Histories/Histoire(s). Images of Walter Benjamin and Jean-Luc Godard

Abstract

Taking as our starting point Jean-Luc Godard´s film Histoire(s) du cinéma, we intend to review some basic concepts of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history. This implies the return to montage as a historic procedure and also to the way in which the re-writing of history enables new political views according to the benjaminian notion of “history against the grain”. In this sense, it becomes unavoidable the notion of “ruin” that allows an unorthodox look at History, different from those which propose a single historical meaning or the teleological rationalization of events.