Abstract
Calling into question the idea of progress, as it has been done by contemporary approaches in philosophy of history and historical epistemology, entails accepting the impossibility of replacing it by another idea that puts forward a unified sense of history. The decline of metanarratives and of great emancipatory accounts requires a concept of representation that takes into consideration new ways in which human and social temporality appear and a new matrix that links past, present and future. The new notion of representation must also be attentive to new artistic interventions that, either from vanguardist or classic experiences, revisit the pairs “art/history” and “art/politics” by considering the potentialities of art, in general, and films, in particular, to compose narratives that are attuned to an experience of time marked by the crises of representationalism. For this reason, this paper starts by analyzing the crisis of progressive narratives, and its consequences for writing the past, in order to examine both the potentialities of cinematographic images for historical epistemology and the importance of Hayden White’s recent work about the ways to conceptualize contemporary historical experience.