1No Escape from Time
Memory and Redemption in the
International Postwar Art Film
Memory implies a certain act of redemption.
âJohn Berger
[T]hrough memory the world becomes my world.
âAlain Resnais
INTRODUCTION: IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME
In what can be called, for lack of a better term, the contemporary art film, Deleuzeâs âtime-imageâ is revisited, inflected in certain ways with the âmovement-imageâ as we move from a âcinema of the see-erâ (de voyant) to a cinema of agency (dâactant) 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 âNewtonianâ 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 representationâand valuationâof time, memory, death and redemption are combined or juxtaposed within the same film. A tension emerges between the meaning implicit in this chapterâs title (âno escape from timeâ) of âthe present as prisoner of the pastâ1âa modernist sentiment characteristic of the postwar international art film (especially French)âand the more contemporary, postmodern, notion of the present as a âwork-in-progressâ with the past as malleable fiction.
Crystallized in Chris Markerâs landmark La JetĂ©e (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 questionsâquestions of representationâare 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 âart filmâ as characterized by formal discontinuity, semantic ambiguity and anti-Oedipal visual pleasures. I therefore invoke here David Bordwellâs classification of the art film as not a genre so much as a style or mode, embodying Bazinâs valorization of the long take and deep space, Tarkovskyâs privileging of the individual shot over montage, as well as Deleuzeâs 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 filmâs 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 levelâthe representation of an individualâs perception of time, the structural and thematic role of desire, and a reified relation to deathâwith the objective level of ârealismâ (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 âcity of the deadâ for the modern katabasis narrative; the spatial locus for the journey whose ultimate goal is to ironically âredeemâ 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 âmemory-filmâ 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 timeâs exigencies, to find âdeliveranceâ from desire, from (in a Levinasian phrase) responsibility to the other? As Andras Balint KovĂĄcs says of the representation of time in Last Year at Marienbad: âWithout a past, desires of the present, hence acts of the future, have no legitimacyâ (106). Without a shared sense of pastness, desires and actions have no moral legitimacy. At issue, though, is the fictionalâand, ultimately, literalâstatus 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 âsalvationâ 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 worldâs semi-conscious disavowal of its abiding allegiance to categories like God or an afterlife. As Stewart Martin puts it, modernity has âkill[ed] off God without giving up the [messianic] temporality that anticipates his comingâ (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 âsuperheroâ as Nietzschean Ăbermensch 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 ânext worldâ 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 âexistentialâ action genre and the popularized memory film.
THE CINEMATIC CITY: TEMPS MORT AND
THE âANY-SPACE-WHATEVERâ
That the art filmâs protagonistâs journey often turns into a quest for self-knowledge that takes the place of the âsensory-motor mechanismâ of Deleuzeâs 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 âwhite noiseâ: Deleuzeâs âany-space-whateverâ, signifying at once as the concrete (albeit empty, banal or vague) location of the action as such and an allegorical mental chronotope of psychic âactionâ or inaction (Cinema 1 208).4 Or rather, the primary action, as Deleuze emphasizes, is now that of lookingâeven more overtly, perhaps, than in classical Hollywood. This is the space (or spaces) in which become visible âsubjective 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 playingâ (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 differencesâof production context and/or stylistic registerâthey are all examples of what I call âmemory-filmsâ.
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 hypomnesicâartificial or prostheticâequivalent of classical mnemonic loci (locations or spaces); the milieux de memoire (environments of memory) or cinematic cityscapes comprised of specific topoi, the conventional onscreen âtopicsâ or places, the urban settingsâstreets, buildings, rooms; exteriors, interiors, often corresponding to conventional shots or shot-sequences, specific formal-stylistic devices and strategiesâthe specific lieux de memoire (to appropriate Noraâs 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 cinemaâs seemingly universalizing tendencies, where local-regional stories are treated in the same medium, masquerading as a âglobal languageâ, 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 renewed5âall at one remove. This is the cinematic city as simulacral locus of a public, âsocialâ memory and therefore of specific, historically sedimented, collective identities: â[c]ities constitute virtual mnemonic zones where a continual activity produces a collective mental life with its own historiesâ (McNeil 206). According to Henry Jenkins:
We are encouraged to read the urban landscape symptomaticallyâfor signs of similarity and difference from cities we encounter in our everyday lives. These imaginary cities . . . âare also constructed as space for the filmâs spectator to enter, to map, and to exploreâ . . . 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 filmsâFritz Langâs Metropolis (1926 [sic]) and William Cameron Menziesâ Things to Come (1936)âoffered such vivid images of the urban experience that filmmakers have returned again and again to a shared databaseâa matrixâof 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 spaceâboth public and privateâand âthe building is one of the classical models for systems of memoryâ (191). Lina Bolzoni traces the history of thinking about memory back to the Greeks and the significance of memory âin a society where writing has not yet been introducedâ (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)âthe first classical Latin treatise on the art of memory, often attributed to Ciceroâthere are two kinds of memory: ânaturalâ and âartificialâ, where the latter is the product of close observation of what were thought to be âthe mindâs natural functionsâ (Bolzoni xvi). The underlying irony here, vastly amplified in cinemaâs scopic regime, is that âtechniques of memory reach their greatest development in a world in which their meaning and importance are gradually stripped away from themâ by ongoing technological developments (xviii).
The idea of an artificial memory implies memory as âtechnologyâ, technique or âartâ (Gk. techne); hence an aid to memory (aide-de-memoire), a mnemotechnic that all but takes the place of a ânaturalâ 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 âtopicsâ 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 Augustineâs Confessions (397â398 CE), for example, this model acquires âa new and extraordinary vitalityâ (Bolzoni 239; see also Yates 4â49). In Book 10 (ch. 8 ff.) the visual-spatial tropes of the classical art of memory have been internalized (ânaturalizedâ) in Augustineâs autobiography as a means of describing memory as an inner place or space: the vast internal landscape or architectural edifice of memory, âwhich is like a great field or a spacious palace, a storehouse for countless images of all kinds which are conveyed to it by the sensesâ (10.8 214). Augustine, like the classical rhetoricians, follows Aristo...