The application of the autochrome towards anthropological or para-anthropological endeavors was a new story to me. Commonly discussed in the context of color theories and creative practice, the autochrome and its "realistic" possibilities take on a different significance in an explicitly documentary context. The narratives that we tell about the use of black & white photographs in the age of color to elicit connotations of serious work and the historical past seem less applicable to the strange case of Albert Kahn's "Archives of the Planet."

The fact that Kahn was one of the first pupils of Henri Bergson serves Werner's article as a way to establish Kahn's elite and educated social circles. But I wonder what this relationship might have elicited for Kahn, since Bergson was (or would become?) a favorite theorist of temporality, matter, and intersubjectivity in the modern age. Certainly his opinions about cinema are still cited in film theory today.

Returning to Kahn's project of the "Archives of the Planet," I find it very interesting to situate the use of film specifically (more so even than photography) towards the project of capturing a universal picture of the world. Werner lists the kinds of scenes that were depicted - scenes of everyday life. But the codification of these extractions such that they can stand as autonomous (individual) and comparative (interrelated) examples is not as intuitive as it might seem. How do such pieces of life get transformed into a new whole - representative of something called "the planet"?