Image and Movement in the Construction of History: An Approach to Cinema from Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg

NATALIA TACCETTA

Atenas

Conferencia; International Conference History of Twentieth-Century Historiography; 2015

Universidad de Atenas

From the way history is built on the Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg?s thought and assuming that both philosophers privilege the domain of the image to address the construction of the past, this paper explores the relationship between image and movement that the two thinkers operated to construct meanings that deviate from conventional historiographical approaches. Benjamin and Warburg are thinkers especially difficult to classify and they work in the complex and sometimes fuzzy border between history, art, philosophy and theory of history.On the one hand, the thought of Warburg forces to investigate a kind of cinematic quality that the Mnemosyne atlas, as an example of construction of history, captured in an iconology of the interval moves interest in significance to place it in the relationship between images. On the other hand, it becomes inevitable to explore the notion of "dialectical image" from which Benjamin characterizes his conception of history, a notion which also carries a representation of the story that involves a kind of "awakening" of the tradition to return possible the reading of the experience and the political rewriting of history. From the fascination with the movement of the pioneers who may have witnessed Warburg, or attending film appropriation by fascism as Benjamin none of the authors lost confidence in the image to account for the past -political history or art history-. From this assumption, it seems possible to wonder how their conceptions of history are linked to the political-aesthetic potential of the cinema. In both cases, the gaze on history is away from the historicist approaches and rests on montage as fundamental historic operation. Montage is the method used in Benjamin ?Arcades? ?his most important historical and political project- and also the mechanism from which the Mnemosyne sheets are organized. In both cases, the mechanism itself shows that it is a historical-political operation (that breaks the chronology and linearity) and a tool that calls the attention to memory. Images are not just ?present? because they are able to make visible complex time relationships incumbent upon historical memory. Images ??anachronical? according to these considerations and according with Georges Didi-Huberman perspective- allow history and their epiphenomena to be interrogated. To question the Modernity?s ?dogma? and think the specificity of art, Warburg and Benjamin choose "micro-strategies" that allows uncovering the secrets of the myth of progress and gaps through which to think about new ways of conceiving the relationship between history, politics and art.