An Examination on the Construction of Image of the Archive in Film Medium

Abstract

As a concept archive encapsulates different levels of profoundness and has a loaded meaning. This concept has interpenetrated into many disciplines and gained a strong position as a theoretical tool in the late twentieth century. As much as the variety and elasticity of its conceptual elaborations, the imaged existence of the archive in the fiction medium also reflects a certain heterogeneity; archive spaces are depicted in connection with associations such as ‘being buried, accessibility difficulty, security, dusty and old environment’. Dematerialization of its basic unit, the document, leads archive space to lose its materiality as well. This creates an interest and ambiguity for the archive’s future. Among these ambiguities, the study initiates a discussion for the imagination of the future of the archive and looks into the archive’s techno-cybernetic envisagement via analyzing the film Archive (2020). According to this analysis, the meanings associated with the archive are constructed via three distinct levels; these are the architectural features of the facility, the representation of the archive as data storage, finally, its embodiment as a synthetic body, which hints that the archive will evolve from a static repository to a variable and active process between past knowledge and the phantasy of the future. The article argues that without reduction to representations at any one layer, a mental image of the archive arises from their interaction and concludes that the archive is not an object, but a web of relations that is open to reproduction and interaction of what it contains.