Offering an alternative historical, technological and visual perspective, this chapter surveys a further example of a film history, one that persists in the present, creatively reconfigured or reimagined. From the earth to the ether, the focus shifts from the geological materiality of film as a medium to the physical apparatus of its imaging technologies, as we glance upwards to consider the camera-carrying drone that rises above the city of Paris in Aleksandr Sokurov's Francofonia (2015).

If the practices of archaeology and geology are more typically associated with a burrowing downwards into the earth, the extrapolation of a media archaeology, including Jussi Parikka's geological variation (see Parikka 2015), could include the atmosphere that surrounds the earth, encompassing an aerially borne film history. These models, for Parikka, straddle history and its metaphors, comprising both an applied archaeology of material remnants and a figurative archaeology of historical discovery. The act of unearthing, as one example, might be literal and/or figurative, an archaeology of earthly application and/or historiographic abstraction.

Similarly, as this chapter ascends into the heavens, the concept of an archaeological approach to film history operates simultaneously on multiple registers. With regard to the geological, Parikka offers a useful reminder that a geology might extend upwards, too, in terms of matter to be mined or media to be uncovered. In other words, the stratification of such a history might comprise not only that which exists below the ground, but ‘a new extended geological “layer” that circles our planet’ (Parikka 2015: 8). To look upwards is also to find layered connections between the histories of those imaging technologies and practices that have occupied the skies.

FRANCOFONIA: FILM HISTORY FROM ABOVE

In the instance of Francofonia, the play between literal and metaphorical conceptions of archaeology is explored in the historiographic realm of interrelated genealogies of aerial imaging, from cinema to war (or war to cinema), including material and other determinants of the technical design and visual aesthetics of the camera-carrying drone. This is a device that carries with it the traces of multiple histories, positioned in Francofonia against a broader return of the historical memory of twentieth-century war and the associated archive of filmic images and collective cultural memory of cinema.