ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the connection between the practice of found footage film and Walter Benjamin's theory of natural history. The archive functions as a repository of the past but its images are also subject to the action of time. Detached from their original context, they break with the order of chronology and continuity. Instead, the fragment serves as the basic unit of meaning. Found footage film can be seen as a modern variant of the allegorical impulse which Benjamin discovers in the Trauerspiel. The films of Alain Resnais, Joseph Cornell, and Bill Morrison provide the material for an analysis of the ways in which archival imagery bears the marks of decay, disruption, and dissolution.
