Abstract
This chapter depicts Bolesław Matuszewski as the “father of the filmic archive,” a place of honor in film history that he never truly earned. The Polish cinematographer’s goal was to create an institution that would present meaningful filmed evidence of human reality and advance human knowledge. On March 25, 1898, Matuszewski published an article in the French newspaper Le Figaro entitled “Une nouvelle source de l’histoire: création d’un dépôt de cinématographie historique” (“A New Source of History: The Creation of a Depository for Historical Cinematography”). In this manifesto Matuszewski envisioned the future form of Documentary as bearing invaluable commercial potential and the capacity to respond to an innate evolutionary human feature that is a cultural necessity—curiosity. In it, among other arguments and declarations pertaining to various discursive orders, Matuszewski described, for the first time in cinema history, the fundamental ontological assets of the yet-to-be-recognized and categorized form of human expression, Documentary. In my discussion I analyze his original treatment of notions such as collection; curiosity; documentary interest; simple-past-time; direct view of the past; agreeable method for studying the past; necessity-of-investigation-and-study; and last but certainly not least, archive.
Matuszewski, 1995 [1898]
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- 1.
For a more detailed account of the genealogy of the word “documentary,” see Rosen (1993).
- 2.
Kessler (2009, 187–198). Following Matuszewski—and later, Esfir Shub (Chap.11 herein)—an abundance of “Archive manifestos” (showcased in: Scott MacKenzie, 2014) merit further attention. Among the most notable are: “Filmliga Manifesto” (1927); “The Importance of Film Archives” (1948); “A Plea for a Canadian Film Archive” (1949); “Open Letter to Filmmakers of the World” (1966); “A Declaration from the Committee for the Defense of la Cinémathèque Française” (1968); “Anthology Film Archives Manifesto” (1970); “Toward an Ethnographic Film Archive” (1971); and “Don’t Throw Films Away” (2007).
- 3.
Kuc writes: “Matuszewski was a keen theorist, photographer (he owned two photographic studios: one in Paris, one in Warsaw), and filmmaker.” In Kuc (2016a, 121).
- 4.
Kessler (2009).
- 5.
For Esfir Shub’s distinctive relationship and mode of working with archive materials, see Chap. 11 herein.
- 6.
An exception to this common spirit can be found in Jared E. Green’s discussion about Flaherty and Buñuel’s Irrealism, wherein he devotes a short paragraph to Matuszewski, arguing that “Matuszewski’s encomia are representative of the competing fantasies of the cinematograph’s future, fantasies that circulated around the idea of the cinema’s imagined capacity to capture and reproduce all of the elements of contemporary life; to be, in effect, the archive of all archives and thus the summa of nineteenth-century technologies of classification” (2006, 74). For a critique of film historians’ ignorance of Matuszewski’s contribution to the development of the idea of the filmic archive, see Winston (1988, 277–279).
- 7.
Matuszewski (1995 [1898], 323).
- 8.
Aka “actualities” or proto-documentaries.
- 9.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary etymologizes “collection” as “Middle English collecte, from Anglo-French, from Medieval Latin collecta (short for oratio ad collectam, prayer upon assembly), from Late Latin, assembly, from Latin, assemblage, from feminine of collectus.”
- 10.
“Quantity” is manifested in three subcategories: Unity, Plurality, and Totality. In a broader view, each of Kant’s prime categories includes three different forms of manifestation. Together Kant offers a structure and order of twelve categories, whereas Aristotle offers ten.
- 11.
Kant (1998 [1781]).
- 12.
See Kant’s distinction between the phenomena and the Noumena (Ding -an-sich) in Kant (1998 [1781]). Kuc supports this view, saying: “A clear tension between the objective and subjective approach to filmmaking is revealed once we allow the claim that the cinematic apparatus is not just a witness to history but also its active agent” (in Kuc, 2016a, 121). For more about post-Kantian opposition to this view, see (Arnauld 1964, 43).
- 13.
See “Collect” (n.d.) in MWD, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/collect#etymology (last accessed January 13, 2019).
- 14.
An idea Benjamin will later pursue in his seminal The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (2008 [1936]).
- 15.
Deleuze and Guattari (1987).
- 16.
Implied by the term “slices of public and national life” [line 6].
- 17.
The origin of the word “individual” is Latin: “in-dividuum,” which means “that which cannot be divided.”
- 18.
- 19.
See Matuszewski’s other manifesto: “Animated Photography as It Is and as It Should Be.” Quoted in Kuc (2016a). For a list of Matuszewski’s five major articles, see ibid., 184.
- 20.
Hume (1993).
- 21.
See “Beyond Story: A Community-Based Manifesto,” in World Records (2018), https://vols.worldrecordsjournal.org/#/02/03.
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Geva, D. (2021). 1898: Bolesław Matuszewski. In: A Philosophical History of Documentary, 1895–1959. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79466-8_4
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