ABSTRACT
In 1898 Boleslas Matuszewski, a photographer and former court cinematographer of Tsar Nikolas II, published a booklet in France entitled Une nouvelle source de l’histoire in which he pleads for the creation of a repository for actuality films so that they can serve as historical documents for future generations. Animated photography, he argues, is unrivalled in its capacity to faithfully record historical events and thus should be collected and stored in an official archive. Matuszewski claims that cinematographic images in particular can resist attempts to manipulate them and thus are the most valuable witnesses of the past:
Perhaps the cinematograph does not give history in its entirety, but at least what it does deliver is incontestable and of an absolute truth. Ordinary photography admits of retouching, to the point of transformation. But try to retouch, in an identical way for each figure, these thousand or twelve hundred, almost microscopic negatives...! One could say that animated photography has a character of authenticity, accuracy and precision that belongs to it alone. It is the ocular evidence that is truthful and infallible par excellence
(Matuszewski 1995, 323).