ABSTRACT
Archives commonly feature sites where the material past lies safely petrified or dormant, to be accessed and activated again at a later stage. The archive appears as an elaborate storing system or a container: in his film All the world’s memory (1956), Alain Resnais unsurprisingly compared the French Bibliothèque Nationale to an enduring, inviolable ‘fortress’. However, the discourse (or dream) of permanence is an abstracted one – it leaves aside many important aspects of archives.
Time itself is continuously at work within the archive, slowly yet indefatigably erasing the traces. Despite diligent (but variable) conservation effort, materials age, deteriorate and mutate. It follows that the symbolic contents they preserve are inexorably threatened by ruination; physical degradation may lead to illegibility and disrupt the process of transmission as if to show that the symbolic cannot be divorced from the material. This is especially true of audiovisual archives – too little has been written about the fading pigments of photographs, the warped, yellowing celluloid films, or the ephemerality of some types of paper as they turn to dust.
In this chapter, I consider the film archive in relation to organic (or natural) – rather than historical – time. To consider the materiality of the audiovisual archive implicitly means that we interrogate how the archive passes in and through time, and not simply how it ‘passes on’ (or transmits) past temporalities. This shift of focus bears theoretical as well as practical implications; how can archival theory address the natural time of the archive and issues of transience, illegibility and disappearance? What happens when we begin to think of the archive as an unfinished process? How do we ‘read’ an archive which is falling apart?
In order to consider these questions, my chapter notably offers a dialogue between the work of archival theorists, film theorists and ruin theorists, exploring the affinities between archives and ‘waste-sites’. I engage with a selection of visual artists who have critically and aesthetically concerned themselves with the accidental and organic character of the archive. These include Peter Delpeut (Lyrical Nitrate 1990) and Bill Morrison (Dawson City: Frozen Time 2016; Decasia 2002), two filmmakers who have worked with decomposing footage found in institutional film archives.
