Dematerialization of history in the era of the (cinematographic) archive. From Aby Warburg to Jean-Luc Godard

Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne proposes a writing of art history that escaped from chrono-normativities of historiography that crystallized before their eyes. In his atlas, he sought an anachronistic point of view where past and present transform each other to configure what Walter Benjamin could call "constellation". Both Warburgian experience and some cinematographic archives of Jean-Luc Godard pose epistemological problems very contemporary: how configure an archive about the past and how to restore to (visual) documents a place in the historical process? This article explores how the Warburg's method illuminates contemporary productions on the relationship between film and history and how it continues functioning as a matrix to think the dematerialization of the historical discipline.