Montage as Allegory: On the Concept of Historical Truth in Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord

Whether the truth of history can become an object of knowledge or it is bound to be lost forever is the crucial question that defines the field of inquiry of what has been called “philosophy of history”. Doubts about the historian’s ability to offer an authentic representation of the past through a work of reconstruction have haunted the field since the publication in 1874 of the second of Nietzsche’s “Untimely meditations”, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. Nietzsche’s text situates itself at the beginning of an intellectual geneaology that has called into question the applicability of a scientific method of research to history. His suspicions about scientific historiography are echoed in Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, On the concept of history. Here Benjamin develops a thorough critique of the “additive method” employed by positivist historians, whose concept of history correspond to simply mustering “a mass of data to fill the homogoneous, empty time” of the past. Benjamin’s concept of history is of particular consequence for film studies since it implies a theory of montage inspired to Russian avant-garde cinema. His recourse to film theory to propose an alternative historiographical method is not isolated in the field of the critics of historicism. Jean-Luc Godard - himself a proponent of a “true history of the cinema”- has gathered a whole collection of such figures in his monumental Histoire(s) du cinéma, in which he draws a cinematographic constallation between such apparently unrelated figures as Walter Benjamin, André Malraux, Elie Faure, Serge Daney, and Guy Debord. Of these, the one who has gone further in employing film theory to produce an alternative method to do history is certainly Guy Debord.