ABSTRACT
It sometimes seems as though the cinema’s legacy has only recently acquired the status of serious and historical document. With the passing of time itself, the vast accumulation of film footage, that mirrors the twentieth century like a parallel universe, has inevitably attracted the attention of film and video artists as well as historians. However, from its earliest days, some pioneering film historians perceived that out of film’s special relationship with reality, human culture had acquired a unique source of documentation. As early as 1898, the Polish photographer Boleslaw Matuszewski published a brochure suggesting that film would be ‘A New Source for History’, due to its ability to capture reality (Sjöberg 2001: 41). This relationship was subsequently realized, above all, in the compilation film. However, I would like to suggest in this chapter that, through the compilation film, a relationship might be forged not only between cinema and history, but also between cinema, history and psychoanalysis.
