The 2nd Lawrence R. Schehr Memorial Award Winning Essay

The Vidéothèque de Paris, a moving image archive of the French capital, opened in 1988 in the Forum des Halles, site of the city’s former central food markets. This article analyzes the institution’s placement in this new development, its adoption of new technologies, and its engagement with discussions of history and memory. It argues that the Vidéothèque’s formation and first years epitomized the play with historical time that defined Paris in the 1970s and 1980s: a simultaneous investment in the past as the bedrock of the capital’s identity and a self-conscious futurism. When the city tore down the Baltard pavilions, it made way for a proliferation of historical reenactments at the city’s heart that culminated in the opening of the Vidéothèque. Promoted as the city’s “living memory,” the institution placed 2,500 documents from almost a century of Parisian film, television, and advertising at visitors’ disposal at high-tech viewing stations. Vidéothèque staff employed the most up-to-date audiovisual and networking technologies in building these stations and in efforts to make the collections available on-demand via the city’s expanding cable network. New technologies allowed users to select from and watch documents at their own pace, creating personal connections to images from the city’s past. Praised as an alternative to formal historical narratives, the Vidéothèque, I argue, promised to resolve the tension between past and future by fostering the city’s collective memory in the audiovisual age

Art · Art history · Environmental ethics · Cinema and Media Studies · Digital Media and Philosophy · Philosophy · Radio, Podcasts, and Digital Media