Signum crucis: a historia do cinema como encrucillada en Jean-Luc Godard e Harun Farocki

Abstract

The film Histoire(s) du cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1998) constituted, outside of the purely filmic arena, a controversial position-taking with regards to historiography itself. Even if it is not methodologically prudent to adscribe it to this, the film nevertheless shares common points with historiography which go beyond the discipline’s institutional markers. In this work the moment in which this reflection on history crystallizes into the history of the cinematographic medium itself is analyzed. This idea implies aninterdisciplinary opening within its genealogy insofar as the archive of the history of cinema is not purely filmic: film is a chapter in the history of many other things. However, it must be admitted that the work of Godard has a monumental and melancholical dimension to it (owing to his centrality in the cinematographic institution and its resultant authorial legitimacy) which accounts for a formal complexity and a certain conservatism that contrasts with his renovating vision of history. As an antidote, a dialogue is proposed with the work of German director Harun Farocki, who possesses a vision close to that of Godard but whose work is liberated from such heavy authorial burden. In Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik(1995) we find the aforementioned idea that film is a chapter in the history of something else—in this case, work.