Mnemosyne moving image archive: ethics and assemblage as a radical archival practice

Abstract

This paper stems from the concern for the relationship between the viewer, the film, and the filmmaker. It is an inquiry looking at how the moving image allows us to create an experience of the world. It is with the awareness that this experience has cultural and political implications, particularly when understood in terms of what is held in film archives, museums and collections. It is concerned with interventionist practices, that may bring to the fore what it is that constitutes the making and viewing of film and how through archival film practices film histories are constituted. The Mnemosyne Moving Image Archive utilises the approach of Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, one model in a number of strategies that attempt, through its techniques of assemblage, comparison and disjuncture, to read the image contextually in multiple aspects. Warburg's approach is recast here to take images and sequences from moving image works to read across traditional film studies categories to (reading) the moving image, as form, auteur, spectator, nation etc. to assert the potential relations between the works in order to recover histories, alternative modes of meaning making, and creative and cultural practices.