The cinematographic forms of history

Abstract

This essay approaches cinema neither as a language nor as the object of a history that would be its own. It focuses instead on cinema insofar as it gives form to a historical reality, keeping a distance from it through mise-en-scène while simultaneously revealing it through natural impregnation (the “ontological” realism of cinema). Cinema thus gives a form to history, since it can show the reality of a moment by laying out fragments of such reality according to an original organization: mise-en-scène. Giving history a form, it makes it visible. Looking to theoreticians of history – Kracauer, in the first place – who have identified homologies between cinema and history, the article also points to intrinsic analogies between cinema and history: the collection of memorable facts and characters (the plot almost any film consists of), a practice of memory, and the possibility of a common destiny. The “cinematographic form of history” thus refers to the capacity of cinema to “embalm the real”, and accordingly to preserve an archival reality or a documentary authenticity of history; to render in revealing detail the history of the century; and to turn into a “projection” of the world.