Les Images d’archives face à l’histoire: de la conservation à la création by Laurent Véray (review)

In Les Images d’archives face à l’histoire, French film historian Laurent Véray charts the field for a much-needed history of “image archives,” as distinct from histories of cinémathèques created to collect, protect, and screen film as an art form. He mounts urgent arguments for up-to-date preservation of these often fragile fragments of the past so that copies can be used “to transmit knowledge, specifically, the interpretation of the past” (16).¹ It follows that for these image documents to be meaningful as historical evidence, their context and provenance need to be identified accurately, particularly before they are “reused,” which has often meant simply cutting them from their original location.

Despite Véray’s description of this book as provisional, “a series of reflections, analyses and propositions toward methods of creating a history of archival films that remains to be done” (10), make no mistake: this is a lucid, ambitious work. The author tells us it is geared toward “students, historians, filmmakers and the general public” (9), moving beyond the traditional framework of academic historians, particularly by including filmmakers. At the heart of this book is a passion to demarcate clearly the stakes for image archives (their history and specificity). Véray demonstrates their importance through a series of impressive examples of archival images that cannot be summarily dismissed by historians as “untrustworthy” and therefore ignored as essential sources of historical evidence. In French, his title positions “image archives” face-to-face with “history.” His subtitle could have been “How to Write History (in Print or in an Audiovisual Medium) Using Archival Images,” or more polemically (not stated by the author), “How Can Historians Not Make Use of the Evidence Provided by Image Archives?”

This call to arms comes from a film historian who has been working in European archives for over twenty years researching World War I, including two books and two films created from image archival documents, Heroic Cinematographer (2003) and En Somme (2006), a triple-screen standing installation created for the Museum of the History of the Somme.² When he speaks about the value of image archives for researchers and filmmakers, he is both.

Although the book brings us up to the digital era, World War I will return as a point of reference, in part because it generated the first archives designed to preserve documentary film and photographs for future study. The military was essential to this movement—the archival center ECPAD continues to add to its holdings today—and nonmilitary groups, the government, and philanthropists were essential as well (the BDIC is an important example).³ Those who lived through the Great War wanted to preserve what remained of the mass of wartime images so that those experiences would not be forgotten or repeated. Véray also uses World War I archival examples because both documentary and fiction films have consistently incorporated these images, especially in commemorative works. Véray grounds his notion of “commemoration” in historian Pierre Nora’s influential concept of the “sites of memory.”⁴

Véray’s book has three parts: part 1, “The History of the Establishment of Image Archives in France and the Subsequent Challenges of Preserving Their Holdings According to Current Archival Standards”; part 2, “The Principal Ways That Archival Images Have Been Reused in Documentary or Fiction Films, or a Combination of the Two”; and part 3, “The Re-use of Archival Images in Non-dominant Forms Such as the Essay Film, Experimental Films, Museum Installations, and Myriad Other Possibilities.” Vivid examples, often accompanied by period-specific illustrations or frame enlargements credited to image archives, move the reader through different types of recycling. Not all periods or uses are covered: this is neither an inventory nor an encyclopedia but rather a conceptual mapping project.

After introducing early documentary or actuality films that...