(Dis)Assemblages of time: the conception of history in Sylvio Back's cinema and it's philosophical resonances

Abstract

This article investigates how the cinematographic work of Sylvio Back establishes a poetics of critical montage, in which literature and history intertwine as symbolic operations for the reconfiguration of time. Without seeking to trace direct filiations, the study draws upon concepts such as Walter Benjamin’s messianic time and Gilles Deleuze’s time-image in order to illuminate aesthetic procedures that unsettle both narrative linearity and the conventions of dominant historiography. The recurrence of marginalized historical figures, together with a dense web of literary references, reveals the construction of hybrid cinematic writing, wherein Back’s films operate as archives of dissensus. Ultimately, it is argued that, in Back’s oeuvre, cinema does not merely represent the past, but reinscribes it as interrogation, instituting a regime of critical temporality that challenges the boundaries between document, fiction, and memory.