THE WARBURG INSTITUTE, LIBRARY AND READING ROOM - Elusive legacy : Animating the still image & Unfit format : Misleading interpretation

i | image

 

Film Narratives

 

Philippe-Alain Michaud, the French Film Curator at the Musée national d’art moderne-Centre Georges-Pompidou, Sophie Hawkes and Georges Didi-Huberman interpreted Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion.

 

Michaud insists that for Warburg, the practice of art history was not only the recognition of the radical heterogeneity of objects but the discovery within the art work itself of lines of fracture, contradictions, tensions, and the energies of magic, empathy, totemism, and animism.

 

Film Formats

 

The transition of the Warburgian montage into a cinematic sequence of images is enabled through the removal of the individual image frames to favour the filmic aspect ratio.

 

However, by translating obscure fragments into a coherent narrative, this approach deviates from the issue of format which Warburg faced during the realisation of the Bilderreihen or the Mnemosyne Atlas.