In the art biennales of today, video has become, like it or not, a universal tool, a sort of “green card” for today’s art. It forms a convenient platform, especially when used with subtitles and especially for the artists of emerging countries, as long as they have access to this technique.

Could the art history film equally become a language shared by the community of art historians? This type of film is characterised by the collaboration of a filmmaker and an art historian, such as occurred when Roberto Longhi and Umberto Barbaro together produced their film Carpaccio in 1948. Erwin Panofsky, Rudolf Arnheim and Carlo Argan have analysed cinema in this regard. Others have practised it in undertaking art history: Kenneth Clark is one example. Another is Carlo Ragghianti, who made 20 critofilms between 1948 and 1964 which he defined as “a reading and a critical analysis of artistic language realised through the visual language of cinema”.

Is our contemporary era, marked as it is by the globalisation of art and the proliferation of films on art (documentaries, “art films”, experimental films, biopics), beginning thus to create its own art history? If so, of which sort?

This art history through film has a comparative intention, marked by a re-reading of the art of the past, in the way that Bill Viola, for example, is enlivening painting. It has the potential to transform connoisseurship by enabling a new relationship to emerge between the eye and the artwork, but it is also a post-colonial history which bursts the boundaries between ethnographic films like those of Flaherty or Les Maîtres fous of Jean Rouch (1954) or Les Statues meurent aussi of Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, and films of today’s highly ritualised “performance art” manifestations. As well it brings consideration to new approaches, such as those of the neuro-sciences and questions the force of images (David Freedberg) and their “agency” (Gell). Henri Storck has written: “The eye of the camera is much more powerful than our own”.

In his book L’Intemporel (1973), Malraux wrote that “the museum of the audio-visual” had replaced the “museum of the imaginary”. With video and digital art, the art history film has entered a new era, while still remaining an important element of the teaching of art history, as had been wished for from very early on since the 1950s by the art historian Pierre Francastel.

Already in the 1960s UNESCO played an important part in searching out and compiling an inventory of resources relating to film on art. Such investigation needs to be resumed today. But above all, it is the history of the “art history film” which still remains to undertaken at a time when the challenges of a now polycentred world are sketching out a different future.