Amad 2015

Film as the “Skin of History”: André Bazin and the Specter of the Archive and Death in
Nicole Védrès’s Paris 1900 (1947)

Author(s): Paula Amad
Source: Representations, Vol. 130, No. 1 (Spring 2015), pp. 84-118
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rep.2015.130.1.84 .
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PAULA AMAD
Film as the ‘‘Skin of History’’:

André Bazin and the Specter of
the Archive and Death in Nicole Védrès’s
Paris 1900 (1947)
We live more and more in a world stripped bare by film, a world that tends to peel
off its own image. Hundreds of thousands of screens make us watch, during
the news broadcasts, the extraordinary shedding performed each day by tens of
thousands of cameras. As soon as it forms, History’s skin [la peau de l’Histoire]
peels off again.
—André Bazin, 19461
So, for the first thirty years or so of this century, the historian will have to rely on the
accidental accumulation of film in reels produced for anything but historical
reasons. Taking a parallel from written sources, it is as if the historian of the early
twentieth century had little more to guide him than the Daily Mirror,
Old Moore’s Almanac, Tit-Bits, and a run of Nelson’s Sevenpenny Novels.
—Arthur Elton, 19552
A B O U T T W O T H I R D S O F T H E way through Nicole Védrès’s Paris

1900 (1947), a feature-length documentary that combines fragments of
nonfiction and fiction footage with a view to delivering a new, cinematic
type of history, an old newsreel sequence violently interrupts the otherwise
sedate, audiovisual chronicle of the Belle Epoque. The six-shot sequence
begins with a full shot of a man, whom the voice-over commentator labels
a ‘‘modern Icarus,’’ outfitted in a winged parachute-type suit, making a slow
full circle for the cameraman, followed by a distant tilt shot that moves up
a b s t r a c t Why did the notoriously antimontage film theorist André Bazin champion Nicole
Védrès’s Paris 1900 (1947), a kaleidoscopic film de montage compiled from scraps of archival film,
including footage of a death recorded live? How did archival films and death on film together
mediate for Bazin the fatal coupling of ‘‘total war’’ and ‘‘total History,’’ and why were archival films
seen by others to raise urgent questions of historical philosophy? This essay explores the intensified
historical consciousness that developed around archival films and the representability of death after the
Second World War. Reinserting documentary as the missing key to Bazin’s so-called realist film theory,
I argue that Bazin found in Paris 1900 a new archive-inflected and essayistic model of film’s historicity
whose full potential continues to be realized in the explosion of archival filmmaking today.
R e p r e s e n t a t i o n s 130. Spring 2015 © The Regents of the University of California. ISSN
0734-6018, electronic ISSN 1533-855X, pages 84–118. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission
to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at http://www.
84 ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/rep.2015.130.4.84.

the length of the Eiffel Tower.3 In the third and longer shot, the birdman, in
the company of two other men, spreads the now unfurled, winglike sections
of his outfit (fig. 1) and readies himself for what feels like an interminable
fifteen seconds on the balcony edge of the tower’s first tier before finally, after
a moment’s hesitation, jumping. We then cut to a distant shot aimed at the
first level of the tower and tilt down as the second camera follows the bird-
man’s descent, his flying suit trailing ineffectually before a small puff of dust is
released from the Champ de Mars as his body hits the ground. The sequence
ends with a close shot of hands measuring the ‘‘six-inch’’ deep impact of the
fallen Icarus, followed by a brief final shot of his corpse being carried away.
The birdman footage appears after a long audiovisual roll call of now
celebrated turn-of-the-century figures from the fields of politics (Léon
Blum, Charles Maurras), theater (Sarah Bernhardt), opera (Nellie Melba,
Victor Caruso), art (Auguste Rodin, Pierre Renoir, Claude Monet), and lit-
erature (Willy, Colette, André Gide, Paul Valéry, Jean Cocteau). Yet like so
much of Paris 1900’s footage, the birdman’s image appears to carry minimal
historical import except as macabre evidence of the era’s aviation mania,
elsewhere more playfully or soberly documented with footage of a couple
performing an aerial dance and Charles Blériot’s record-breaking 1909 Chan-
nel crossing. Conscious of the seemingly trivial remains of history then pre-
served in film archives, Védrès admitted that ‘‘scarcely one percent [of the
footage she found] referred to important events.’’4 In light of the minor
status of the birdman event historically, we might read the fragment as simply
more of the dead skin of film sloughed off by the incessantly updated screens
of twentieth-century news media, a phenomenon described by André Bazin,
arguably the preeminent film critic and theorist of the past century. Or the
fragment might be read as the ‘‘accidental accumulation’’ of tabloid-like
evidence that Sir Arthur Elton, a key producer-director in the British docu-
mentary film movement, feared the newsreels of the early twentieth century
bequeathed to later historians. Or, to take an earlier example, it might be
read as the ‘‘anecdotal’’ history of the everyday that Bolesław Matuszewski,
a Polish newsreel cameraman, claimed the cinema was destined to archive.5
To be sure, the birdman sequence shifts the tone of the film from a light-
hearted nostalgic skip through the Belle Epoque to a bleak forewarning of
the abyss of the Great War into which Europe would soon plunge (the com-
mentator clearly provides the 1912 date of the footage). Yet the fragment still
retains an uneasy relation to any straightforward attempt to mobilize archival
film as historical evidence. Although it feels significant, it’s hard to say what
the image of the birdman’s fall at last means. What might this disturbing early
example of a subject dying (to be) on film have to do with film’s, and more
specifically the archival compilation film’s, peculiar temporal and ethical
registers?
Film as the ‘‘Skin of History’’ 85

figure 1. Dying to save face: the
birdman prepares, hesitates and
jumps to his death, marked by the
six-inch deep imprint in the ground;
Paris 1900: chronique de 1900, directed
by Nicole Védrès (1947; phoenix,
1992), DVD.

Ever since its emergence in the late nineteenth century, film’s capacity
to function as a historical document that provides irrefutable evidence of
past events has aroused both support and skepticism. If, for its supporters,
film promised a superior record of total recall, to its detractors it delivered
a machine-rendered, indiscriminate, impoverished reality, drained of natu-
ralistic sound and color. As for film’s potential as an archival source, its
storage, retrieval, and semantic capacities were mostly considered to be
unmanageable and incomprehensible, especially compared to photogra-
phy. This mixture of optimism and pessimism regarding film’s ability to
serve history continued into the mid-twentieth century. For Bazin, the news-
reel’s near-instantaneous blanket coverage of events during the Second
World War paradoxically left reality uncovered, exposing a history of the
present that was as unconfrontable as an open wound. Echoing Bazin’s
concerns, Elton, then president of the British Scientific Film Association,
argued that nonfiction film before 1930 bequeathed to later generations an
unusable mass of incidental visual chitchat, lacking the epic and ordered
sense of serious historical documents.
Although Bazin judged newsreels of the present and Elton those of the
recent past, and both ultimately advocated for film as a new form of history,
their expressions of caution were rooted in the ongoing uncertainty regard-
ing the medium’s problematic archival tendencies. As I have argued else-
where, film’s troublesome archival status in the first decades of cinema
stemmed from its association with forms of memory that were incomplete,
intermittent, and involuntary, despite the medium’s appeal to a mechanisti-
cally comprehensive record of the past.6 In this essay I argue that an
expanded consciousness of film’s relation to the archive following the Sec-
ond World War allowed critics and filmmakers to negotiate more confidently
new models of cinematic memory. I develop this argument across three
interrelated explorations. First, I claim that film archives, far from being
neutral depositories, instead shaped, albeit indirectly, innovative and influ-
ential modes of cinematic history during the mid-twentieth century. The
1940s and 1950s witnessed an exponential expansion of historical footage
held in the world’s film archives due to the vast documentation of the war.
Beyond recognizing that this growth resulted in a creative and critical boom
in films that reused footage found in archives, I contend that this period
demands an elaboration upon the connection between the evolution of the
archival film mode and cinematic representations of violence, war, and death
more generally.
The second element of the essay is concerned with a recovery of Védrès’s
own reflections upon the archive-inflected, cinematic strategies of history
making used in Paris 1900. Herself once a print and television journalist,
novelist, and filmmaker of considerable renown, Védrès belongs to a now

largely marginalized group of women, including Myriam Borsoutsky and
Yannick Bellon (the former the editor and the latter the assistant editor
of Paris 1900), who helped elevate French documentary film into the realm
of experimental and even ‘‘pure’’ cinema after the Second World War. One of
four films made by Védrès, Paris 1900 has acquired an underground follow-
ing, in part due to Bazin’s championing of it, Alain Resnais’s apprenticeship
on it as a then unknown assistant director, and Chris Marker’s acknowledg-
ment that it revealed to him the ‘‘intelligence’’ of film and the outlines of
that ambiguous genre, the essay film, of which he became a celebrated
practitioner.7 This essay thus restores Védrès and the archival film mode
to their rightful place in the history of the essay film.
A critical recovery of Védrès and Paris 1900 also bears implications for
the recent rebirth of Bazin studies. Close attention to Bazin’s untranslated
reviews of Paris 1900 necessitates a fuller reconsideration of the neglected
dialogue between his so-called realist film theory and the more ‘‘minor’’
forms of documentary such as the archival film. The third element of this
essay thus contributes to the reopening of Bazin by returning documentary
to its central place in his thinking.8 I argue that his writings on film de
montage, a nonfiction mode dominated by editing, serve as a counterpoint
to what Hervé Joubert-Laurencin has called Bazin’s two theories of realism
(within his essays on photographic ontology and Italian neorealist cin-
ema). Where Joubert-Laurencin and others explore the dialectical rela-
tionship between Bazin’s two theories of realism (the ontological real
versus Italian neorealism) and his two exemplars of cinematic realism
(Orson Welles versus Roberto Rossellini), this essay argues for the need
to understand those oppositions in relation to nonfiction film; to see what
happens, in other words, when we triangulate the canonical Citizen Kane
(1941) and Paisà (1946) with the noncanonical Paris 1900.9 Rather than
merely a theorist of realism, Bazin emerges as a theorist of the image in an
archival age, and rather than merely a historian of film style, he becomes
a theorist of film style as history. Of central significance here is the degree
to which Bazin’s nonrepresentational claims regarding film’s capacities to
record, store, and repeat time in a revelatory rather than a mechanistic
mode echo Védrès’s approach in Paris 1900. In addition, this documentary-
inclusive approach to Bazin allows us to see more clearly the relevance of
his work to that of Gilles Deleuze. It enables a more forceful understand-
ing of how the latter’s demarcation between a cinema of the ‘‘movement-
image’’ (pre-1939) and the ‘‘time-image’’ (post-1945) is not a distinction of
style but of history—most explicitly, the post-Auschwitz crisis of cinematic
representation that Védrès (whom Night and Fog’s producer’s envisaged as
a potential director before eventually giving it to Resnais) indirectly nego-
tiated in Paris 1900.10
88 Representations

The Archival Origins
of Compilation Film
The compilation film genre is most commonly associated with

a historically self-conscious attention to the recompiling of fragments from
old films—a practice that did not fully emerge until after the First World
War, reaching its next most intense period of development with the onset of
the Second.11 The establishment of film units for all major armies, the
development of lighter and faster cameras allowing more ubiquitous and
graphic coverage of events, and the public’s increased expectation of daily
newsreel reportage generated vast quantities of footage and, in turn,
a demand for archives to store it. By the 1950s, a veritable crisis occurred,
to the extent that in 1955 Elton claimed, ‘‘Today the world’s vaults are
bursting with yesterday’s film’’ (‘‘Film as Source,’’ 216). This overflow
marked a decided change from the early twentieth century when, despite
the best efforts of diverse film-archive pioneers, nonfiction footage of his-
torical interest was mostly, aside from certain military archives, preserved
accidentally.12 Indeed, Védrès herself recalled how much of the newsreel
footage she reused in Paris 1900 had only been saved because it was unin-
tentionally preserved on exhibition reels containing the more valued fiction
films from the period.13 Regardless of how it was saved, or whether it
became intercut with new and sometimes staged footage or provided the
sole source for the film, archival footage of all types increasingly found
a second life on postwar screens, perhaps most famously in Resnais’s Night
and Fog (Nuit et brouillard, 1955). Although now widely recognized as the
epitome of this intense period of experimentation with footage liberated
from the archives, Night and Fog is not alone in its innovative treatment of
archival footage. Indeed, that film’s canonical status has probably contrib-
uted to the obscuring of earlier examples, Paris 1900 chief amongst them, in
which archival film’s ability to creatively and ethically confront the past
beyond the standard didactic appeals of documentary film is on display.
Why We Fight
Versus Paris 1900
An important example of the contemporary impact of Paris 1900

can be seen in Elton’s essay ‘‘Film as Source Material for History’’ (1955). This
essay positions Védrès’s work as belonging to one of two groups that exem-
plify film’s ability to serve a new type of history in a modern audiovisual mode,
not by neutrally offering facts and figures, but by delivering a deliberate,
unabashedly biased ‘‘point of view.’’ Something about the compilation genre

led Elton to reject documentary film’s affinity with objective history and its
duty to present two sides of an argument neutrally: ‘‘A film is not a medium to
teach statistic, date or place. It cannot easily qualify or express two points of
view. But it can miraculously illuminate and reveal’’ (211–12). Elton’s skepti-
cism toward balanced, objective reportage places him in line with the French
director Jean Vigo’s promotion in 1930 of what he called the ‘‘documented
point of view,’’ a purposefully paradoxical amalgamation of objective and
subjective approaches in documentary filmmaking that might be read as the
founding manifesto for the essayistic tendency in post-Second World War
French documentary film.14 Elton’s interest in film’s potential for serving
an expanded definition of history reaches its most provocative conclusion
in his claim that archival films raise ‘‘questions of historical philosophy’’
(210). Compilation films, he argued, lead us away from ‘‘the dispassionate
objective techniques of much contemporary historical method and back to
the more emotive methods practiced by Carlyle or Macaulay’’ (211). At the
same time, Elton did not unequivocally support the group of films in which
he situated Paris 1900, finally labeling Védrès’s work as ‘‘evocative’’ yet ulti-
mately undermined by a content ‘‘so incidental as barely to fall within any
ordinary definition of history’’ (212). More to Elton’s taste was a second
group of films in which he detected ‘‘the seeds of future history film making.’’
Included here was Frank Capra’s Why We Fight (1942–45), the six-part series
on the war assembled by the Hollywood director from recent newsreels for
the US War Department and the US Army Special Services Division.
Less than a decade earlier, André Bazin also attended to the historical
import of Paris 1900 and Why We Fight but came to the opposite conclusion.
The two extremes of Bazin’s thinking on the issue of archival films or films de
montage (of which he claims to have seen several) appear in two articles he
wrote in 1946–47, the first a critical review of Capra’s Why We Fight subtitled
‘‘History, Documentation, and the Newsreel,’’ the second a celebratory
review, still untranslated, of Védrès’s Paris 1900 that he titled, in homage to
Marcel Proust, ‘‘A la recherche du temps perdu.’’15 In the first of these reviews
Bazin focused upon the war’s incitement of archival frenzy due to the fatal
coupling of ‘‘total war’’ and ‘‘total History’’ (‘‘On Why We Fight,’’188), the latter
term referring to the all-encompassing documentation and subsequent drive
for preservation that resulted from the camera’s unprecedented ‘‘omnipres-
ence in space and time’’ (190). The cinematic materialization of this symbi-
osis of violence and history occurs for Bazin in the newsreel’s claim ‘‘to
observe history-in-the-making’’ from every possible vantage point. Certainly,
we have heard this assertion regarding film’s troubling omnipresence before.
For example, Siegfried Kracauer makes references in the 1920s to modern
media’s unlimited storage capacities as a ‘‘central archive’’ or ‘‘general inven-
tory’’; to motion pictures’ spatio-temporal ubiquity as a ‘‘giant film’’ that
90 Representations

automatically, endlessly records life on earth; and to the disaster-like scale of
early twentieth-century photo-cinematographic documentation, which he
compares to a ‘‘blizzard’’ or ‘‘flood.’’16 But what seems to have changed
during and in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War is the
intensity of the relationship between war and vision, and history and cin-
ema, as exemplified in the two types of film Bazin briefly alludes to in the
‘‘Why We Fight’’ review—aerial bombardment footage and the films of the
Nuremberg trials.17
Elton claimed that the reason for the expansion of film’s coverage of
space and time lay in the increased awareness in the mid-twentieth century
of the future historical value of nonfiction footage:
Almost for the first time, cameramen were instructed systematically to ‘‘get cover-
age’’ of various events, that is, to take film not for immediate use but to store against
future use. True, much of this coverage was haphazard, uncritical, and without
historical or any other point of view. Nevertheless, the very giving of an order to
get coverage represented something new in film, for it took for granted needs over
and beyond ephemeral ones. (‘‘Film as Source,’’ 216)
The ‘‘needs’’ Elton refers to, which counter the ephemeral presentist ones
of commercial filmmaking, are implicitly archival, understood in this instance
to mean beyond time (‘‘not for immediate use’’), and eventually intended for
the production of history (‘‘future use’’). Although Elton slightly exaggerates
the unprecedented nature of this attentiveness to the historical value of film
(as earlier examples do exist), it is fair to say that this period witnessed
a deepened recognition of the historical value of what Marcel Martin called,
in opposition to the ‘‘short memory’’ of human beings, the ‘‘long memory’’ of
film.18 It is this widespread appreciation of film’s unlimited memory and
unblinking eye-on-the-world that is no doubt at play in Elton’s reference to
the cameramen’s orders to ‘‘get coverage’’—an imperative also influenced by
the era’s overriding threat of nuclear apocalypse.19
Bazin’s attempt in his review of Why We Fight to come to terms with this
magnification of archival awareness led him to a much more pessimistic
appraisal of the doc-utopia of complete coverage offered by film’s omnipres-
ence in space and time. No doubt also thinking of television’s expansion,
while uncannily foreshadowing our own screen-saturated era, Bazin refers to
the ‘‘hundreds of thousands of screens making us watch’’ history every day
and compares the newsreel’s daily update of ‘‘history-in-the-making’’ to a type
of ongoing exfoliation of the face of history: ‘‘As soon as it forms, History’s
skin peels off again’’ (la peau de l’Histoire tombe en pellicule).20 In this post-
Auschwitz, nuclear-age image of the dermabrasive trauma undergone by
history, Bazin, profiting from the French word pellicule’s double meaning of
skin and film, suggests an avenue for thinking about film as the protective yet

fragile, superficial yet revelatory, integral yet duplicitous, visual yet tactile,
surface of modern history.21 No longer allowed to occur spontaneously or
invisibly without always already being caught on film ‘‘in the act (in the
historical act, of course)’’ (‘‘On Why We Fight,’’ 188), history, confronted by
the accelerated tempo of cinema’s and television’s competitive ‘‘cult’’ of
quasi-live reportage, has acquired a cosmetic, media-prepared face that leaves
Bazin disturbed.
Bazin viewed Capra’s Why We Fight series as a direct offspring of the war’s
expansion of the international stock of historical footage (189–90). Com-
posed, as he correctly notes, nearly entirely of reedited newsreels, Why We
Fight demonstrates for Bazin how the reassemblage of footage ‘‘shot for
other purposes can achieve the flexibility and precision of language’’
(189). Ultimately, however, he accuses the series’ formal strategy, dominated
by the reediting of newsreels with a new soundtrack, of ‘‘intellectual decep-
tion’’ as it subordinates ‘‘the events pictured on screen’’ (190) to the ‘‘cement
of the words’’ and the ‘‘soundtrack’’; in other words, the overall visual and
sound montage failed to respect the ‘‘intrinsic and distinct values’’ of image
and words, facts and commentary. For Bazin, the infamously antimontage
theorist of mostly fiction film, here again was proof of editing’s violent dimin-
ishment of meaning and affect within the durational continuity of the single,
in this instance nonfiction, shot.
He ends the review by distinguishing between written and filmed history’s
access to the ‘‘historical fact,’’ the former dependent upon the mind and
human language to reconstruct and argue about the past event, the latter
benefiting from a shorthand method whereby ‘‘we can refer to the facts in
flesh and blood’’ (191). And yet the more ‘‘concrete’’ facts through which film
can write history are just as subject to manipulation, which leads Bazin to ask:
Could they bear witness to something else other than themselves? To something
else other than the narrative of which they form a part? I think that far from moving
the historical sciences toward more objectivity, the cinema paradoxically gives them
the additional power of illusion [that is, the ability to falsify through editing] by its
very realism.
Not yet willing to explore the positive, revelatory side of this illusionism,
Bazin describes it here as ‘‘dangerous’’ (190), comparing edited film’s
capacity for deception to the ‘‘rape of the masses.’’ Limited by its obvious
propagandistic function, Capra’s Why We Fight series thus ultimately repre-
sented for Bazin a missed opportunity to build productively upon an alter-
native potential that lay within the practice of reusing archival footage.
Instead, it offered a glimpse of ‘‘tomorrow’s historian of the masses’’ figured
as a shady ventriloquist of the dead serving a debased variety of history
currently ‘‘being prepared in all the film archives of the world’’ (192).
92 Representations

Bazin’s quasi-gothic invocation of the archive conforms to a deep anti-
archival tradition within French intellectual history, which from Charles
Baudelaire and Henri Bergson to Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Jac-
ques Derrida, and Pierre Nora has derided the archive as the servant, grave-
yard, or factory of history. Yet just as the French anti-archival tendency also
contains within it significant, if mostly overlooked, insights into the positive
dimensions of the archive, so too does Bazin’s surface rejection of the
archive leave room for an embrace of film’s counterarchival historical
potential.22 What exactly might this alternative history lying dormant within
the archives of old footage look like once it was given an opportunity to
appear on the screen? Does it have anything in common with the halluci-
natory, nonobjective potential within the ‘‘fact’’ that Bazin wrote about in
‘‘Ontology of the Photographic Image’’ or the revelatory history ‘‘buried
casually in the world’s newsreels’’ that Elton later lauded?23
Just one year after his review of Why We Fight, Bazin begins to give us an
answer. In stark contrast to his negative view of archival film’s ability to
produce history as propaganda, he has nothing but praise for another
archival-based, reedited film, Paris 1900, in which he discovers a Proustian
temporality marked by the irruptions of the accidental and a new example
of ‘‘pure cinema,’’ liberated from ‘‘the aesthetic norms’’ of contemporary
film practice (‘‘Paris 1900,’’ 241). So what exactly did Védrès do with archi-
val footage in Paris 1900 that caused Bazin to compare the film’s ‘‘over-
hauling’’ of cinematic norms to Proust’s overhauling of novelistic norms,
while also leading him to state that from now on all fiction film would be
superfluous, declaring, ‘‘I would never dare touch a camera after having
seen Paris 1900’’ (241)? Clues to the film’s impact appear in other critics’
reviews. Not alone in his praise, Bazin was joined just six months later by
the communist film historian Georges Sadoul, who expressed his gratitude
to Védrès for having taught him how ‘‘by the chance happenings in a shot
the camera can attain the depth and complexity of the best historian or the
best novelist.’’24 Echoing Sadoul’s interest in Paris 1900’s delivery of a new
type of history, Kracauer found in it and other film ‘‘retrospects’’ the par-
ticularly ‘‘traumatic effect’’ arising from cinematic representations that
inhabited ‘‘the border region between the present and the past’’ beyond
which ‘‘the realm of history begins.’’25 Expanding upon Sadoul’s and Kra-
cauer’s commentaries, we can attribute Paris 1900’s striking appeal to three
interrelated features: its hyperarchival awareness; its dependence upon
a fragmented, heterogeneous assortment of authorless, ready-made facts
or film fragments; and its arousal of what Bazin and Kracauer describe or
allude to as alienated memories that ultimately relate to its ‘‘memory-of-the-
future’’ temporal structure and, more generally, cinema’s relationship to
death.

Langlois’s Bath-Archive
Before we see the first frame of old footage flicker onto the
screen, Védrès carefully sets up Paris 1900 as a self-conscious archival film
emblematic of a media culture in which the historical importance of film’s
‘‘long memory’’ is increasingly appreciated. In line with the production
company’s promotion elsewhere of the film’s ability to ‘‘revive’’ the past via
documents of a ‘‘scrupulous authenticity,’’ the opening credits indicate that
Védrès gathered her material of ‘‘authentic documents’’ from no less than
seven hundred different films, sourced from diverse commercial (Pathé,
Gaumont), state (Cinémathèque Française, Musée Carnavalet, British Film
Institute), and private archives (Boulogne).26
The earnestness of the production company’s promotional bids for Paris
1900 ’s historical authenticity are, however, undercut within the film by the
particular thanks given in the opening credits to the maverick cofounder of
the Cinémathèque Française, Védrès’s friend, Henri Langlois. Prior to her
work on Paris 1900, Védrès had become intimately familiar with Langlois’s
cinémathèque when she edited an unconventional book titled Images du
cinéma français (1945), composed nearly entirely of frame enlargements
sourced from fiction, nonfiction, and ‘‘unknown’’ films from the collec-
tion.27 A revealing stylistic forerunner to Paris 1900, the book offers a history
of French cinema through a series of disconnected stills organized loosely
into ten categories, each prefaced by a short text (‘‘Burlesque and Comedy,’’
‘‘Terror,’’ ‘‘Adventure,’’ ‘‘The Human Condition,’’ ‘‘Men and Women,’’
‘‘Atmosphere,’’ ‘‘Influences,’’ ‘‘Artists and Models,’’ ‘‘History,’’ and ‘‘In Search
of Form’’). The history it tells is thus essayistic, subjective, and evocative rather
than informational, objective, and comprehensive. As such, it bears the stamp
of Langlois’s idiosyncratic approach to film history, showcased for example
in the inaugural exhibition of his Musée du Cinéma on 28 December 1944,
which was also titled ‘‘Images du cinéma français.’’ Comprising a ‘‘strange
accumulation of objects and archives,’’ the 1944 landmark exhibition, Laur-
ent Mannoni has argued, contained the seeds of all Langlois’s future shows:
‘‘It offers no chronological path; there is no theoretical discourse, but rather
absolute disorder.’’28
A state of creative chaos also characterized Langlois’s film-collecting
practice, as mythologized in Denise Bellon’s photograph from around
1946 of what we might call Langlois’s bath-archive (fig. 2).29 Although
staged, Bellon’s photograph mixes fiction with fact. The option of storing
films in a bathtub was not so ludicrous during the Second World War, given
the real threat of a Nazi takeover of the French film heritage. On the other
hand, the image poses an impossible contradiction in its intermingling of
film preservation and destruction, the gas water heater residing over the
94 Representations

nitrate reels like an incendiary guardian, while the water it contains promises
a deliverance from a possible nitrate fire. The iconic image thus belongs to the
Bazinian surreal, a hallucinatory fact documenting the state of film storage
in the immediate postwar years.30 Védrès reprised the spirit of the photo-
graph in her own drawing of the archival surreal (fig. 3), which was published
to illustrate an article she wrote in March 1948 detailing the unconventional
research, within ‘‘caves, rabbit sheds, and cinémathèque bunkers,’’ that went
into the making of Paris 1900.31 The sketch, ironically titled ‘‘The Studios of
Paris 1900,’’ depicts Alain Resnais with a broom and Védrès handling an
unrolled film reel together in an underground shelter containing caged
rabbits, silent-cinema movie posters, and haphazardly arranged cans of film,
all presided over by a candle-carrying ghost named Henri Langlois.
figure 2. The archival surreal: Henri

Langlois’s bath-archive, photograph by Denise
Bellon, c. 1946. © Les films de l’equinoxe-
Fonds photographique de Denise Bellon.
figure 3. Védrès’s drawing of herself and

Alain Resnais presided over by Henri
Langlois in the film archives, published in
Nicole Védrès, ‘‘A la poursuite de Paris
1900,’’ L’Ecran français (2 March 1948): 3–4.
Described by Védrès as anything but ‘‘a classificatory rationalist,’’ Langlois

advised her and Resnais to be guided in their archival searches by ‘‘instinct’’
rather than a ‘‘catalog.’’ This anticlassificatory tendency clearly underpinned
the counterarchival method Langlois followed in his first Musée du Cinéma
exhibition, whose organization was so idiosyncratic and far removed from the
educational norms of standard museum practice that he felt the need to

explain its obviously surreal heritage: ‘‘‘Images du cinéma français’ could
never be taken to be a didactic exhibition. . . . In one word, [it] envisages
above all fantasy, fairytales, the unreal, the fantastic or the phantasmagori-
cal.’’32 In full revolt against the rationalist regime of the catalog, Langlois
celebrated what he called the ‘‘involuntary, accidental, and fortuitous’’ fea-
tures of his exhibition’s antididactic method of history-through-images.33
The effect of Langlois’s counterpositivist method is evident in Védrès’s
book under the rubric of ‘‘Terror,’’ where haunting images of hooded faces
lifted from a range of fiction and nonfiction films invoke one of the cine-
ma’s deepest drives—‘‘necrophilia’’ (fig. 4).34 Not surprisingly, given the
unsurpassable ‘‘competition with the real’’ that the recent war’s atrocities
gave to the horror genre, the range of films from which Védrès extracted
frames includes a surgical film by Dr. Charles Claoué, a pioneer of recon-
structive facial surgery for mutilated First World War soldiers.35 The choice
of a surgical film typifies a widely known surrealist interest, displayed else-
where in the book through stills from Jean Painlevé’s popular scientific films
of vampire bats, seahorses, and crabs, in what Bazin called, in his own 1947
essay on Painlevé’s work, the ‘‘accidental beauty’’ contained within the
figure 4. A visual essay

on ‘‘Terror’’ in Védrès’s
book Images du cinéma
français (Paris, 1945). The
still from a surgical film by
Dr. Claoué is on the
bottom right.
96 Representations

aesthetically disinterested realm of documentary shorts.36 When viewed out
of their instructional context, Painlevé’s images were liberated from their
original intent, free to ‘‘bear witness to something else other than them-
selves’’ (‘‘On Why We Fight,’’ 191), much like the stills from avant-garde films
of the 1920s (by Fernand Léger, Henri Chomette, and René Clair) with
which Védrès intentionally juxtaposed them. Disconnected from narrative
order and edited sequence, the intrinsic autonomy of the footage rises to
the surface. It is this same highly personalized, essayistic interest in the
image beyond its original documentary meaning, along with an attraction
to instinctual and accidental methodologies of visual compilation, that
together combine to form a new mode of ‘‘necrophilic’’ cinema history that
Védrès, under the influence of Langlois, imports from her illustrated book
into Paris 1900’s resuscitation of the dead.
Those Were Happy Times
Védrès’s film begins as a deceptively saccharine account of the

Belle Epoque, much in line with the clichéd images of Parisian monuments
and types on the film’s original posters. Although missing the section titles of
Images du cinéma français, the film is structured according to categories that
might have come straight from the book. Conforming to that book’s category
of ‘‘Atmosphere’’ is the film’s assemblage of curious highlights of the era such
as the gigantic Ferris wheel from the 1900 Paris Exposition and the female fad
for wearing watches on the ankle; under ‘‘Artists and Models’’ we glance at
paintings by Pablo Picasso and Claude Monet and see footage of André Gide
and Paul Valéry; under ‘‘Men and Women’’ we witness a visual essay on the
transformation of early twentieth-century gender roles; and under ‘‘History’’
a roll call of politicians and dignitaries. Narrated with a grandfatherly voice-
over commentary by the actor Claude Dauphin (who is replaced by Monty
Woolley in the English version) and set against a melodious soundtrack com-
posed by Guy Bernard-Delapierre, Paris 1900 appears to fulfill its opening
premise that ‘‘those were happy times.’’ In this respect, the light atmospheric
style of its first two-thirds conforms to the negative description of compilation
films made by a Cahiers du cinéma (the journal founded by Bazin) critic in
1963, as those ‘‘touching and funny reels generally stamped with nostalgia.’’37
The film’s lightheartedness is, however, a decoy. In addition to the
opening reference to Langlois, the second hint we have that Paris 1900 will
not be all that it seems occurs in the increasingly wry and mocking tone of
the narrator (for example, to the image of a group of self-satisfied members
of the Académie Française, he intones, ‘‘Who in fifty years time will even
know them?’’ and to footage of the 1910 floods, whose effects he claims were

worse than a war, he sarcastically states, ‘‘But wars are fortunately a thing of
the past’’). The ridiculing aspect of his narration, so different from the
straightforward impartiality of a voice-of-God commentator, increases in the
second half of the film and turns bitterly pessimistic by the end. Most impor-
tant, it has the overall effect of dislodging the commentary from the image,
thereby encouraging a spectatorial space of critical, skeptical distance that
Bazin sorely missed in the didactically closed relationship between sound and
image in the Why We Fight series. Nearly a decade before Resnais dismantles
documentary codes with Night and Fog’s skeptical and ironic voice-over com-
mentary, Védrès cracks the cemented relation between commentary and the
image-track. Echoing the voice-over’s shift in tone is that of the musical score,
whose harmless façade of skipping, sweet melodies is undercut by the increas-
ingly mournful and foreboding composition of the film’s last third.
Film as ‘‘Puzzle’’
The auditory cracks in the film’s surface are magnified at the level
of the image-track, which in a revealing discussion of the film Védrès likened
to a ‘‘puzzle.’’38 In addition to footage of varying quality and texture, the
film’s heterogeneity extends to its intermedia mosaic of photographs, post-
cards, paintings, and newspaper clippings. Not surprisingly, one American
reviewer compared the film’s disjointedness to that of a ‘‘kaleidoscope of
unrelated events [that] is gradually shaped toward wholeness and mean-
ing.’’39 The film’s uneven, collage-like composition continues in the mixing
of still and moving archival material; high and low cultural references; and,
most important, nonfiction and fiction footage. Typifying the film’s loose
approach to historical evidence in its liberal mixing of fact and fiction,
footage of what appears to be the police showdown with the infamous
Bonnot criminal gang in 1912 is presented as newsreel footage, reinforced
by the now unreliable voice-over claiming that ‘‘a cameraman just happened
to be present.’’ In fact, the footage comes from Victorin Jasset’s fictionalized
account of the celebrated criminal’s rise and fall in two films he made for
Eclair, La Bande de l’auto grise and Hors la loi (1912).40 Situating herself as the
inheritor of an earlier moment in documentary filmmaking when the
porousness between fact and fiction prevailed, Védrès values the fiction
films for their documentary evidence. With the indexical guarantee of the
footage no longer primary, and the narrator no longer trustworthy, Védrès
moves us further and further away from the idea of cinematic history based
upon an essentialist definition of documentary film’s realism.
The film’s fragmented nature is also apparent in its uniquely cinematic,
citationless method of combining different sources. As with nearly all
98 Representations

compilation films, none of the fragments are referenced. They appear with-
out quotation marks, as it were, unmoored from their original sources,
floating free in an authorless assemblage of visual facts. As such, they fly
in the face of historical scholarship’s evidentiary and author-based methods
of citation. Their contextless appearance in the film also mirrors the
catalog-free state of their archival storage. Before and during the war it was
standard for nonfiction films to be stored without any information as to
their date, title, subject, or camera operator, as Védrès herself testified in
her description of the state of the archives she consulted as ‘‘ambient
chaos.’’41 Indeed, fiction and nonfiction footage was often collected and
preserved in archives on the same reel. Such a practice, resulting from the
original multigenre exhibition context, also suggests the weak borders men-
tioned earlier between fact and fiction in the history of documentary film-
making and exhibition. Finally, the mise-en-abı̂me of misappropriated
footage resulting from this practice (as seen in the Bonnot gang passage)
points not only to the archival film’s identity as the offspring of films that
beget films (to use the title of Jay Leyda’s pioneering book on compilation
films) but also, ironically, to their capacity to beget films-as-archives.42 In
other words, archival films have a tendency to themselves acquire the aura of
unquestionable historical evidence, searched and reused by future film-
makers looking for already validated ‘‘authentic documents’’ of the past.
Paris 1900’s citationless assemblage of film fragments also relates to its
authorless, cameraless mode. Bazin highlighted these two features in the
opening sentences of his review, where he made a point of referring to the
collaborative genesis of the film and connected its aesthetic shock to an
exclusive reliance upon already shot footage that rendered the camera super-
fluous, to the point that Paris 1900 resembled the ‘‘pure cinema’’ of avant-
garde experimentation. The reference to ‘‘pure cinema’’ is coded and takes
us back to the 1920s, when the term was used to invoke, amongst other moves
toward nonrepresentational expression, the cameraless experiments of quasi-
surrealist cinematography, whose results depended heavily upon chance.43
In applying this term to Paris 1900, Bazin conjures the outlines of a new type
of history (whose exhibition mode Langlois had been exploring since the
mid-1940s), one untroubled by the authorless, cameraless mode’s confirma-
tion of film’s essentially ambiguous delivery of the real, devoid of intention-
ality, and curiously once removed from its ontological photographic base.
Memories Not Ours
The film’s cut-and-paste form connects to its third feature: its

arousal, resulting from the orphaned nature of its film fragments, of alienated,

unclaimed memories of the past. In Paris 1900’s awakening of what Bazin
insightfully described in his review of the film as recollections that ‘‘do not
belong to us’’ (242), drawn from the disembodied anonymity of the world
archive of film and ‘‘a memory exterior to our consciousness,’’ he continues
a line of thinking about the force of old newsreels that goes back at least to
Virginia Woolf’s 1926 essay ‘‘The Movies and Reality.’’44 There Woolf negoti-
ates the complicated appeal of a typical program of newsreels (featuring
footage of a king, a famous yacht, and a horse race) when viewed a decade
after its original release: ‘‘We behold them as they are when we are not
there. We see life as it is when we have no part in it. As we gaze we seem
to be removed from the pettiness of actual existence. . . . Further, all this
happened ten years ago, we are told. We are beholding a world which has
gone beneath the waves’’ (231). Far from simply appealing to the eye’s
rational bent for past facts, the newsreels, she suggests, ‘‘have taken on
a quality which does not simply belong to the photograph of real life.’’
Beyond their indexical, camera-bound, documentary appeal, they provide
us with a glimpse of a world that does not include us and that now unfolds in
a time that does not include many of the filmed subjects. Here we have, to
paraphrase Kracauer on one of photography’s essential affinities, not just
nature, but time and history ‘‘as it exists independently of us.’’45 In short,
these brief resuscitations from the past deliver for Woolf (as they would for
Bazin and Kracauer) a haunting, posthuman embodiment of not presence
but absence, not life but death; or, perhaps more accurately, life in the face
of death.
This is the hollowed-out real from which we are usually protected by
cinema’s habitual skin, but to which we are occasionally exposed. In the case
of Paris 1900 the emotive encounter with a posthuman relation to time is
even more unexpected because it emerges from the normally affectless space
of the ‘‘objective past,’’ which Bazin places in direct opposition to Proust’s
hypersubjective relation to the past. Where Proust found time regained
through the ‘‘ineffable joy of being engulfed in his memory’’ (‘‘Paris 1900,’’
242), Bazin suggests that Paris 1900’s spectators are gripped by a more con-
flicted experience of ‘‘an aesthetic joy born from a tear [déchirement], because
these ‘memories’ do not belong to us.’’ Rather than luxuriously losing them-
selves in a sea of personal memory, spectators of Paris 1900 find themselves
washed ashore, cut off from the impossible vastness of collective memory. The
distancing experience, or defamiliarization, aroused by the old newsreels
realizes ‘‘the paradox of an objective past, of a memory exterior to our con-
science.’’ Recipients of a sort of removed, prosthetic memory, spectators are
left feeling both in and out of the past, in a dizzying experience of temporal
vertigo (of time lost, then found, then lost again) that unbalances the com-
forting sequential order promoted in Paris 1900’s subtitle—‘‘a filmed chronicle
100 Representations

of the Belle Epoque, 1900–1914.’’ Clearly, it was a particular type of docu-
mentary film, one shaped by fragmentation, an irreverent combination of fact
and fiction, and (as I will soon argue) a multidirectional temporality that
activated this unsettling experience between objective history and subjective
memory, chronological time and achronological experience.
The crucial philosophical and aesthetic step in Bazin’s argument about
Paris 1900 occurs when he associates the unique quality of Védrès’s mon-
tage of old fragments with a tear (déchirement) in the film’s surface or skin.
Not coincidentally, Bazin’s use of the word ‘‘tear’’ reveals him to be still
working with the language of violent exposure that underpinned his use
the year before of the skin metaphor. This time, however, the peeling has
narrowed into a rip, which, though still destructive, now acquires the par-
adoxical quality of a ‘‘monstrously beautiful’’ allure (whose nonfiction ori-
gins Bazin explored further the same year under the guise of the
‘‘accidental beauty’’ of scientific films). It is this tear, indicative of the film’s
puzzle-like, fragmented form, not to mention the threadbare, worn-out
state of the footage, that unstitches the image’s ties to positivist, objective,
archival history, which he referred to explicitly in the review of Why We Fight
as film’s relation to ‘‘straight historical facts’’ (191). This slit in film’s skin-
like surface, Bazin ultimately argues, creates an opening between ‘‘chance
and reality’’ (‘‘Paris 1900,’’ 243) through which a different type of what I call
counterarchival history might emerge, one that was responsive to an appre-
ciation of the cinematic image as simultaneously ‘‘real’’ and ‘‘fantastic’’
(242), factual and hallucinatory, objective and subjective, present and past,
always in flux.
Le Souvenir d’un avenir

(The Memory of a Future)
The temporal slippage mentioned earlier reaches its most intense

expression in Paris 1900 through its overarching ‘‘memory-of-the-future’’
structure. The film’s chronological climax of August 1914 creates a temporal
slide in which modernity’s monuments of progress (the 1900 World Expo-
sition in Paris, aviation, women’s liberation) lean inexorably and inevitably
into the horrors of the First World War (after footage of the 1912 eclipse of
the sun and continuing into the first shot of the birdman sequence, the
commentator intones that there are ‘‘those who see [the eclipse] as an
omen that the end of the world is coming . . . but aviation really will put
an end to the world as we know it’’). Far from being a singular attribute
of Védrès’s film, Woolf’s essay (much like Kracauer’s contemporaneous
references to the disorienting power of old images) suggests that a haunting

futurity might be a dimension of all viewings of old newsreels.46 Woolf’s
words could have been written about similar scenes from Paris 1900:
Brides are emerging from the Abbey—they are now mothers; ushers are ardent—they
are now silent; mothers are tearful; guests are joyful, this has been and that has been
lost; and it is over and done with. The War sprung its chasm at the feet of all this
innocence and ignorance, but it was thus that we danced and pirouetted, toiled and
desired, thus that the sun shone and the clouds scudded up to the very end. (231)
Regardless of whether Woolf was responding to a simple rerun of some

prewar newsreels or a purposefully edited compilation of them, what is
significant for her (and Bazin) is less the relation between shots (that is,
the editing) than the experience of a multidirectional temporal force ema-
nating from the shot itself when viewed across time. As a film that obliquely
historicizes the First World War from the dual perspective of that event’s
immediate Belle Epoque prehistory and the immediate aftermath of the
Second World War in which the film was made, Paris 1900 is enmeshed in
a complex circuitous mobilization of the temporal interconnectedness of
film’s tenses, in which the projected image’s primary effect of screening
events unfolding in present time becomes simultaneously open to the past
and future. To make things even more complicated, if by its nature film’s
presence is always haunted by a time that has passed, its temporal belated-
ness is strengthened when viewing old footage. As Bazin put it in the second
version of the Paris 1900 review, to which I will soon return, the resuscitation
of old footage in archival films intensifies the ‘‘apparition of the specifically
cinematographic tragedy of Time twice lost.’’47
In his privileging of the overall temporal effect of the film, Bazin largely
neglects its editing structure. In this respect, he is at odds with the dominant,
montage-centric approach to analyzing compilation film (as evidenced even
in the standard French term for compilations, films de montage). In a review of
another compilation film, The Bullfight (La course de taureaux, 1951), also
edited by Myriam Borsoutsky and directed by Paris 1900’s producer, Pierre
Braunberger, Bazin claimed that
at issue here is something quite different than a return to the old primacy of
montage over decoupage (shooting script) as taught by early Soviet cinema. Neither
Paris 1900 nor The Bullfight are ‘‘Kino eye.’’ They are modern works, aesthetically
contemporary with the decoupage of films such as Citizen Kane, Rules of the Game, The
Viper, and Bicycle Thieves [all films canonized by Bazin as exemplars of a new form of
realism]. The goal of the editing is not to suggest symbolic and abstract links
between the images, as in Kulechov’s famous experiment.48
Rather, its purpose is to ‘‘fulfill both the physical verisimilitude of the decou-
page [that is, to maintain a sense of spatial and temporal continuity across
obviously disparate shots] and its logical malleability.’’ In other words, Paris
102 Representations

1900’s editing aims ‘‘above all at physical realism’’ and ‘‘the deception of the
editing supports the verisimilitude’’ of the film’s subservience to an artifi-
cially reconstructed linear chronology beginning in 1900 and ending in
1914. On the one hand, Bazin seems here to contradict himself by accepting
in Paris 1900, under the name of ‘‘physical realism,’’ what he had previously
rejected as the dangerous capacity for deception in Why We Fight’s editing
structure. On the other hand, he is being consistent because what he really
opposed in Why We Fight was the way in which the editing of image to sound
exclusively served the didacticism of ‘‘making a point’’ rather than the more
spectatorially interactive, open-endedness of ‘‘showing.’’49 Distinctions
between documentary and fiction film are not at stake for Bazin; what is
at issue is a mixed-genre facto-fictional expanded sense of realism and, by
implication, history. This is why Bazin provocatively refuses to return the
films de montage to the montage dialectics of their Soviet documentary line-
age, implying instead that their archival form issues specifically from a mid-
century cinematic modernism characterized by the ‘‘revolution in film
language’’ waged by Welles and Rossellini under the name of what he calls
‘‘reborn realism.’’50
Dead Again
If a reconfigured aesthetic of the real rather than Soviet-style

montage appears to be what is at stake in Bazin’s praise for the compilation
film, then how does his ‘‘reborn realism,’’ traditionally associated with a deep
respect for temporal and spatial continuity, square with a form of filmmak-
ing so hyperbolically dependent upon a fragmented and discontinuous
form of editing? Certainly it helps to recognize that Bazin’s realism is not
at odds with deception, and that his interest in documentary is not in oppo-
sition to the fictional. But a full understanding of Bazin’s unexpected
patience with the film de montage requires a return to his discussion of cine-
ma’s ontological links to time and death, the latter discussed at length in his
review of The Bullfight. Broadening his argument beyond the obvious cen-
trality of death to the sport of bullfighting, Bazin claims that filmed death is
one of those rare events that justifies the term ‘‘cinematic specificity’’
(‘‘Death Every Afternoon,’’ 30). As the absolute negation of objective time
and the affirmation of singular time, death mirrors the cinema’s ‘‘aesthetic
time based on lived time, Bergsonian ‘durée,’ which is in essence irrevers-
ible and qualitative.’’ Paradoxically, however, film’s ability to not just record
but also repeat time (or at least the traces of its unfolding) abuses the
sanctity of temporal irreversibility, put to the test nowhere more disturbingly
than in the filming of death.

Bazin thus notes with horror the increased indecency of the postwar eye
of the film camera and its takeover of that last holdout, the passage from life
to death. Referring to footage that he viewed in a 1949 newsreel of the
public execution of communists in Shanghai, Bazin sarcastically writes,
‘‘Thanks to film, nowadays we can desecrate and show at will the only one
of our possessions that is temporally inalienable: dead without a requiem,
the eternal dead-again of the cinema!’’ (‘‘Death Every Afternoon,’’ 31). Even
more forceful than the indirect impression of death Woolf felt in viewing
old newsreels, the literal representation of death on screen marks for Bazin
‘‘the frontier between the duration of consciousness and the objective time
of things’’ (30). Again, as in his review of Paris 1900, we have here a non-
realist and indeed posthumanist invocation of the term ‘‘objective,’’ leading
to a notion of history in which ‘‘things’’ rather than humans are the bearers
of time. This is the traumatic aspect of Paris 1900’s forcing of an encounter
with foreign memory and a time from which humans are alienated. Védrès
herself acknowledged that she never intended the film to teach ‘‘‘a’ history,
nor even ‘the’ history’’ of the Belle Epoque.51 Rather than delivering
a purely subjective or objective chronology of past events, the film animates
an ebb and flow of time moving in different directions, its temporal rest-
lessness a product of the unhinged nature of the film’s fragments of
archived time. Paris 1900’s tears thus open onto the essential ‘‘cinemato-
graphic Tragedy,’’ the paradoxically incomplete quality of film’s archival or
mechanistic capacity to store the past. As Bazin put it, ‘‘The cinema is
a machine for regaining time all the better to lose it.’’52 Destroying what
it aims to preserve, it thus embodies, somewhat like Langlois’s bath-archive
and Bazin’s figure of shedding skin, a nightmare and dream of archival
preservation.
A Modern Icarus
Although he did not explore it fully in the first magazine publica-

tions of his review of Paris 1900, at issue for Bazin was more than the film’s
general, indirect reflection upon death. Even more shocking than The Bull-
fight’s inclusion of the death of the bull is Paris 1900’s direct recording of the
passage from life to death of a human, a rarity (if not for long, as the 1949
newsreel footage from Shanghai attests) in the cinema of the mid-twentieth
century. Regardless of its shocking nature, the footage conforms to the ‘‘inci-
dental’’ details that barely ‘‘fall within any ordinary definition of history’’ that
Elton criticized in his reference to Paris 1900 and that Védrès herself acknowl-
edged in her own recognition of how few ‘‘important events’’ she found in the
archival footage. Still, Elton might have been more generous with Paris 1900,
104 Representations

for in Védrès’s emphasis upon the unimportant sideshows of history over the
epic outlines of histoire événementielle, the film implicitly spoke to Elton’s inter-
est in nonobjective tendencies, which is noted in his claim that ‘‘film is not
a medium to teach statistic, date or place’’ (‘‘Film as Source,’’ 211–12). Where
Védrès may have gone too far for Elton, yet just far enough for Bazin, is in her
related overinvestment in film’s ability to ‘‘illuminate and reveal.’’ But what
exactly did the birdman footage reveal?
A clue might be found in a contemporaneous report on the event from
France’s foremost illustrated newspaper, L’Illustration (10 February 1912;
fig. 5). On a first read of the article, Paris 1900’s anonymous history loses
some of its distance as we learn the identity of the ‘‘modern Icarus’’: François
Reichelt, an Austrian tailor with a sideline in inventions.53 The article also
showcases a new type of visual evidence, inserting, much like quotations,
what it describes as ‘‘fragments’’ of actual film from the Pathé newsreel, thus
producing a novelty of intermedia illustration for the time. It is no coinci-
dence that the frames extracted from the newsreel depict two separate
camera perspectives of Reichelt’s jump (an example of cinema’s ubiquity
in space and time)—the first is a tightly framed full shot of him from the
tower’s ledge, the second, a distant shot taken from the ground, in which he
appears as a barely visible descending figure. The article’s dependence
upon the film frames for both its sensational and evidentiary appeal also
takes us into another troubling dimension of Bazin’s response to Védrès’s
film: the accompanying Illustration story itself indicates that the presence of
the newsreel cameraman, for whom Reichelt posed before his suicidal flight,
seems to have spurred him on to take the fateful jump. Spread out for us,
frame by frame, in a vertical arrangement that highlights the descending
direction of the fall, we are in one glance able to see and rewind the seconds
before Reichelt’s death. Translated from the screen to the page, the slice-in-
time ‘‘this has been’’-ness of the photographic basis of the film medium is now
free to suggest the noninevitability of the tragedy supposedly provoked by
what Bazin would later diagnose as the camera’s death-driven ‘‘craze’’ for the
‘‘unique event, shot on the spot, at the very moment of its creation.’’54
Much like the Illustration reporter, Bazin was struck, albeit belatedly, by
the murderous intent of the camera in the birdman footage, an aspect of the
film he re-remembered and commented upon in the 1958 abridged and
revised version of his Paris 1900 review that he republished in the all-
important first volume of Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? 55 In that revised essay,
straight after his definition of the cinematographic tragedy of time, now
slightly rewritten to end with the words ‘‘Time twice lost,’’ Bazin, ironically
experiencing his own doubled memory of the film, also felt compelled to
add what he had previously edited, forgotten, or not fully processed about
the film:

figure 5. Original report in L’Illustration, 10 February 1912, 106, on the birdman’s
jump. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Iowa.
There is perhaps something else which is born from this impersonal look with
which from now on man gazes at history. So it is in that extraordinary birdman
sequence in which it seems obvious that the poor fool takes fright and finally
recognizes the absurdity of his bet. But there, fixing him for eternity is the camera
whose soulless eye he finally doesn’t dare deceive. Had there only been human
witnesses, a wise cowardice would no doubt have come over him. (41–42)
Twice removed from his original experience of Paris 1900, Bazin confronts
the full impact of the footage and recognizes the scene’s applicability to his
1947 meditation upon the film’s alienated style of memory. He now directly
106 Representations

positions the birdman sequence as the product of a mortifyingly ‘‘imper-
sonal’’ and ‘‘soulless’’ witness, the camera, whose gaze embodies the ‘‘under
the spotlights’’ media-preparedness of modern history (alluded to in his
Why We Fight review [189]). Thus, in the second 1958 version of the Paris
1900 review, the camera (whose absence was celebrated in the 1947 review)
returns, yet not as the guarantor of humanist history, but as a hollow, ghostly
recorder of life, the progenitor of that disinterested mode of history ‘‘being
prepared in all the film archives of the world.’’
Read through the lens of Bazinian film theory, the birdman sequence is
highly evocative for three reasons. As discussed, it suggests the complicity of
the camera in the death of the birdman, thus offering an extreme example
of the intermingling of film and death, preservation and destruction, that is
at the heart of Bazin’s double-edged theory of film’s lifelike referentiality.
Second, as an unintentional snuff film of sorts, the footage actually bears
witness to the expiration of life, again providing an exaggerated instance of
Bazin’s more general and abstract concern with film’s repetition and nega-
tion of time. Finally, the footage bears an affinity with the endlessly debated
passages in his seminal essay, ‘‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image,’’ in
which he focused upon the material imprint of the object represented
within photographic media (for example, ‘‘The photograph as such and
the object in itself share a common being, after the fashion of a finger-
print’’).56 In the macabre image of the six-inch-deep imprint left by the
force of the tailor’s body (the description of which he pointedly revised in
the 1958 version to read a ‘‘tomb of fourteen centimeters’’), we have an
analogy for the similarly grave-like impression of reality—the afterimage
of those ‘‘facts in flesh and blood’’ (‘‘On Why We Fight,’’ 191)—that Bazin
saw beneath the skin of film’s surface.57
The birdman footage would most likely also have contributed to the
striking effect Paris 1900 had upon Kracauer. He discussed it in the seminal
third chapter of Theory of Film (1960), where he enlarged film’s tendency to
‘‘reveal things normally unseen’’ (46) to the status of a quasi-ethical duty to
explore phenomena that evade ‘‘our attention in everyday life’’ (53). Regis-
tering Paris 1900’s ironic tone, Kracauer ultimately suggests that it stirred in
the spectator a shuddering laugh that cuts through the habitual inertia of
ordinary perception to express nothing short of the ‘‘traumatic effect’’ (56) of
the recently resuscitated, anonymous past. He claims, much like Bazin, that
this defamiliarizing confrontation occurs, not as a result of a camera’s shift in
spatial or temporal perspective (as happens with uncommon camera angles
or fast-motion cinematography), but through the more external, alienating,
archival effect of time itself upon the old footage. Forcing the individual
spectator to reinsert him- or herself into an alienated collective past, and to
confront what Bazin called ‘‘the impersonal look’’ of the camera-as-historian,

archival films like Paris 1900 expose the fragility of our present (soon-to-be-
past) material environment, by making us see (as Kracauer puts it in one of
his own film-as-skin references) how ‘‘all these things [that] are part of us like
our skin’’ (55) are destined to be shed. Returning to his interest in the
historically charged nature of outdated pre-1914 newsreel footage that
appears in his writings from the 1920s, Kracauer, now responding again to
prewar newsreels in Paris 1900, writes, ‘‘In a flash the camera exposes the
paraphernalia of our former existence, stripping them of the significance
which originally transfigured them so that they changed from things in their
own right into invisible conduits’’ (56).58 Film ‘‘retrospects’’ like Paris 1900
thus strip bare the habitually ‘‘invisible conduits’’ of our former and present
existence, thereby bringing us ‘‘face to face with’’ a sort of dereified, nonan-
thropocentric shock of the usually unknowable realm of ‘‘things in their own
right’’ (56). In his image of the camera’s alienating flash, which exposes the
previously ‘‘unseen’’ objects and events of the past and present, Kracauer
brings his friend Walter Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image into the
orbit of Bazin’s aesthetic of the tear.
Reedited as a fragment amongst fragments, and viewed a quarter of
a century after its first screening, the birdman footage loses its attachment
to the era’s aviation mania and becomes an angel of death, accusing the
spectator of colluding in the cinema’s murderous bargain with immortality.
Beyond the personal tragedy, our ‘‘modern Icarus’’ now conveys a collective
fate, as (to use the words of the 1912 Illustration article) ‘‘he unbuttons the
parachute-outfit, looks into the abyss, straightens himself up and plunges
into the emptiness,’’ not just of space but of time, specifically that of the First
World War, and more obliquely of the Second World War. Although Kra-
cauer does not mention the birdman, the topic of death is, unsurprisingly,
also the climax of his discussion of Paris 1900. For Kracauer, the proud
defender of the detritus of history, it would not have been a problem that
the birdman footage resembled the tabloid debasement of history that Elton
feared the newsreels would leave future historians. As one of those historians,
Kracauer recognized that once the newsreel’s bond with the present was torn
and film’s photographic referentiality came undone, cinema’s chance to
ignite critically transfigurative encounters between personal and collective
history would emerge. Kracauer’s example of such an encounter is highly
relevant; he refers to ‘‘spectacles which shock,’’ such as filmed death, as
instances where cinema can transform ‘‘the agitated witness into a conscious
observer’’ (57–58).
Védrès herself echoed both Bazin’s and Kracauer’s responses to her film
in an explanatory note she provided for a screening at the Toronto Film
Society in 1948: ‘‘One must not explain or describe. Quite the contrary. One
must go, as it were, through the outer appearance of the selected shot to feel
108 Representations

and, without insistence, make felt that strange and unexpected ‘second
meaning’ that always hides behind the surface of the subject.’’59 Inverting
Védrès’s language of surface and substrata, we might claim that the reused
archival footage acquires the aura of a second skin grafted onto the original
film’s epidermis. One image, two skins. Once unstitched from the natural-
ized fabric of the present, footage that had been resuscitated and reused
enabled Bazin, Kracauer, and, Védrès suggests, viewers to think the
unthought of history. In Paris 1900 this took the form of the noninevitability
of the present state of things, all compacted into the teetering ‘‘what if’’
possibility, as we are watching the birdman’s fifteen seconds of fame, that he
(and Europe with him) might not have made that suicidal leap. It is archival
footage’s unstitched qualities, leading to its capacity to peel back the epi-
dermis of the past that brings the visual lullaby of Paris 1900’s first half face
to face with the increasingly antiwar awakening of its second half, a confron-
tation that climaxes in the film’s final image of those naive soldiers at the
Gare de l’Est in August 1914, with (to use the words of the commentator)
their ‘‘faces ill-prepared for the spectacles of tomorrow’’ (fig. 6).60
figure 6. August 1914, newly

mobilized soldiers at the Gare de
l’Est; Paris 1900.
Indeed, this is the exact meaning that Védrès gives to the birdman foot-
age in her 1958 essay ‘‘The Rustling Leaves’’ (Les feuilles bougent). Discuss-
ing her resolutely anti-objective methodology in Paris 1900 within the context
of cinema’s essential relation to the fortuitous, she argues that, faced with the
thousands of kilometers of dateless, nameless, and authorless archival foot-
age, mostly of ‘‘no real historical value’’ (59), she and her collaborators were
guided, à la Langlois, by the vagaries of ‘‘taste’’ and ‘‘chance’’ (56). The result
was a film that ‘‘retains the appearance of a puzzle’’ and that borrowed, she
explains, more from ‘‘literary fiction’’ than from the standard ‘‘historical
compilation’’ (57). She turns to the birdman footage as an example of this
anti-objective, quasi-poetic mode of history. She recalls feeling burdened by
the footage, not knowing where to include it, as it was too ‘‘heavy’’ for the early

sections on sport or fait divers topics. Eventually, in the absence of footage of
the assassination of Socialist leader and outspoken pacifist Jean Jaurès, an
event she believed marked a turning point in the era’s descent into the First
World War, she inserts the birdman footage to provide a corresponding his-
torical transition. The replacement of Jaurès with the birdman perhaps fur-
ther explains the appeal of the scene to Bazin, for whom ‘‘some measure of
reality must always be sacrificed in the effect of achieving it.’’61 Much like the
absence of storm footage in Thor Heyerdahl’s documentary Kon Tiki (1950),
which Bazin claimed made the film of the treacherous raft voyage an even
more convincing, albeit negative, imprint of the real (as the cameramen were
having to fight the storm to survive), the footage of the birdman’s death,
impresses even more forcefully upon us that which it replaces, the transitional
event of Jaurès’s burial and all that followed in its wake.62 In the substitution
of a curious, cinematically provoked death for the film archive’s missing
footage of the funeral of a major politician, we see the antidocumentary
plasticity of archival film’s neorealism marked by what Bazin elsewhere
described as the ‘‘ebb and flow of our imagination which feeds on a reality
for which it plans to substitute.’’63
Aware of the shockingly ‘‘subjective’’ nature of her replacement of a major
historical event by a bizarre accident, Védrès justifies the choice by arguing
that the birdman’s jump provides a ‘‘seminal document’’ that symbolizes ‘‘an
alteration in the voltage of the époque’’ embedded in the footage’s transmis-
sion, not of the appearance, but of ‘‘the idea of death’’ (‘‘Rustling Leaves,’’
61). It is what we feel in going beyond the image of a singular death to the
‘‘second meaning’’ of mass annihilation that is central to her larger narration
of the First World War as not simply a conflict between nations but ‘‘the
defining drama of the twentieth century’’ (60). Moving from agitated witness
to conscious observer, Védrès developed the stealth pacifism of Paris 1900
further in her second film, a pioneering antinuclear documentary titled La
Vie commence demain (Life begins tomorrow; 1950), which incorporated even
more graphic archival footage of atrocities.64 Where that film looked to the
future, Paris 1900 mobilized a more circuitous temporality, glancing back at
pre-First World War Paris in order to activate that memory-of-the-future tem-
poral circuit, that is, a form of history rooted in an immediate post-Second
World War context in which audiences were barely yet able to confront a new
era of mass annihilation. As Kracauer would put it, spectators existed during
this period on that traumatic threshold between past and present where a new
form of history emerges, bringing with it, at its best, the transformation of
agitation into consciousness. Kracauer ultimately suggested in Theory of Film
that cinema, at its best, could encourage the production of a history suitable
to the twentieth century by pushing spectators across that threshold. Bazin
would have agreed.
110 Representations

What Bazin’s, Kracauer’s, and Védrès’s writings on Paris 1900 make clear
is that the mid-twentieth century was a crucial testing ground for the emer-
gence of such a history. As subsequent filmmakers (Jean-Luc Godard),
philosophers (Gilles Deleuze), and film and art historians (Georges Didi-
Huberman) have suggested, it was the revelation of the cinematographic
records of the concentration camps, as much for what they did not show as
for what they showed, that arguably marked the turning point, not just of
the twentieth century, but also of the history of cinema as a medium that
had lost its representational innocence.65 Film archives, Paris 1900 teaches
us, are the structuring absence in the often-noted crisis in representation
resulting from the cinema’s paradoxical ability to draw attention to the
passage from life to death of one human in the face of its simultaneous
inability to represent or sufficiently bear witness to the annihilation of mil-
lions (in both world wars). If, in response to this dilemma, an anti-archival
direction would emerge by the 1980s that militated on behalf of an ethical
imperative not to use archival footage in documentaries dealing with the
Holocaust (a position associated with the work of Claude Lanzmann and
Marcel Ophuls), Paris 1900 belongs to an earlier midcentury counter-
archival investment in a strategic politics and poetics of the archive. One
tradition is based in an intransigent anti-archival ethics, the other in a more
flexible counterarchival reinvention of ethics in which the ‘‘soulless eye’’ of
the archival camera transforms into the twentieth-century’s most impas-
sioned historian.
Conclusion
We are now in a better position to understand the importance of

reinserting documentary film into the implied cinematic terrain of Bazin’s
‘‘Ontology’’ essay and, more specifically, its central, cryptic claim: ‘‘No mat-
ter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in documen-
tary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its
becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the
model.’’66 Certainly ‘‘fuzzy’’ and worn by time’s passage, while also ‘‘lacking
in documentary value,’’ as Védrès openly recognized, the birdman footage
in Paris 1900 impressed itself upon Bazin’s memory as a figure exemplary of
film’s enigmatic representational status as both life and death (‘‘flesh and
blood’’ and disintegrating nitrate), memory and forgetting, record and rev-
elation, fact and fiction, the unstaged and the provoked, history and poetry.
To be sure, the impact of the footage stems from the taboo-breaking nature
of its representation of a real death, which perhaps partly explains why Bazin
takes time before he can fully allow the memory of the footage to register in

his writing. Yet, as Védrès makes clear, it is not just the content but also the
idea of death embedded in the image that is key. Thus, although the record-
ing of an authentic death clearly struck him, Bazin makes no hierarchy
between factual and fictional footage in his reflections. Reinserting docu-
mentary into Bazinian film theory thus reveals not simply the importance of
nonfiction to his ideas but also his indifference to oppositions between
fiction and nonfiction within his broader rearticulation of realism and cin-
ematic historicity. Much like the similar face-value appeal of documents in
an archive, Paris 1900’s recombined scraps of film all arouse Bazin on the
same level as what he elsewhere calls ‘‘image-facts.’’67 Missing from the
current debates that reopen Bazinian realism is a recognition that his is
an archivally inflected theory of film, one that, to reconnect him to Deleuze,
sees films and reality as part of a larger ‘‘image-fact’’ archive of the world and
flirts (albeit at the level of provocation) with the assumption, as Bazin does
in the Paris 1900 review, that there is no need to film anything anymore
because our film archives already contain all, and indeed more than we
need. In the grave left by the birdman’s body, Bazin contemplates the future
archival grave of all film footage. If film is dead, Bazin seems to be saying (or
predicting), long live the film archive where history (as well as realism) will
be reborn.
The shock aroused by the film’s inclusion of a recorded death is con-
nected to the trauma of Paris 1900’s torn and frayed attachment to the
archival historical image. Together they are responsible for stimulating in
Bazin ‘‘some of the most intense emotions that the cinema has given
[him],’’ including demonstrable ‘‘tears of pleasure.’’68 The more collective
reverberations of Bazin’s otherwise personal and cinephilic transportation
in front of archival footage would continue in the film practice of so many of
the so-called Left Bank filmmakers, such as Alain Resnais, Georges Franju,
Agnès Varda, and especially Chris Marker. Yet the lessons of Paris 1900
remained. Situated between Védrès’s book Images du cinéma français (1945)
and Night and Fog (1954), Paris 1900 offers a forgotten bridge between the
literary-photographic precursors and the postwar culture of representational
crisis that Timothy Corrigan has argued provide seminal moments in the
evolution of the essay film. Acknowledging the foundational bridging work
done by Védrès thus also requires a broader recognition of the compilation
film’s role in the evolution of the essay film.69 In this regard, and keeping in
mind that the cuts of montage are perhaps the foundational expression of
‘‘tears’’ in film, it is additionally important to recognize that Paris 1900 also
offers a missing link between Bazin the antimontage theorist and Bazin the
champion of a different form of montage, glimpsed in a nascent state in
Védrès’s focus upon the secondary ‘‘idea’’ behind the image and in a more
radical fruition in the late 1950s in what Bazin described as Chris Marker’s
112 Representations

‘‘horizontal montage.’’70 Marker experimented with these types of relation
between shots in many of his films, including Level Five (1996), in which he
visually quotes Paris 1900’s ur-scene, superimposing the footage of the bird-
man’s jump over footage of the ‘‘forced suicide’’ of a Japanese woman jump-
ing from a cliff in Saipan after the Battle of Okinawa.
It is undeniable that Paris 1900 today appears tame compared to the
work of the more experimentally radical compilation filmmakers who have
inherited in the past few decades Védrès’s archival fever in an era more
technologically and institutionally suited to arousing ‘‘second’’ meanings
from archival footage due to ease of access and manipulation (if not copy-
right clearance) of films.71 Yet, in part due to the digital opening of film
archives, it has become perhaps too easy to celebrate and practice the film
de montage as the quintessential Benjaminian form of history, dominated as
they are by the juxtapositional montage of outdated images intended to
awaken us from diverse reactionary slumbers. In Paris 1900 Védrès offers us
an earlier and more difficult experiment in this dialectical form of cinematic
history, operating, as she and her collaborators did, like chiffoniers upon what
Jay Leyda called (in reference to the general mode of compilation filmmak-
ing practice) the ‘‘slag-heaps of past newsreels.’’72 She worked at a time when
newsreels and other scraps of footage were just emerging from their lowly
status as cultural detritus and still enmeshed in their complicit identity as
propaganda—a far cry from the kitsch or abstract effect that any piece of old
footage might arouse today. She also worked in a period when the messy
materiality of the film archives she accessed fed productively into her creative
process. In other words, the formal qualities of Paris 1900 (a fragmented,
puzzle-like surface; a multilayered, multidirectional temporal structure; an
ironic, biased narration; a meta-archival consciousness; and a preference for
an emotive rather than an informational appeal) register the impact of the
state of specific midcentury French film archives (then dominated by the
haphazard rather than systematic preservation of incidental rather than epic
events, leading to an instinctual rather than catalog-based method of visual
research). Notwithstanding the work of filmmakers still committed to explor-
ing the celluloid life of archives, the dematerialization today of so many
audiovisual collections as they migrate into the digital realm means we risk
losing the specific creative potential for history embedded in the material
history of specific archives. The race to digitize thus potentially entails giving
up not on film as the skin of history, but on the equally important history
written across film’s skin.73
Mixed in with Bazin’s appreciation of Védrès’s ability to mine the crea-
tive potential of film archives is his recognition that the retrospective gaze
she deployed in Paris 1900 was dominated as much by a history of cinema as
by a history of the twentieth century. The reflections upon archival films that

Paris 1900 aroused in Bazin were thus also overlaid with a melancholic
sensitivity to the history of cinema itself, a cinema that for Bazin was born
old, prematurely wrinkled by the weathering of ‘‘Time twice lost.’’ Védrès’s
film allowed him to access a history of the medium he adored, but which, in
a memory-of-the-future mode, he could also foresee might one day vanish
(into postcamera archival cinema, if not digital cinema).
Finally, revisiting Bazin’s writings on documentary film between Why We
Fight and Paris 1900 gives us a stronger sense of the full historical import of
his arguments against montage, allowing us to glimpse in the archival exper-
imentation of Védrès a model for how history should be done after the
twinned emergence of ‘‘total history’’ and ‘‘total war.’’ The birdman footage
in Paris 1900 magnifies what is at stake in Bazin’s ruminations on documen-
tary as it brings together the causal presence of the camera, its confrontation
with death, and its ability to suggest a history that it does not represent
directly. It also reveals the continuing relevance today of Bazin’s midcentury
commentary on the interrelationship between modern media and violence.
If we pursue the coupling of the specifically cinematographic ‘‘tragedy’’ of
time with that of destructive violence in the twentieth and twenty-first cen-
turies, as witnessed by all the descendants (televisual, video, digital) of the
‘‘soulless’’ camera the birdman faced in 1912, we arrive at the fresh traumas
aggravating history’s skin today, whether they are currently being worked
through in diverse digitized archives commemorating the Great War’s cen-
tenary or reenacted in the ongoing beheading videos posted to social media
by ISIS militants.
Notes
Thanks to Lorraine Daston and members of the Research Group on the

Sciences of the Archive at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science,
Berlin, where this essay developed during my stay as an invited Visiting Scholar
in 2011. My deep appreciation also to Kent Puckett, Jean Day, and the Repre-
sentations editorial board for their insightful feedback on the essay and to Nick
Yablon for his invaluable contributions. This essay is dedicated to the memory
of Miriam Hansen.
1. André Bazin, ‘‘On Why We Fight: History, Documentation, and the Newsreel,’’
Esprit (1946), reprinted in Bazin at Work: Major Essays from the Forties and Fifties,
ed. Bert Cardullo, trans. Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo (New York, 1997), 189.
2. Arthur Elton, ‘‘The Film as Source Material for History,’’ Aslib Proceedings 7, no.
4 (November 1955): 216.
3. Unless otherwise noted, I will be using the commentary from the English ver-
sion of the film. I have consulted three versions: a 79-minute French version
and 51- and 74-minute English versions.
114 Representations

4. Nicole Védrès, ‘‘Les Feuilles bougent’’ [The rustling leaves], in Paris, le . . .
(Paris, 1958), 55.
5. Bolesław Matuszewski, Une Nouvelle Source de l’histoire (Paris, 1898), 11n1.
6. See Paula Amad, Counter-Archive: Film, The Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de
la Planète (New York, 2010).
7. Film histories often incorrectly name Alain Resnais as editor of the film, a mis-
take that he himself corrected. See Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues and Jean-Louis
Leutrat, ed., Alain Resnais: Liaisons secrètes, accords vagabonds (Paris, 2006), 179.
For Chris Marker’s reference to Paris 1900, see Annick Peigné-Giuly, ‘‘Nicole
Védrès, de Paris 1900 à nos jours,’’ Images 63 (2008): 12.
8. For recent examples of the revitalization of Bazin studies, see Dudley Andrew,
What Cinema Is! (Oxford, 2010); Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its
Afterlife, ed. Dudley Andrew with Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (Oxford, 2011);
the essays on Bazin in the French film history journal 1895 67 (2012), and
Cahiers du cinéma (February 2014); Hervé Joubert-Laurencin, Le Sommeil para-
doxal: écrits sur André Bazin (Paris, 2014); and the new English translation of his
work, André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, trans. Timothy Barnard (Montreal,
2009). Indicative of a broader sidelining of documentary in film studies,
Bazin’s essays on nonfiction film have been left largely out of translated
anthologies; this despite the fact that they were essential to Bazin’s own under-
standing of his work. He devoted eight out of eighteen essays to documen-
taries in the first 1958 volume of Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?; André Bazin, Qu’est-ce
que le cinema?, vol. 1, Ontologie et langage (Paris, 1958). Subtitled ‘‘Ontology and
Language,’’ the 1958 volume unequivocally situated documentary film as cen-
tral to Bazin’s broader cinematic purview. Because, however, all but one of
those eight essays were left out of the most popular translations of Bazin’s
work, scholarship has mainly focused on his theory of photographic ontology
and his essays on fiction films.
9. For a summary of Joubert-Laurencin’s reading of Bazin, see Stéphane Delorme,
‘‘André Bazin, la vie même,’’ Cahiers du cinéma (February 2014): 58–63. Inter-
estingly, a review of Paisà appears on the page after Bazin’s first review of Paris
1900. See Georges Altman, L’Ecran français (30 September 1947): 7.
10. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (Minnea-
polis, 1986), and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta (Minneapolis, 1989).
11. Key interwar compilation films include Dziga Vertov’s Anniversary of the Revolu-
tion (1919), Esther Schub’s Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), Jean Epstein’s
Photogénies (1925), Henri Storck’s Le Soldat inconnu (The unknown soldier,
1929), and Germaine Dulac’s Le Cinéma au service de l’histoire (Cinema in the
service of history, 1935).
12. On early twentieth-century film archiving efforts in France, see Amad, Counter-
Archive, 133–65.
13. See the television documentary Portrait de Nicole Védrès, directed by Jean-Claude
Bergeret (1964; Bry-sur-Marne, 1975), VHS.
14. Jean Vigo, ‘‘Toward a Social Cinema’’ (1930), reprinted in Richard Abel, French
Film Theory and Criticism, vol. 2, 1929–1939 (New Jersey, 1988), 60–63. For my
earlier recognition of the importance of Vigo for a reconsideration of French
documentary, see Amad, Counter-Archive, 91–93. Even though Arthur Elton is
most known for his (and Edgar Anstey’s) film Housing Problems (1935), a classic
of argument-driven documentary using an objective voice-of-God narration, we
should remember the important role that the subjective takes in that film, in

the form of pioneering ‘‘talking head’’ interviews with people actually living in
the slum housing.
15. See André Bazin, ‘‘On Why We Fight,’’ and ‘‘Paris 1900 : À la recherche du temps
perdu,’’ L’Ecran français (30 September 1947): 6, reprinted in André Bazin, Le
Cinéma français de la Libération à la Nouvelle Vague, 1945–1958, ed. Jean Narboni
(Paris, 1998). For his reference to being well acquainted with films de montage,
see his second magazine review of the film, André Bazin, ‘‘Paris 1900,’’ L’Ecran
français (3 March 1948): 2. Bazin’s review of Paris 1900 received its first book
reprint, albeit in a revised form, in the first edition of the first volume of his
Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? (1958).
16. See Siegfried Kracauer, ‘‘Photography’’ (1927), reprinted in The Mass Ornament:
Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 50, 58, 61, 62.
17. Bazin, ‘‘On Why We Fight,’’ 188–89.
18. See Marcel Martin, ‘‘La longue mémoire,’’ Cinéma (April 1963): 81–91. For
earlier examples, see Amad, Counter-Archive, 133–65.
19. Védrès would make a documentary in 1950 about the threat of nuclear apoc-
alypse titled La Vie commence demain, and Bazin also refers to the topic in the Why
We Fight essay when he mentions the films of the 1946 Bikini Atoll atomic bomb
tests.
20. Bazin, ‘‘On Why We Fight,’’ 188–89. In the paragraph immediately preceding the
skin-of-history discussion, he refers to live televisual broadcasts in addition to
films of the atomic bomb tests and the Nuremberg trials.
21. In addition to the already mentioned reference to the Bikini Atoll footage,
Bazin refers to the atomic bombs and concentration camps in the first para-
graph of the Why We Fight essay: ‘‘War, with its harvest of dead bodies, its
immense destructiveness, its countless migrations, its concentration camps, and
its atomic bombs, leaves far behind the creative art that aims at reconstituting
it’’ (187).
22. I traced the conceptual and historical emergence of film’s counterarchival
historicity in Counter-Archive.
23. André Bazin, ‘‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’’ (1945), in What Is
Cinema?, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1967–71), 1:16. Elton, ‘‘Film as Source,’’ 209.
24. Georges Sadoul, ‘‘Le Temps retrouvé: Paris 1900 de Nicole Védrès,’’ in Chron-
iques du cinéma français: 1939–1967 (Paris, 1979), 81–84. Interestingly, Védrès,
herself a novelist, emphasized the novelistic affinities of Paris 1900’s method.
See Védrès, ‘‘Les Feuilles bougent.’’
25. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960;
reprint, Princeton, 1997), 57.
26. Paris 1900 was produced by Pierre Braunberger’s Panthéon company. Braunber-
ger was a hugely influential producer, most known for his backing of experimen-
tal cinema and the New Wave. For the promotional phrases, see typed synopsis
‘‘Paris 1900: Chroniques de la vie à Paris 1900–1914,’’ Panthéon Production
Company, Bibliothèque du Film, Paris, FIF 90 B12: 1. Bazin’s review also repeats
the emphasis upon ‘‘authentic documents.’’ The opening credits’ reference to an
archive in Boulogne undoubtedly refers to Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète
collection, which is definitely the source for the footage of the street urinals and
perhaps also that of the Ferris wheel, the Paris floods, and the solar eclipse.
27. Nicole Védrès, Images du cinéma français (Paris, 1945).
28. Laurent Mannoni, L’Histoire de la Cinémathèque française (Paris, 2006), 194.
29. The photographer Denise Bellon was the mother of the filmmaker Yannick
Bellon, who was the assistant editor on Paris 1900 and the maker of a film about
116 Representations

her mother titled Le Souvenir d’un avenir [The memory of a future] with Chris
Marker in 2003.
30. The surreal aura of the photograph is not so surprising, as Denise Bellon was
a friend and associate of many surrealists and produced an important photo-
graphic record of the Paris surrealist exhibition of 1938.
31. Nicole Védrès, ‘‘A la poursuite de Paris 1900,’’ L’Ecran français (2 March 1948):
3–4. This is the same journal in which Bazin first reviewed Paris 1900.
32. Henri Langlois cited in Mannoni, L’Histoire de la Cinémathèque française, 197.
33. Ibid.
34. Védrès, Images du cinéma français, 34.
35. Ibid. In the midforties, Dr. Claoué became more well known for his nose jobs
on the stars and for having his license twice revoked.
36. André Bazin, ‘‘Le Film scientifique: Beauté du hasard,’’ L’Ecran français (21
October 1947), reprinted in Bazin, Le Cinéma français de la Libération à la Nouvelle
Vague, 1945–1958, 317–21.
37. André S. Labarthe, ‘‘Mythe de l’objectivité,’’ Cahiers du cinéma 140 (February
1963): 59.
38. Védrès, ‘‘Les Feuilles bougent,’’ 59.
39. Richard Griffith, ‘‘This Was Our World,’’ Saturday Review, 28 October 1950, 45.
40. See Martin, ‘‘La longue mémoire,’’ 87.
42. Jay Leyda, Films Beget Films: Compilation Films from Propaganda to Drama (New
York, 1964).
43. See, for example, the rayograph work of Man Ray presented in his films Le
Retour à la raison (1923) and Emak Bakia (1926).
44. Virginia Woolf, ‘‘The Movies and Reality’’ (1926), reprinted in Red Velvet Seat,
ed. Antonia Lant (London, 2006), 231–34.
45. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 18.
46. For more on Kracauer’s interest in old newsreels, see note 58. Similar invoca-
tions of death’s centrality to photographs in which the past is haunted by the
future are made by Walter Benjamin (when he refers to the ‘‘tiny spark of
chance’’) and by Roland Barthes (under the category of the ‘‘future anterior’’
present in the simultaneous reading of the ‘‘this will be and this has been’’
within a photograph). See Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Little History of Photography’’
(1931), reprinted in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jen-
nings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge,
MA, 1999), 510, and Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography,
trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1981), 50.
47. André Bazin, ‘‘À la recherche du temps perdu: Paris 1900’’ (1958), in Qu’est-ce
que le cinéma?, 1:41.
48. See André Bazin, ‘‘Death Every Afternoon,’’ trans. Mark A. Cohen, in Rites of
Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed. Ivone Margulies (Durham, 2003), 28.
49. Bazin, ‘‘On Why We Fight,’’ 189.
50. André Bazin, ‘‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,’’ in What Is Cinema?,
1:38–39.
52. Bazin, ‘‘Paris 1900’’ (1947), 242. Bazin’s point is echoed in Jean Cayrol’s com-
mentary in a sequence of Night and Fog showing the camps; in a shocking
affront to the purported evidentiary power of the footage’s witnessing func-
tion, he sarcastically asks of the camera’s earnest gaze, ‘‘In search of what?’’
(A la recherche de quoi?).

53. F. H., ‘‘Un Saut mortel en parachute,’’ L’Illustration, 10 February 1912, 106.
54. Bazin, ‘‘On Why We Fight,’’ 188.
55. Bazin, ‘‘À la recherche du temps perdu: Paris 1900’’ (1958), 41–43.
56. Bazin, ‘‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image,’’ 14–15.
57. Bazin, ‘‘À la recherche du temps perdu: Paris 1900’’ (1958), 41 (my emphasis).
58. In his essay ‘‘Photography’’ (1927), Kracauer described how the recently out-
dated prewar newsreels contain the simultaneously ‘‘comical and terrifying’’
power that he attributed to photographs from the ‘‘recent past’’: that is, an
ability to mock the viewer with the revelation that ‘‘this detritus was once the
present.’’ See Kracauer, ‘‘Photography,’’ 55–56.
59. Védrès cited in Leyda, Films Beget Films, 79.
60. This is a translation from the original French commentary.
61. André Bazin, ‘‘An Aesthetic of Reality: Cinematic Realism and the Italian
School of the Liberation’’ (1948), in What Is Cinema?, 2:30.
62. André Bazin, ‘‘Cinema and Exploration’’ (1953/1956), in What Is Cinema?, 1:163.
63. André Bazin, ‘‘The Virtues and Limitations of Montage’’ (1954/1957), in What
Is Cinema?, 1:48.
64. Not exactly a compilation film, although it makes liberal use of violent newsreel
footage, La Vie commence demain is structured through a series of interviews by
a fictitious journalist with world-famous representatives from the domains of
science (Jean Rostand), philosophy (Jean-Paul Sartre), architecture (Le Corbu-
sier), and art (Picasso). Védrès did make another short archival film with the
biologist Jean Rostand titled Aux frontières de l’homme (aspects de la biologie fran-
çaise) (1953).
65. An interesting correspondence exists between my reading of Bazin’s ethico-poet-
ics of the ‘‘tear’’ in archival footage and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman’s
use of the notion of the ‘‘tear-image’’ (image-déchirure) to describe a similarly
traumatic force within certain images that disrupt conventional modes of repre-
sentation and spectatorship. For his use of the concept of the ‘‘tear-image’’ to
read four rare photographs of Auschwitz within the context of archive-phobic,
photographic, and cinematic debates about the nonrepresentability of the
Holocaust, see Georges Didi-Huberman, Images In Spite of All: Four Photographs
From Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago, 2012), 79–89; see also 141.
66. Bazin, ‘‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image,’’ 14.
67. Bazin, ‘‘An Aesthetic of Reality,’’ 37.
68. Bazin, ‘‘Paris 1900’’ (1947), 241–42.
69. On the evolution of the essay film, see Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From
Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford, 2011).
70. See Bazin’s review of Marker’s ‘‘Lettre de Sibérie,’’ France Observateur 443 (30
October 1958), reprinted in Le Cinéma français de la Libération à la Nouvelle Vague,
259.
71. Key filmmakers to work in the avant-garde compilation or found-footage mode,
include Guy Debord, Jean-Luc Godard, Bruce Connor, Craig Baldwin, Abigail
Child, Peter Tscherkassky, Angela Ricci Lucchi and Yervant Gianikian, Peter
Forgács, Gustav Deutsch, and Bill Morrison.
72. Leyda, Films Beget Films, 10.
73. For example, in their recent Pays Barbare (2013), an archival excavation of foot-
age of Italy’s colonial incursion into Libya, Angela Ricci Lucchi and Yervant
Gianikian comment directly upon the ideological implications of worn-out foot-
age, noting how the ‘‘old film torn [déchiré] by multiple viewings’’ bore across its
skin the history of the repetition and reproduction of racist visual propaganda.
118 Representations


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Film as the “Skin of History”: André Bazin and the Specter of the Archive and Death in

Nicole Védrès’s Paris 1900 (1947)

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Film as the ‘‘Skin of History’’:

A B O U T T W O T H I R D S O F T H E way through Nicole Védrès’s Paris

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Film as the ‘‘Skin of History’’ 85

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Film as the ‘‘Skin of History’’ 87

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The compilation film genre is most commonly associated with

An important example of the contemporary impact of Paris 1900

Film as the ‘‘Skin of History’’ 89

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Film as the ‘‘Skin of History’’ 93

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figure 2. The archival surreal: Henri

figure 3. Védrès’s drawing of herself and

Described by Védrès as anything but ‘‘a classificatory rationalist,’’ Langlois

Film as the ‘‘Skin of History’’ 95

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figure 4. A visual essay

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Those Were Happy Times

Védrès’s film begins as a deceptively saccharine account of the

Film as the ‘‘Skin of History’’ 97

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Memories Not Ours

The film’s cut-and-paste form connects to its third feature: its

Film as the ‘‘Skin of History’’ 99

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Le Souvenir d’un avenir

The temporal slippage mentioned earlier reaches its most intense

Film as the ‘‘Skin of History’’ 101

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Regardless of whether Woolf was responding to a simple rerun of some

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If a reconfigured aesthetic of the real rather than Soviet-style

Film as the ‘‘Skin of History’’ 103

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Although he did not explore it fully in the first magazine publica-

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Film as the ‘‘Skin of History’’ 105

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figure 6. August 1914, newly

Film as the ‘‘Skin of History’’ 109

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We are now in a better position to understand the importance of