'Histoire(s) du cinema': the Archive of the Century. Warburgian Insights About History

• Main Author: Natalia Taccetta
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Associação de Investigadores da Imagem em Movimento 2015-07-01
• Series: Aniki: Revista Portuguesa da Imagem em Movimento
• Subjects: Histoire(s) du cinema; Aby Warburg; arquivo; história
• Online Access: http://aim.org.pt/ojs/index.php/revista/article/view/150

Contemporary to the emergence of video first, and to digital culture later, Jean-Luc Godard profaned hegemonic historiography by using film history to rewrite his own history of the century. In the eight deliveries of <em>Histoire(s) du cinéma</em> (1988-1998), Godard articulates a film archive notion that tries to deconstruct conventional representations of the past. Similarly, in his atlas <em>Mnemosyne</em> Aby Warburg proposes a history of art writing that escapes to the chrono-normativity of XIX century historiography. The combined reading of these perspectives allows us to reevaluate the premise on which the archive is both a starting point and a destination for contemporary (audio)visual writing. Indeed, they can be thought of as counter-models of historiographical writing that value the heuristic power of the image to apprehend the past and fight against conventional insights about it. In the light of these considerations, this paper aims to investigate these devices as an array of different ways of thinking about the relationship between cinema and history.<br />