Article
French
ID: <
10.4000/1895.2752>
·
DOI: <
10.4000/1895.2752>
Abstract
The Archives de la Planète, held by the Albert Kahn Museum, remain, despite their uniqueness, a relatively little known collection. Founded in 1912 by the French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn (1860-1940), they were run by the geographer Jean Brunhes (1869-1930) from their beginnings and until their abrupt end. Gathering 4 000 stereoscopic plaques, 72 0000 autochromes and 183 000 meters of film, they represent a unique documentary collection and an extremely important source for the study of non-fiction film. A close analysis of some films allows us to highlight the extraordinary value of this collection, whose distinctive formal austerity seems to correspond, not to a ‘primitivism’ of forms, but to the deployment of a descriptive mode, intimately linked to a scientific rationality.