ABSTRACT
Theodore Roszak, Sebald, and Daitch, film's historicity is examined through the film archive. Death of cinema trope informs the fictions examined with different valences, particularly in light of how each uses the physical instability of analog film to refract, the traumas of World War II. The temporality of literary instances of intermedial engagement is significant for what it refracts about the current moment in media archaeology when new technologies are shifting both the materiality of films and texts and our historical and theoretical approaches to them. Flicker, the earliest of the novels surveyed, marks an emerging interest in the archival history of film that informs all of the literary works examined. If confronting loss is the historiographic challenge that Sebald sets for the archive at the beginning of the new millennium, it is useful to turn to Susan Daitch's Paper Conspiracies to trace in brief the cultural reception of the film archive a decade after Austerlitz and two past Flicker.
