Marianne Alphant

To be in Venice and see the architecture of New York, to perceive in a painting by Tintoretto the birth of animated images, to look at the burlesque Cretinetti as the ancestor of montage - so many shifts, displacements, and striking telescopings that Philippe-Alain Michaud proposes in this film dedicated to him. To follow this art historian, curator of the cinema collections at the Centre Pompidou, is to go from the oriental carpet to the film, or from the first fireworks to the cinema. And everywhere the animation of the images - projections of Antony McCall, or of Paul Sharits, Column without end of Brancusi, Pasolini's Accatone - everything moves! Under the tutelage of Aby Warburg, the great art historian of the early twentieth century, precursor of iconology and image comparison, to whom Philippe-Alain Michaud was the first in France to devote an important essay, eleven images are placed on the table to describe the singular journey of this art historian.

Entering Georges Didi-Huberman’s home is already entering his work: the libraries and their classification, the organized reproductions, and especially the table on which the historian places a few images chosen for us, seeking their relationship of affinity, conflict, dialectical tension. 45 minutes pass where a world is constructed at the same time as a gaze is organized before our eyes, inside the frame. Not only the world of art, the world of images, but the world in general.