Tomasz Majewski

Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1924–1929) – enigmatically defined by its author  as “a ghost story for truly adult people” – was an archive of approximately one thousand photographs  presented  on forty black canvases, presenting mainly motifs of Western culture, which guided that scholar’s research over the years. Quite clearly, however, Bilderatlas was something more than a simple collection of images. Mnemosyne, like other Warburg’s works, especially his Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek  in Hamburg, may appear  to us as a mnemonic system created  for private use – one similar to mnemotechnical theaters projected  in the sixteenth  century  by Giordano Bruno  and Giulio  Camillo.  This dynamic topographic structure may be related  to the  category of Zwischenraum  (interval),  which Warburg  used in his project  of “nameless science”. One may read here about an “iconology of intervals” as a “psychology of oscillation between  the position  of images and signs”. Warburg  clearly presents  here  an idea of inter-media basis for his cultural-historical practice. In Mnemosyne, photographic reproduction was not  merely  illustrative  but  offered  a general  medium  to which all the  figures  (different types of objects  such as paintings,  reliefs  and  drawings)  were reduced  before being arranged on black panel canvases. For this reason some scholars, among them Benjamin Buchloh, drew a parallel between Mnemosyne and the development of photomontage  and photo-archive practices in the 1920s. But it is probably  the  cinema,  as posited  by Philippe  -Alaine  Michaud,  that  may seem  today as a medium most deeply resonating with Warburg’s project. When Warburg  was developing Mnemosyne, he probably discovered  his own “concept  of montage”,  which was capable of transforming hieroglyphs and static figures into live motion and action. In Jean-Luc Godard’s Historie(s) du cinema (1988–1998) one may find a parallel example of how filmic medium  can  explore  its own past  through  a juxtaposition  of images, montage of collisions and analogies. Video serves here the same purpose as photography in the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. In montage appropriation and re-appropriation of images and  worlds, Godard  developed  an  unique  project  of the  cartography  of history and memory. However, while the past is metamorphosed here in the present – all the images begin to signify also cinema’s death.  For  Godard  the  mnemotechnic  art  of quotation refers, most of all, to the temporal depth and the death of the cinemamatography,  which is called by the name Auschwitz.