The Heretical Archive: Digital Memory at the End of Film

The Heretical Archive examines the relationship between memory and creation in contemporary artworks that use digital technology while appropriating film materials. Domietta Torlasco argues that these digital films and multimedia installations radically transform our memory of cinema and our understanding of the archive. Indeed, such works define a notion of archiving not as the passive preservation of audiovisual signs but as an intervention and the creative rearticulation of cinemas perceptual and political textures.

Connecting psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and feminist theory in innovative ways, Torlasco analyzes cutting-edge digital works that engage with the past of European cinema and visual culture, including video installations by Monica Bonvicini (Destroy She Said) and Pierre Huyghe (The Ellipsis), Agnès Vardas film The Gleaners and I, Marco Polonis multimedia installation The Desert Room, and Chris Markers CD-ROM Immemory.

Torlascos central claim is that if the archives of psychoanalysis and cinema have long privileged the lineage that runs from Oedipus to Freud, the archives of the digital agewhat she calls the heretical archivecan help us imagine an unruly, porous, multifaceted legacy, one in which marginal figures return to speak of lost life as much as of life that demands to be lived.