Alex Fulmer
5/25
The Archives of the Planet
It is interesting to contemplate the ethical consequences of Albert Kahn’s Archives of the Planet in comparison with its earliest predecessor, the transport films of the late 19th century, like those of Alexandre Promio and Gabriel Veyre. The most clear difference between these two photographic documentations of the world is their relationship with money. Kahn's voyages were explicitly philanthropic without any intention to recoup on his own investment, as the Archives of the Planet were funded by money earned through Kahn’s own financial endeavors. Disparately, the transport films of decades prior to Kahn’s Archives were explicitly capitalist ventures, as these trips not only promoted the Lumiere’s technology to the French upon the camera operator’s return to paris, but also promoted Lumiere cameras abroad in the places in which Promio and Veyre traveled.
Beyond the contrasting financial interests of each voyage, their general aims in terms of documenting the world were somewhat similar. As stated by Vanessa Schwartz in On the Move, transport films of the late 19th century “registered the human parade, recorded the landscape, and, perhaps most significantly, expressed complex power relations between photographers and those they photographed.” (131) These films attempted to bring an unaltered vision of the world back to Paris. Despite the cultural differences between Parisians and those recorded in the films, registering ubiquitous cultural practices through transport films made the world feel smaller and the film’s subjects more human. Similarly, Kahn’s Archives of the Planet operated in the interest of the science of human geography, as conceived by Jean Brunhes. Kahn’s goals were to record basic aspects of human existence across the world in the service of science before these culture’s idiosyncrasies, such as daily routines, important ceremonies, and details like clothing and food, were eliminated by the rush of industrialization and homogenized by globalization. The missions of Kahn and an earlier filmmaker like Promio are similar in an abstract sense, however, seeing the ethical ramifications of their films and photographs in practice complicates an otherwise straightforward mission.
While there is a case to be made about how transport films helped decolonization efforts, due to their humanization of their subjects, as well as their popularization of the medium that would one day effectively expose the cruelties of colonialism, Kahn’s Archives of the Planet as they were practically executed by their camera operators were not at all decolonizing in nature. This is not to say that Bruhnes’ human geographical ideas, as taught to the Archives’ camera operators, were not themselves saturated in humanistic, somewhat decolonizing ideals, like what is arguably present in Promio and Veyre’s transport films. As explored by Jean-François Werner in The Archives of the Planet, the recording of Kahn’s Archives in practice was saturated with colonialist motives, whether it be through a the work of colonialist officer operating the camera in French Indochina, or the operator working with a priest attempting to convert the indigenous people of Dahomey to Catholicism.
I think it is fascinating to unpack this westernist gaze, specifically the desire to utilize technology to record the surrounding world for your own safe keeping. Are colonialist tendencies inherent to this traveling cinematic gaze itself? Or, whenever colonialism is not present in the text of the film itself or the practices utilized to make it, what distinction behind the scenes or in front of the camera makes a film distinctly non-colonialist? Perhaps the shadow of the ephemerality of modernism cast upon western culture sparked this impulse for documentation. Or is this impulse to capture and safekeep something as immaterial as an image itself colonialist in nature? It’s almost as if this obsession with the contemporary moment came about as backlash to industrialism’s widespread fixation on the future.