The Archiving Film: A Pharmacology of the Media Flux

By analyzing films assembled from images from the media flux, this article aims to explore a poetics of what we shall call the archiving film. We argue that such a cinema may be a pharmacological politics of memory, since it archives the ephemeral, often repressed or overlooked images of an operational flux, freeing their potentiality as cultural artefacts. From Walter Benjamin’s view that history belongs to the oppressed, to Foucault’s study of panopticism and Agamben’s poetics of inoperability, we propose to trace the artistic and epistemological value of the archiving film, focusing on an awareness of selectivity and transfiguration on part of the filmmakers. The chosen filmography marks a shift in relation to images from the flux: from a paradigmatic, descriptive state of contemplation (as in Michael Klier’s Der Riese from 1983, comprised of footage from the first CCTV cameras installed in West Germany), to a later syntagmatic turn (in Dragonfly Eyes from 2017, Xu Bing uses extensive hours of surveillance footage from mainland China to create a metafictional narrative). With the advent of desktop cinema and machinima, the hybridization of an archiving cinema thus escapes an analytic scheme set on binary oppositions, including that between author and spectator.