Entre absence d’images et preuves des crimes. Sur le montage des images de l’histoire

Abstract

By means of strategies to put together or apart, through joining and cutting, editing is a writing process which allows facing the historiographical main problem of the lack of images, evidences and witnesses. Fleeting and hardly perceptible, images from the past need to be arranged in the present so that they may appear as effectively documentary images. This arrangement is a political gesture in so far as it supposes deciding about the archives and avoids reducing images from the past to simple illustrations of history.  Editing has to do with images in their properly historiographic function because it actualizes them as pieces of testimony or even as evidence. What editing does to the writing of history will be assessed through the different stages of an investigation that was realized into the archives of the political polices in Brazil for the making of the film Photos d’identification (Anita Leandro, Brésil, 2014, 73 min).