| This PhD dissertation addresses the imaginary of ruins, past and contemporary, and in particular the imaginary of ruins in cinema. It intersects two types of objects: ruins cinema has filmed, and ruin as a material state of film itself (from the decay of film stock to the fragmentary state of found films). The first section, "Approaching Ruins," follows up on Marc Auge's thesis on the "disappearance of ruins." Our contemporary regime of historicity, dominated by the present (what Hartog calls "le presentisme"), is analysed through the notions of patrimony, digital revolution and the debates concerning restoration. In this configuration, art and cinema in particular are posited as possible loci where can survive and resist, for the time being, a certain presence of ruins and an experience of time. The dissertation then looks at different key moments of the discourse and aesthetic of ruins, as they have developed since the XVIth Century up to the XXth Century, in photography and cinema, before analysing, more directly, the technical, discursive and figural relationship that ties cinema, photography and time. The second section of the thesis, "Ruins, History, Memory," deals with the transition---which occurred around World War II---, between a "poetics of ruins" and a "pedagogy of rubble," via the different modalities of ruins (ruins of History, memory of ruins, ruins of fiction, etc.) that can be found in the Post-War cinemas of Rossellini, Lamprecht, Staudte, Reitz, Wenders, Godard, Tarkovski and Angelopoulos. In the two first chapters of this section, the attention is brought on the relationship between modernist cinema and ruins, since the end of WWII and up to the Fall of the Berlin Wall. If the material scars or the symbolic force of ruined sites of History constitute an open archive, explored by the work of memory of certain films, the filmic archive may in turn be considered a "container of ruins," a museum of memory and history in a state of decay, on the constant verge of disappearance. Thus, the final chapter of this thesis will be concerned with the works of certain avant-garde "film archaeologists" (Delpeut, Morrison, Ricci Lucchi & Gianikian) who create "original" works using found footage of decayed or fragmented film material. This chapter will have beforehand retraced the history of the film archive (and the disappearance of early cinema), cinema's "museum turn," the history of compilation films and found footage filmmaking, which all inform the melancholic aesthetics of ruins of these contemporary filmmakers. The concluding remarks analyse the presence of Antiquity in modernist film practices (Fellini, Pollet, Pasolini) and propose a reading of Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia (1954), a fundamental work which is related to all the major issues that are at the heart of this study. These reflections leads to a discussion on cinephilia as a form of melancholia put to the test of time in cinema.;Keywords. motion pictures, ruins, aesthetics of ruins, modernist cinema, experimental cinema, found footage films. Italian Post-War cinema, German Post-War cinema, Trummerfilme, film archives, time in motion pictures, history and cinema, preservation and restoration. |
