Archiveology

"Moving through a careful, rigorous, and nuanced reading of Walter Benjamin's work, Catherine Russell's new book explores the remarkable range of 'archiveology' as a creative engagement with technologies of storing and accessing. About the formation and critique of collective memories and histories at the intersection of the avant-garde and documentaries, this superb study is, more importantly perhaps, about the present and future of contemporary media culture." - Timothy Corrigan, author of The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker

"Showing how Benjamin's insights remain especially timely and relevant for early twenty-first-century archival film practices, Archiveology makes an important contribution to critical and feminist film theory while offering a compelling approach to contemporary moving image art in ways that traverse experimental, documentary, and new media platforms." - Patrice Petro, author of Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History

"Archiveology opens up yet more rich and very pertinent questions relating to film-making as an archival practice in which themes of time, memory and imagination are fluidly interwoven and fleshed out as new cinematic experiences." - Davina Quinlivan, Times Higher Education

"Archiveology is a refreshing for film archivists looking to expand their horizons and better understand potential users. . . . Catherine Russell’s masterful explanations ensure that the book remains accessible to readers from all disciplines." - Kristen E. Muenz, Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

"Archiveology offers insightful analyses enlightened by Benjamin's legacy. . . . Catherine Russell adds authority to a new model of cultural intelligibility that we can use to rescue voices relegated to oblivion." - Cesar Ustarroz, Found Footage

"Archiveology is. . . one of the few books of film theory and criticism that takes Benjamin seriously in all of his complexity, and, more importantly and innovatively, shows us the mechanics of what one can do with the concepts in an era of disturbingly unstable media." - Joshua Wiebe, Film and History

"This book advances a new archival language, with which to renew the history of twentieth-century representation. Archiveology, indeed, enables thinking about the constantly evolving nature of images, by informing not only the way they work but also the way we look at the present time." - Catherine Russell, Frames Cinema Journal