The Heretical Archive

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 cinema\u2019s 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), Agn\u00e8s Varda\u2019s film The Gleaners and I, Marco Poloni\u2019s multimedia installation The Desert Room, and Chris Marker\u2019s CD-ROM Immemory. Torlasco\u2019s 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 age—what she calls the \u201cheretical archive\u201d—can 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.