium "Orphans of
the storm: saving 'orphan films' in the digital age",
held at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, South
Carolina. [15]
For an extensive analysis of the
question of details, including their differentiation from
fragments, see Naomi Schor, Reading in detail:
aesthetics and the feminine, (London: Methuen, 1987).
[16]
For this distinction of monumental (sic) importance, see
Michel Foucault, Archeology of knowledge. London:
Tavistock Publications Ltd,1972. Translated by A.M.
Sheridan Smith. (originally published as
L'Archéologie du savoir. Paris:
Éditions Gallimard, 1969) esp. pp
138-140. [17]
For further elaboration of this
issue, see my After the beginning: cinema of the
american west, before 1915 (2002, Ph.D dissertation,
Utrecht University). [18]
"Vrouw en kinderen worden belaagd door boevenbende.
Edison. Verenigde Staten, 1910[c]." [19]
"Expeditie in weids landschap, Verenigde
Staten." [20]
"Cowboy hangt vijand aan een touw boven afgrond. Onder
het touw laat hij een kaarsje branden. Verenigde
Staten," [21]
"Een fantastisch duel. Twee locomotieven loopen tegen
elkander met een snelheid van 100 kilometer in
tegenwoordigheid der bevolking van
Indianapolis." [22]
"Machinisten en stokers springen van de locomotieven een
oogenblik voor de samenstoot." [23]
Tom Gunning, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American
Narrative Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press
1991: 67)
11,015 words
An
archive is a place replete with three things: objects
from the past, the mission to preserve these from
disappearance, and the categorizations that make them
accessible. The first engage the question of materiality,
in the face of the fugitive nature of current screen
culture.[1]
The second is sometimes articulated in terms of cultural
memory, an urgently felt preoccupation of our time. The
third concerns the discursivity of even the most
rudimentary of classifications. I contend that the
connection between these three strands underlies the
current fascination with "the archive."[2]
How Bits
& Pieces Tell a Story: Pre-conceptualizing the
Archive
From
archaeology to archive: digging up and laying
out
Naming the
hero: a case study
Telling the
Story: Reading Archivally
Archival
Poetics and Story-Telling
Conclusion
Endnotes
