This dissertation tracks the changing conception of the archive in film and media art. It examines filmmakers who reflect upon the historicity of cinema in their work and use the archive as a model for creating their essay films, video essays and installations. The four filmmakers whose work is under examination—Alexander Kluge, Hartmut Bitomsky, Harun Farocki and Hito Steyerl—have each played an instrumental role in the development of the film industry in postwar and contemporary Germany. Considered in a constellation with one another, they cover an important period of German—and global—media history, in which the forms of moving images and their mode of exhibition have diversified. New archival sources and media technology expanded the possibilities for these filmmakers to explore the contents of the German cinematographic archive and to integrate moving images from previous sources into their works. Taking their cue from Walter Benjamin’s concept of history and his practices of citation, these filmmakers use montage to put films from the past into constellation with present-day film and media. Their montages unearth aspects of earlier films that were not visible in their original context and they reveal the shifting configurations between past and present in film history, illustrating the need for a non-linear film historiography.

In these works, film history and the cinematographic archive become a site of potentiality that offers alternative paths for film in the art gallery and museum, and on the Internet. Their works collectively demonstrate how essayistic practices have expanded from the essay film of auteur cinema to the video and digital essay of media artists featured in art installations and on the Internet. The evolution of these essayistic practices testifies to the essay’s continued ability to function as a form that runs against the grain of commercial production. If, as some theorists argue, the bureaucratic documentation of the archive is now the primary force through which biopolitics renders life deathlike, then the archival practices exhibited by these filmmakers not only illustrate how the past might gain a functional, creative use for the present, but they also provide an example for ways in which the archive might be employed against existing forms of control. Their works illustrate the need for increased access to the archive and a democratization of who has the authority to investigate its contents and document its histories today.