A Film-maker’s Film Histories

Abstract

An artist should probably not be a historian of their art. But when they are, they produce specific kinds of histories. In this chapter, I argue that their position entails a reluctance towards literary forms of history writing, towards explanations and comments. Film-makers aspiring to historical construction have rather relied on paratactic forms of discourse, mainly through non-literary practices such as film programming. This idea implies a reconsideration of such endeavours within a wider network of mostly modernist conceptions of collecting and curating as historiographical projects. Juxtaposition, montage, and blank spaces are then the tools of a historiography based on the fundamental principle of adjacency, and the anthology becomes the major form of the artist’s history of their own art.