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

Abstract

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 Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), Godard articulates a film archive notion that tries to deconstruct conventional representations of the past. Similarly, in his atlas Mnemosyne 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.