University of Cambridge
Dormant Images: Documentary Film, Volcanoes, and the Archive
Abstract
dc:description.abstractThis thesis explores the intersections of volcanoes and the archive in documentary moving images. Responding to two growing interests across the humanities – in geological materialities and temporalities and in the physical site and concept of the archive – the thesis examines the largely unmapped interactions between these two questions through the lens of archivally constituted moving image works that centre volcanoes. It locates in these works the possibility to exceed the frequent emphasis, in the ‘geological turn’, of the processual breadth of geological time and the indifference of inhuman materiality, in favour of an understanding of the coevalness and ongoingness of geological processes and of their intimate proximity to human life. Likewise, it argues that the circulation, re-use, and materiality of archival images permits a volcanic reorientation towards the concept and materiality of the archive more broadly, moving beyond a passive, archaeological conceptualisation and towards an understanding of the archive’s dormancy, activity, and eruptive returns. In turn, the thesis suggests that the productive intensity of thinking with volcanoes and the archive enables reflection on the medium of documentary film, challenging its archival, historicist, and realist claims and emphasising its intimate and subjective contours. It assembles a diverse corpus – including contemporary experimental shorts, documentaries that re-use archival material, twentieth-century films, projection-performances, paracinematic texts, and an interactive multimedia archive – in an effort to situate and unpack the relationships between filmmaker, medium, and geological processes as they are disclosed and developed in the volcano, in the archive, and beyond. The first chapter examines the phenomenon of volcanic islands through the experimental short film Volcano: What Does a Lake Dream? (Diana Vidrașcu, 2019). It explores the stakes of volcanic and disaster memory and suggests an expansion of the types of archive used to produce and represent knowledge through film, beyond evidentiary or indexical images. The second chapter traces the re-use by Sara Dosa and Werner Herzog of the audiovisual archive of the volcanologist-filmmakers Maurice and Katia Krafft. It contends that in spite of their shared archival origins, Dosa and Herzog’s intimate and subjective editorial address to the volcanic content of the Kraffts’ images reflects the unsettledness of archival matter and its propensity to return. The third chapter examines the images and legacy of the volcanologist and filmmaker Haroun Tazieff, with particular attention to recent efforts to remediate his precarious archive. It suggests that the duality of creation and destruction in volcanic environments is shared with the film archive, arguing that the projection of Tazieff’s decaying yet beautiful footage might permit the critical unpicking of the problematic legacies of realist exploratory cinema. The final chapter unpacks the underappreciated volcanic interest of the French documentarian Chris Marker. It argues that the persistent presence and return of volcanoes throughout his long career of auto-archival filmmaking reflects and permits a reorientation of thinking about human-geological relations, about the workings of the film archive, and about histories personal and shared.
Degree
thesis:*- Name dc:type.qualificationname
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
- Doctoral
- Grantor dc:publisher.institution
- University of Cambridge
- Year dc:date.issued
- 2025
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- Ashworth, Toby
- Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
-
- McMahon, Laura
Subjects
dc:subject × 10Rights
dc:rightsIdentifiers
dc:identifier.*- Author Identifier
- 0000-0001-9256-2913
- OAI identifier oai:identifier
- oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/394051