History, Cinema's Auxiliary

Abstract

To speak as a historian speaks about the history of the cinema is take, paradoxically, an unusual step. Indeed, for more than twenty years, the cinema has become one of the new objects used to do History, and yet it is considered only as a trace, a documentary series, a false or truthful witness. It serves construct beyond itself that inaccessible past of societies at which historians take aim. To ask the question of the cinema's history is open up quite another perspective: make cinema no longer the auxiliary but the object of the quest. And why not? Long ago, Thucydides felt the need organize the chaos of the Peloponnesian wars; closer us, positivist and scientific historians felt justified in dissecting [d6coupage]* the world of the nineteenth century in the account they gave of national histories, in which they evaluated events, ordered the past, and legimitized its specificity and its functions.