The Con·temporary in Cinema

Abstract

This article examines some epistemological aspects of the notion of the contemporary in order to trace an image that is turned towards its past while also looking into the future. This is the Con•temporary in cinema; an image invested with temporality that brings together the old and the new by manifesting an ideal continuity along its path. Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas and Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma will be used as two examples to illustrate a philosophical notion of the contemporary that treats the past and the present as parts of a crystalline structure. Here, by employing an archaeological montage-technique that portrays an overall vision of the history of cinema (in Godard), or the history of art (in Warburg), both artist-historians develop a method of cinematic arrangement that remixes and recollects what has been lost in order to renovate it into something new. Their work – which is a product of their time, and yet it transcends their time – will be said to be contemporary inasmuch as the signatures of the archaic and the old are inscribed in the most recent and modern.