The footage plucked from archives — crowds, interview face-offs, heads of states grandstanding — can be electric.
This year's program contains some 75 feature films and shorts from archives around the world.
Vintage photographs plucked from archives have inspired a small industry of coffee table books.
"There was something not quite pure in all this learning from archives.
Mr. Sebald accumulates postcards from junk shops, maps from archives, passages from memoirs.
"I didn't know from archives, so I just went through his files," Ms. Bord said.
THEY emerged from archives around the world, let their eyes adjust to the daylight, and then headed for Kalamazoo.
"Not only were we all working on books, we were all drawing from archives of found materials.
But the pictures may have been fabricated or pulled from archives, and shown as a sort of threat.
The question of excising names from archives has not yet been resolved by the German courts, he said.
He spent more than 50 years tracking down surviving prints of Napoleon from archives around the world.
