• Journal of Korea Entertainment Industry Association
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• v.13 no.8
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• pp.209-221
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• 2019

A found-footage film La France est notre patrie is a documentary, in which archive images are juxtaposed with intertitles, non-diegetic music and foley, by borrowing an audiovisual strategy of silent films. The filmmaker Rithy Panh has excavated the images, which had been taken during the same period as the film history of the end of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries in Southeast Asia and Africa under French colonial rule. This paper examines the filmmaker's methods of historiography when utilizing archive images in order to represent the past by referring to Walter Benjamin's concept of historical montage and dialectical image. As the analysis illustrates the singularity of constructive methods, which include multi-layer viewpoints and montage styles of compilation and collage, it reveals how La France est notre patrie elicits the essay film modes through its self-reflexivity, leads audience to the threshold of critical thinking about time and history and creates a discourse of counter-memory.