The Coming of a People

The article sets out to investigate the work of experimental filmmakers Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci-Luchi through the distinct prism of Walter Benjamin’s Theses on History. An ethical and conceptual affinity is encountered, linking Benjamin’s attempts at reconstructing history in a non-teleological way with the author’s cinema of exception, which bears upon the naked human existence in a representational regime of aestheticised politics. In dismantling the filmmakers signature device – the analytical camera – various formal strategies of their work with archival materials are proposed as grounds for a radical, subversive and ethical praxis through which a new dialectical image is extracted from the imagery tainted with the catastrophic: the Great War, European colonialism, fascism. An image that constitutes an incendiary call for a critical historicity and a new cinematic body of politics, metaphorically embodied in Paul Klee’s famous Angelus Novus.

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!