Cinema, Memory, Modernity

The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema

Russell J.A. Kilbourn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134550227
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Filmgeschichte & Filmkritik

Since its inception, cinema has evolved into not merely a 'reflection' but an indispensable index of human experience – especially our experience of time's passage, of the present moment, and, most importantly perhaps, of the past, in both collective and individual terms. In this volume, Kilbourn provides a comparative theorization of the representation of memory in both mainstream Hollywood and international art cinema within an increasingly transnational context of production and reception. Focusing on European, North and South American, and Asian films, Kilbourn reads cinema as providing the viewer with not only the content and form of memory, but also with its own directions for use: the required codes and conventions for understanding and implementing this crucial prosthetic technology — an art of memory for the twentieth-century and beyond.

1No Escape from Time

Memory and Redemption in the
International Postwar Art Film

Memory implies a certain act of redemption.

—John Berger

[T]hrough memory the world becomes my world.

—Alain Resnais

INTRODUCTION: IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME

In what can be called, for lack of a better term, the contemporary art film, Deleuze’s ‘time-image’ is revisited, inflected in certain ways with the ‘movement-image’ as we move from a “cinema of the see-er” (de voyant) to a cinema of agency (d’actant) and beyond (Cinema 2 2). Spectatorial identification and distanciation are curiously imbricated in the new model emerging in the 1960s and after. For Deleuze,

[I]dentification is actually inverted: the character has become a kind of viewer. He shifts, runs and becomes animated in vain, the situation he is in outstrips his motor capacities on all sides, and makes him see and hear what is no longer subject to the rules of a response or an action. He records rather than reacts. He is prey to a vision, pursued by it or pursuing it, rather than engaged in an action. (Cinema 2 3)

It is not simply that the “Newtonian” time of the classical montage has given way to the phenomenological temporality of the long take and elliptical editing of the art film; rather, the two different approaches to the representation—and valuation—of time, memory, death and redemption are combined or juxtaposed within the same film. A tension emerges between the meaning implicit in this chapter’s title (“no escape from time”) of “the present as prisoner of the past”¹—a modernist sentiment characteristic of the postwar international art film (especially French)—and the more contemporary, postmodern, notion of the present as a ‘work-in-progress’ with the past as malleable fiction.

Crystallized in Chris Marker’s landmark La Jetée (1962), the theme that there is no escape from time resonates across the history of the European art film and its international counterpart. This becomes a sort of cinematic meta-theme, connecting as it does narratives of individual desire, death, mourning and, above all, memory, with the fictional cinematic accommodation of capital h History. In other words: the problem of temporally conditioned identity, individual or collective, at the heart of a visually hegemonic culture for which political and aesthetic questions—questions of representation—are mutually constitutive. This chapter examines the production of identity out of the intersection of individual memory and modern history as represented cinematically in the postwar art film in dialectical relation to the dominant cinematic mode of a broader commercial culture. As noted in the Introduction, I read the ‘art film’ as characterized by formal discontinuity, semantic ambiguity and anti-Oedipal visual pleasures. I therefore invoke here David Bordwell’s classification of the art film as not a genre so much as a style or mode, embodying Bazin’s valorization of the long take and deep space, Tarkovsky’s privileging of the individual shot over montage, as well as Deleuze’s comparable distinction between the movement-image and the time-image. Again, I invoke these various and differing definitions in order to emphasize their intersection in the historical art film’s production of meaning out of a specific approach to the presentation and manipulation of uniquely cinematic spaces and temporalities. The focus is on the conjunction of the subjective level—the representation of an individual’s perception of time, the structural and thematic role of desire, and a reified relation to death—with the objective level of ‘realism’ (both iconic and ideological) epitomized in the modern city in which cinema as the paradigmatic late-modern cultural form finds its ideal setting. The twentieth-century city is the literal ‘city of the dead’ for the modern katabasis narrative; the spatial locus for the journey whose ultimate goal is to ironically ‘redeem’ life by escaping time. This chapter compares a cross-section of European postwar and contemporary art films within the self-reflexive and -reflective context of cinema as a time-based medium. Beyond the ‘memory-film’ category, these films are connected in their representation of built space, their production of spatial form, and their manipulation of volume, light, shadow; visual-architectural allegories of the modern metropolis as it gives way to the urban spaces of the global postmodern.

In the shift from a modernist to a postmodernist cinema the seemingly positive desire to escape time, at bottom a function of the erotic drive, the desire to escape death, ironically inverts into its complement: thanatos, the desire for death. How better to transcend time’s exigencies, to find ‘deliverance’ from desire, from (in a Levinasian phrase) responsibility to the other? As Andras Balint Kovács says of the representation of time in Last Year at Marienbad: “Without a past, desires of the present, hence acts of the future, have no legitimacy” (106). Without a shared sense of pastness, desires and actions have no moral legitimacy. At issue, though, is the fictional—and, ultimately, literal—status of death: the reality principle whose cultural valuation in the late-modern period is always at odds with the problem of its representation. Contemporary popular culture encourages us to see in representations of death a metaphor for an implicit ‘salvation’ through consumption. There is a correlative of this in much classical film narrative (the metaphorical redemptive function of un-ironic narrative closure²), whereas in the modernist tradition from which the art film emerges, death signifies as a purgatorial or even infernal space within which any redemptive or eroto-salvific potential has only an ironic or ambiguous value. More generally, the metaphysical category of redemption has been long since revalued in the gradual shift to a so-called secular late modernity: the Western world’s semi-conscious disavowal of its abiding allegiance to categories like God or an afterlife. As Stewart Martin puts it, modernity has “kill[ed] off God without giving up the [messianic] temporality that anticipates his coming” (20). The messianic avatar in the late capitalist paradigm is epitomized in the pop-cultural action hero, especially the protagonist with super-human abilities or powers (the ‘superhero’ as Nietzschean Übermensch redux). The messianic function, in this secular context, however, is typically translated into apocalyptic violence, through which narrative closure is guaranteed: the only terms that make sense to an audience for whom the ‘next world’ is comprehensible only as a reflection of this one.³ The character of Jason Bourne (in the eponymous trilogy, discussed in the second chapter) presents an interesting critique of this paradigm through the merging of a kind of ‘existential’ action genre and the popularized memory film.

THE CINEMATIC CITY: TEMPS MORT AND
THE “ANY-SPACE-WHATEVER”

That the art film’s protagonist’s journey often turns into a quest for self-knowledge that takes the place of the “sensory-motor mechanism” of Deleuze’s classical cinema means that such an interior journey unfolds in the landscape of dream or memory, which in some cases corresponds to the spatial equivalent of ‘white noise’: Deleuze’s “any-space-whatever”, signifying at once as the concrete (albeit empty, banal or vague) location of the action as such and an allegorical mental chronotope of psychic ‘action’ or inaction (Cinema 1 208).⁴ Or rather, the primary action, as Deleuze emphasizes, is now that of looking—even more overtly, perhaps, than in classical Hollywood. This is the space (or spaces) in which become visible “subjective images, memories of childhood, sound and visual dreams or fantasies, where the character does not act without seeing himself acting, complicit viewer of the role he himself is playing” (Cinema 2 6). Taken on its own, this may sound like a reading of the art film through a feminist-psychoanalytic lens, which threatens to reduce the typical classical Hollywood product to an Oedipal allegory of the gaze. But the larger context of transformation, together with the diversity of the individual films, precludes this reductive reading. The specific films discussed here were chosen because they do not simply thematize but visually instantiate memory. Apart from other differences—of production context and/or stylistic register—they are all examples of what I call ‘memory-films’.

Modern and postmodern notions of personal and social identity are elaborated within the largely visually determined subjective and objective spaces of what Frederic Jameson calls the postmodern cultural dominant. And these spaces become the contemporary hypomnesic—artificial or prosthetic—equivalent of classical mnemonic loci (locations or spaces); the milieux de memoire (environments of memory) or cinematic cityscapes comprised of specific topoi, the conventional onscreen ‘topics’ or places, the urban settings—streets, buildings, rooms; exteriors, interiors, often corresponding to conventional shots or shot-sequences, specific formal-stylistic devices and strategies—the specific lieux de memoire (to appropriate Nora’s phrase) which provide the context for the figural content of memory, and thus the ground of identity itself. These films show how, in a more than metaphorical sense, both the structure of memory and processes of remembering and forgetting are provided for us now by cinema, just as they were by other technologies in past eras. What interests me here are the specific differences in the midst of this general continuity of a spatially-visually determined model of memory, which has reached a certain apogee in film as a time-based narrative medium. And if this sounds like a case of euro-ethno-patriarcho-centrism, this is entirely intentional. In subsequent chapters I discuss Asian or Latin American films, for instance, not in order to reductively assimilate them to a neo-colonialist master-narrative, but rather because they are symptomatic in the best sense, offering excellent illustrations of cinema’s seemingly universalizing tendencies, where local-regional stories are treated in the same medium, masquerading as a ‘global language’, as in more overtly commercial fare.

The city in cinema is the imaginary urban three-dimensional space constructed onscreen that provides a shared mental streetscape; the illusory architectural framework in which meanings are stored and retrieved, social practices legitimized and naturalized, identities produced and consumed, desire satisfied and renewed⁵—all at one remove. This is the cinematic city as simulacral locus of a public, ‘social’ memory and therefore of specific, historically sedimented, collective identities: “[c]ities constitute virtual mnemonic zones where a continual activity produces a collective mental life with its own histories” (McNeil 206). According to Henry Jenkins:

We are encouraged to read the urban landscape symptomatically—for signs of similarity and difference from cities we encounter in our everyday lives. These imaginary cities . . . ‘are also constructed as space for the film’s spectator to enter, to map, and to explore’ . . . Finally we are invited to read these cities as allusions, which reference and remediate earlier works in the genre. Some of the earliest science fiction films—Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926 [sic]) and William Cameron Menzies’ Things to Come (1936)—offered such vivid images of the urban experience that filmmakers have returned again and again to a shared database—a matrix—of previous representations. (177)

As argued in the Introduction, the connections between memory and built space so relevant for current film scholarship are connectible to classical theories of artificial memory. Cities are comprised in large part of built space—both public and private—and “the building is one of the classical models for systems of memory” (191). Lina Bolzoni traces the history of thinking about memory back to the Greeks and the significance of memory “in a society where writing has not yet been introduced” (xviii). It is revealing to extend this account of the technologizing impact of writing upon memory to the subsequent transformations of memory in the age of cinema:

With the introduction of writing memory comes down from Olympus and enters the world of the city and its human professions: it becomes an art, something that can be taught and practiced. Writing, moreover, removes words from the unrepeatable temporal flux of oral communication and transforms them into objects positioned in space, into things that can be seen and analysed. [ . . . ] Writing influences even the way in which the mind is perceived: thought takes on a spatial dimension, and thus intellectual processes are described in terms of movement. We can see how this is essential for memory. It appears as a space divided into places, in which are deposited perceptible images that may be preserved or vanish away. The moment that memory becomes an art, writing remodels it in its own image and likeness.⁶ (xviii)

The classical art of memory to which Bolzoni refers is a mnemonic system predicated on highly developed visual-spatial faculties in a culture (like that which dominates today) that privileged sight over the other senses. According to the anonymous Ad Herrenium (ca. 82 BCE)—the first classical Latin treatise on the art of memory, often attributed to Cicero—there are two kinds of memory: ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’, where the latter is the product of close observation of what were thought to be “the mind’s natural functions” (Bolzoni xvi). The underlying irony here, vastly amplified in cinema’s scopic regime, is that “techniques of memory reach their greatest development in a world in which their meaning and importance are gradually stripped away from them” by ongoing technological developments (xviii).

The idea of an artificial memory implies memory as ‘technology’, technique or ‘art’ (Gk. techne); hence an aid to memory (aide-de-memoire), a mnemotechnic that all but takes the place of a ‘natural’ memory by supplementing and augmenting it, prosthetically. The key components of the classical art of memory as essential tool for the rhetorician are as follows: (1) the locus: the imaginary space constructed within memory, typically a large architectural edifice; (2) various topoi: the specific ‘topics’ or places located within the larger space; (3) the images agentes: the objects, images or simulacra contained within each topoi, to which a specific intelligible or sensual meaning is attached; and finally, (4) the specific order or sequence in which the topoi are to be visited when recollecting the first-order meanings, which may be individual semantic elements or more complex parts of a larger rhetorical discourse or narrative.

We have here the origins of the still pervasive visual-spatial model of memory as vast palace or storehouse: a kind of mental archive, where the analogy is not reducible to metaphor. The line of development from classical rhetorical mnemotechnics to Christian Neo-Platonism is relatively unimpeded. In Augustine’s Confessions (397–398 CE), for example, this model acquires “a new and extraordinary vitality” (Bolzoni 239; see also Yates 4–49). In Book 10 (ch. 8 ff.) the visual-spatial tropes of the classical art of memory have been internalized (‘naturalized’) in Augustine’s autobiography as a means of describing memory as an inner place or space: the vast internal landscape or architectural edifice of memory, “which is like a great field or a spacious palace, a storehouse for countless images of all kinds which are conveyed to it by the senses” (10.8 214). Augustine, like the classical rhetoricians, follows Aristo...