ABSTRACT
"Archival cinema" signifies different things to different constituencies; to further complicate matters, its purported meaning is also dependent upon the geographic and idiomatic context where the definition is conveyed. In chronological terms, the emergence of "archival cinema" as a descriptive formula coincides with the rise of "digital cinema", but its semantic roots are much deeper, and deserve to be explained. Each translation reveals a set of conflicting views on how moving images created in the past should be summoned to a contemporary viewer. The contradictions embedded in the term "archival cinema" are revealed in all their depth through a cursory survey of its correspondent in other languages. Archive cinema became an independent form of expression at the end of the silent era. One of the films, Lyrisch nitraat, was the catalyst of a turning point in the evolution of archival cinema.
