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At the close
of a century marked both by large-scale human disaster
and the technical capacity to immediately document such
events, the 1990s saw a swell of reflection on the
meaning of these collective traumata, their analogue or
digital documentation and the repercussions of such
documentation on the perception of individual viewers.
While the majority of the "films of memory" of recent
years are committed to the conservation of experience, my
particular interest lies in works that trace personal
loss, minority identity and the meaning of forgetting as
a collective experience. In this paper I will be
considering two such works: Gariné Torossian's
Girl from Moush (Canada, 1993, 4 minutes, 16 mm
film) and Angela Melitopoulos' Passing DRAMA
(Germany, 1999, 60 minutes, digital beta video) both
of which take the after-effects of genocide in Armenia
and large-scale expulsion and murder in Asia Minor
respectively in the years after WW1 as their points of
departure, but operate in radically different fashions.
What is at stake in both these works rather than the
transmission of information that may not be forgotten, is
an insistence on the presence of lacunae, the contours of
which lend definitive form to the identity, and thus to
the work in question. These works are disinclined to
simply convey information considered essential to the
identity and tradition in question; instead they each
offer a performative approach to memory, one that
requires the viewer to actively participate in the
assimilation of the material presented, as fleeting and
disparate as it is. Crucially, the specific modes of
these "performances" speak not only to the contours of
the mnemonic process for the ethnic identity in question
but also for that of a specific diasporic context,
whether it be Canada or Germany. I would suggest
therefore that there are culturally specific aspects to
autobiographical discourse and that we ought to consider
more carefully the particular framework of collective
memory that are operative in specific diasporic,
multicultural societies. In the wealth
of literature which has sprung up around autobiographical
film since the 1970s, the question of cultural
specificity is absent. By far the majority of this
literature has originated in the North American context
and has not demonstrated an inclination to compare works
as products of widely varying cultural contexts or even
see such distinctions when they do, in fact, exist.
Instead there is an assumption that a world-wide boom in
this "genre" is taking place, an assumption that neglects
the fact that the majority of the literally countless
works that have been made in the last 30 years, were
indeed made in North America, and that the names from the
non-English-speaking world connected with this "boom,"
from Birgit Hein to Peter Forgacs, tend to be anomalous
phenomena in their own cultural contexts. It certainly is
not my intention here to argue that there is little
autobiographical filmmaking going on in the rest of the
world. However, I do want to draw attention to the
cultural specificity of the works in question - and
therefore limitations of scholarship on filmic
autobiography, when it claims to deal with an
international range of works. To speak of oneself, to
translate the question of the self into filmic terms has
different repercussions in different places. These
repercussions leave their traces in the work. In the
Canadian film, Girl from Moush, the experience of
loss, and more crucially of the dissipation of the
"information" or "facts" that surround that loss, is
given concrete form. However, contrary to much that has
been written on such films of memory, this loss is not
supplanted in any way by its visual representation.
Girl from Moush, refuses to locate its own
reference points explicitly and exclusively either within
Armenian or Canadian cultural contexts and thus
problematises the referents of both terms. The processes
of collective memory and the experience of ethnicity are
both shown to be processes of perception rather than
means of accessing a symbolic and essential source
(whether that be "history" or "identity"). Girl from
Moush is an ersatz voyage to a country that is termed
the "homeland", but has never been visited in
reality. Consisting of
a range of material shot on super 8 and then processed
again on an optical printer using a number of methods
that highlight the film's status as representation,
(which will be discussed in more detail later), this
4-minute film is a colourful highly tactile collection of
all the images which are, for diasporic Armenians,
representative of "home:" from Armenian landscapes to
churches to the memorial to the millions who died in the
genocide perpetrated by the Turks upon the Armenians
between 1917 and 1919. However these images are extremely
grainy and dirty, and so, are oftentimes difficult to
recognize as representations of a specific place. The
film's montage is its most remarkable feature: consisting
of several "movements," each of which is determined in
its tempo by the music that accompanies it, the film
creates a momentum, which is difficult to resist,
although its most fundamental mood, despite the
variations in pace, is one of intense
melancholy. By contrast
the German video Passing DRAMA offers an entirely
different, far cooler perspective on the meaning of
historical events. Taking leave of a central perspective
fixed in geography, time and explicit ethnicity
Melitopoulos quite literally weaves the stories of
numerous former refugees from Asia Minor now living in
the Greek city of Drama together with that of her own
father, also a former inhabitant of that city, who
survived a concentration camp in Austria and now lives
out his days as a retired "Guestworker" in Germany.
Lasting close to an hour, the video begins as an almost
impenetrable mixing of elements that palpably resist
revealing the role of a central consciousness that has
guided the selection and arrangement of those elements:
the video is remarkable in that it attempts to expunge
the intervention of a human, subjective logic in its
editing strategies, preferring instead to suggest the
guiding hand of logarithmic calculations. However
Passing DRAMA slowly undergoes a change in style
from a dense formal treatment of various types of visual
material, all related to the markers of "here and there,"
"now and then," in short to the many stations in the
endless movements of those refugees to a rather
conventional interview segment towards its end, in which
Melitopoulos' father revisits the site of the
concentration camp where he was held in
Austria. However rather
than delineating the specificity of minority experience
Passing DRAMA points to the professionalisation of
memory found among the third generation, following the
dictum: the first generation wants to forget, the second
generation must forget and the third wallows in that
which was forgotten pointing to the professional nature
of her interest.[1]
In so doing this work also addresses the key role played
by institutions in the preservation of history, the
retrieveability of the data stored by such institutions,
and thus the tension within the practices of
assimilation, categorization, naming and digital storage
of data - topics that are very much at the heart of
current German historical discourse - as is the work of
Maurice Halbwachs. In his 1925
Les cadres sociaux de mémoire French
sociologist Maurice Halbwachs proposed a model of
collective memory that emphasized structural and
cognitive rather than content-based commonalities. He
asserts that memory is never an individual process but
is, rather, always part of a collective experience,
stating categorically that, "memory is not possible
outside the frameworks employed by people living in
society to determine and retrieve their
recollections."[2]
While he explicitly rejects the notion of a biological,
inherited collective memory (in the Jungian sense), he
insists on the social contingency of the processes of
memory. This is not to say that a group shares a single
common memory "bank," filled with continuously accessible
details and events. Instead a group exerts influence over
the structural ordering and thus the potential processes
of localization of the memory of its members at the
moment that those details are sought out, or more
correctly, reconstructed in the present. The individual
members of a group each must place memories, which
originated at disparate points in time, into a kind of
semantic mnemonic context defined by that particular
group alone and enable each individual member to locate a
particular memory at will (in other words enables them to
recollect at will) by following the particular pathway or
mnemonic framework shared by the group in question.
Recollection thus implies a pathway rather than a set of
contents. Of course, we are all members of many different
groups, and the membership of groups varies greatly over
time: this model is by no means static. Halbwachs
continues, It is crucial
to note here that, according to Halbwachs, if
communication is disrupted or is lacking, the basis for
the mnemonic frame of reference is destroyed. The
consequence of such a collapse of communication must
therefore be forgetting. It is
precisely the issue of this loss, the moment in which
experience should be translated into something of greater
permanence but is not, because of a breakdown in
communication, which is probed in the film, Girl from
Moush. While the film suggests the continuing
existence of the requisite mnemonic framework through its
clear demarcation of an ethnic context (on the level of
the film's content), a gap in memory has already formed
and the film makes this gap clearly visible (within its
formal structure). Following the logic of Halbwach's
thesis, both forgetting and remembering can be described
as socially contingent. If, as he suggests, the
successful operation of memory depends on socially
determined cognitive frames of reference, which select
and organize the material of the past, to make it
accessible at will, what occurs when these frameworks
become unrecognizable or unusable once the group is in
exile? The difference
between the two works in question is also one of degree:
If Girl from Moush tells of the melancholia of
exile still experienced by the second generation,
Passing DRAMA already points to the dissipation of
such a framework in the third generation. Jan Assmann
has suggested that it is precisely the passage into
foreign territory, or the traversal of a border that
brings about a collective loss of memory. Merging
Halbwachs' emphasis on the structural properties of
collective memory with the features of the classical art
of memory (or the mnemotechnic), as described by Frances
Yates [4],
Assmann has traced the existence and influence of a
collective version of the mnemotechnic, which facilitates
the retention of essential cultural information and
thereby defines a group's identity. The primal
image of the individual mnemotechnic in antiquity - the
collapse of a banquet hall after which the sole survivor,
Simonides, was able to identify the dead only by means of
his recollection of where they had been seated - relies
on a spatialisation of the mnemonic process. All data
that is to be retained is positioned within an imaginary
spatial framework and may thus be recalled at will - one
need only traverse this "space" mentally in order to
recall, for example, the points of a rhetorical argument
stored at any one of a number of the many mental
"locations" within that space. While the
individual mnemotechnic affords one the opportunity to
consciously train the ability to retain specific
information, the collective version of this technique
functions in terms of the obligation contained in the
question, "what are we not allowed to forget?" Assmann
asserts that collective forgetting is brought about
through a change of context, a complete transformation of
living and social conditions. He writes, If this
contextualising "fiction" no longer possesses sufficient
structural integrity to permit the reconstruction of a
part of the past, this particular part will be
forgotten. But what
exactly does it mean to forget? What happens when
forgetting within a collective context is akin to
repression, or when one remembers that something has been
forgotten - when memories do not entirely lose their
context but are nonetheless silenced to the extent that
lacunae are created? Umberto Eco
has drawn our attention to the fact that if the art of
memory can be classified as a semiotic process then it is
not possible to merely reverse this model in order to
postulate a conscious act of forgetting, or an "ars
oblivionalis." It is impossible to make use of an
expression in order to make its contents disappear. The
mere reference to a sign causes a mental process to be
set in motion, even if the sign refers to a non-existent
referent. The reversal of the mnemotechnical model would
imply that an ars oblivionalis must in turn be a
kind of semiotic system. But, as a semiotic system (a
cultural practice) functions in order to prevent
forgetting (a natural process), it is, as Renate Lachmann
has pointed out, impossible to conceive of the act of
"forgetting" as a natural process within culture. Within
a cultural system, forgetting cannot be conceived of as a
dysfunction or as a lack of information but rather only
as an excess: not an erasure, but a layering. Lachmann
contends however, that while there may be no forgetting
within a cultural system, there are certainly "systems of
channelling of semiotic excess and sign erasure that are
meant to promote cultural forgetting."[6]
One of the strategies cited by Lachmann is Freudian
repression, which she applies macro-culturally, allowing
her to account for a phenomenon such as censorship in the
remembering, and the forgetting of an entire society.
Unacceptable signs may in this manner be transformed into
acceptable ones, which thereby, once again, may
facilitate representation - but this repression and
transformation in turn bring about other consequences.
Ultimately the goals of such an interpretational process
retain ambivalence in that one's access to the primary
sign remains blocked by definition. It is in fact
precisely this blockage that itself becomes the
sign. Within the
realm of non-fictional filmic representation, that which
can be thought, but which eludes depiction, has been
termed, by Bill Nichols, the "excess" of documentary: in
this case excess is "history" itself. Nichols writes,
"Excess is that which escapes the grasp of narrative and
exposition. It stands outside the web of significance
spun to capture it. [...] Always referred to but
never captured, history, as excess, rebukes those laws
set to contain it; it contests, qualifies, resists, and
refuses them."[7] In its
construction of a contoured absence, Girl from
Moush points explicitly to the problem of the
incommensurability of the filmic image with the
experience of the past. While collective memory is viewed
here as a constitutive element of identity, at the same
time access to the events, places and experiences of the
past is denied. As Halbwachs would have it, this can be
seen as both a depiction or a visualization of the
particular mnemonic framework common to the ethnic group
in question but also, simultaneously and paradoxically, a
recognition of the break in communication that has
already made the transmission of information vital to the
continued existence of such an identificatory framework
impossible. The situation of exile from a homeland
exacerbates such a disruption in communication. The
alteration of social framework and thus, by extension,
the destruction of those organizational mental framework
["les cadres"] which are key to the
functioning of collective memory, are the source of such
mnemonic disruptions. Passing
DRAMA however depicts a more dramatic situation.
While the point of departure for Melitopoulos' video is
the experience of her father, a multitude of other
perspectives, or rather, moments in time are also
depicted. The binary pair "homeland" and "land of exile"
is questioned here. Migration is described as an endless
process, which does not allow for the identification of a
beginning and an end point in the journey - neither a now
and then nor a here and there. At which moment was the
border for the purposes of collective forgetting
traversed? The multitude of times, places and
perspectives implicit in the unwritten history of
refugees hinder an assimilation of the events into a
single narrative, for as Melitopoulos herself writes,
"the forgotten from yesterday has long since been woven
together with the forgotten from the day before yesterday
and the forgotten from today." The question remains:
Which perspective is represented by the logic of this
work? Just as
history can only be accessed through memory ethnic
identity should also be considered a process rather than
as a reference to a pre-existing essence. While the
projections made by a dominant culture onto its "other"
(whether defined by culture, skin, gender etc.) cannot be
considered part of a "natural" state, they cannot be
discounted as mere deception, lacking all material
existence. Cultural identity, after all, is according to
Stuart Hall, "not a mere phantasm either. It is something
- not a mere trick of the imagination. It has its
histories - and histories have their real, material and
symbolic effects."[8]
These "effects" can only be lent a concrete form if one
determines the precise structure of the mnemonic
processes specific to a given culture. If every
discourse can be viewed as an expression of power, then
various positionings in relation to any given discourse
will also always be simultaneously articulated that
implicitly determine the division into "self" and "other"
within a cultural context. The processes of
identification set in motion by any narrative can have a
similarly catalytic function in relation to culture,
especially in the case of historical narratives. Thus
what is at stake in any retelling of the past is not so
much a question of the group of "facts" that a given
group may not forget (à la Assman) as a particular
relationship to those "facts." (à la
Halbwachs). Girl from
Moush positions the viewer by way of the processes of
suture, or in other words, through the type of cognitive
work it demands of its viewer in order that reception be
facilitated. [9]
It is the specific manner in which identificatory
processes operate that demarcates the frame of reference
of any particular ethnic identity (though perhaps not
definitively, certainly as a specific possibility or
potentiality.) In the case of Girl from Moush, the
filmic strategies that either facilitate reception or
render it difficult reveal a particular set of frames of
reference within the processes of suture. These may be
divided into two groups: those which deconstruct the
process of reception and the creation of meaning and the
others which either mimic the exclusion of the viewer
from the creation of meaning or in fact bring about this
exclusion de facto. Conversely
Passing DRAMA ostensibly refuses this option,
eschewing the auctorial voice-over entirely, making only
sparse use of titles that identify relations through
personal pronouns, such as "my father". The video's
structure does not follow the emotional logic of a
daughter haunted inexplicably by objects, photos, and
events never related. Instead it performs an analysis on
all available data, both "personal" and "professional,"
attempting to find a system adequate to sort out all the
various fragments of narratives and locations. Employing
digital editing techniques, which function on the basis
of logarithms rather than the manipulation of an
aesthetic surface, a feature of the video I will come
back to later, this work demonstrates an inclination to
efface the traces of subjectivity and consider instead
the relationship between time and place. These techniques
point explicitly to the non-indexical nature of the
images in the work, to the non-identity of processed
images with their image sources. A popular and,
by now, definitive dictum in the study of Canadian
culture is that it is wholly dominated and determined by
the landscape and its overwhelming severity. For
instance: "Northrop Frye suggests that the experience of
the land in Canada is so powerful that it determines the
Canadian sensibility. This means that the land is always
before the mind's eye in a great love and intimacy; but
it is in the mind, in the metaphors of poets, and on the
canvases of painters a looming, alien
presence."[10]
This paradigmatic statement appeared in a programme for a
series of Canadian avant-garde films that were all
devoted to the expression of this "looming, alien
presence." What I question about this assumption is not
the connection between culture and landscape but rather
the gesture of generalization that excludes a number of
other perspectives, the inclusion of which would preclude
such uniformity, a uniformity that causes one to ask
whether the only "looming, alien presence" that is
implicit here, is in fact that of Nature. In this sense
Gariné Torossian's Girl from Moush can be
seen as doubly challenging: the film takes up the
Canadian topic par excellence of "landscape and identity"
and places it within the tradition of the North American
filmic avant-garde. However the landscape referred to in
this Canadian film is that of Armenia and the film
promises no ontological revelation but rather a
discursive one. Moreover its form is reminiscent of that
of "Autobiographical Cinema,"[11]
although the place in Girl from Moush that acts as
a catalyst is never present in the film other than as
found footage and therefore as a textual remain. Thus
this work is less a subjective confrontation between the
filmmaker and Armenia and more a making visible of the
situation of the exile. Hamid Naficy has suggested that
fetishism is an aid fundamental to the identity of people
living in exile. "For the hybrid exile identity to
survive, the differentiation between the self and "its
bastard," the other, and between the host and the
(m)other culture must be restated continually and
differentially. This process, [...] is perhaps at
the heart of the aesthetics of repetition and hesitation
that marks all exiles."[12]
The continual repetition of this differentiation
identifies a fundamental absence; the insistence upon
certain images and motifs points to a trauma that is
closely tied to both the problems of forgetting and the
incommensurable. Like the primal scene of both the
individual and the collective mnemotechnic, Girl from
Moush comes in the historical wake of a catastrophe -
the Armenian genocide - and marks an admonition to
remember. The unavoidable result of this pattern is the
emphasis on the fundamental absence of the homeland. The
fetishization of those signs that represent "home" is
evidence of a trauma, which could have been identified as
occurring at the point of the traversal of a border
(according to Assmann), or at the point of entry into
exile, had Girl from Moush insisted on the
authenticity of the images of Armenia. But this work
tells of forgetting rather than remembering, for
according to Naficy, fetishisation is the first step
towards forgetting the homeland. Girl from
Moush consists almost entirely of found footage,
either from filmed picture books or calendar images,
which have been assigned the function of keeping the
culture of the homeland alive for diasporic Armenians.
Images of landscapes, but also of folk dances,
manuscripts, out-takes from Atom Egoyan's film
Calendar and images of exile-Armenian director
Paradjanov are assimilated by the film. The materiality
of these images as images - as icons rather than as
indexes of a land - is continually emphasized in the
manner in which the film is assembled. Since the images
consist of photos of photos copied onto super 8 and then
16mm film using an optical printer, they are extremely
grainy. Dirt and scratches on the film material
foreground its surface. All of the images are processed
on an optical printer in one of two main processes: in
the first process, a frame-like hole is cut into every
single image of a portion of the film strip; a second
single piece of different film material is placed into
this hole, which is of roughly the same size as the hole.
The cuts in both levels of the final, projected image
underscore the presence of the film material and
interferes with the viewer's belief in the illusion of
the landscape which was imprinted onto a filmic negative.
The shaky images, visible only for a moment, seem
painfully fragile. In the second
process, which has a similar effect, various pieces of
film stock are pulled simultaneously, horizontally or
vertically, through the aperture of the optical printer.
In this manner the filmstrips appear as filmstrips in the
film, including both their edges and their sprocket
holes, although it still possible to discern what is
depicted on them. The voice of a woman can be heard
faintly in the background throughout the film. The
distortion of the voice is suggestive of a long-distance
phone call. Initially she speaks Armenian, but suddenly
after roughly three minutes she switches to English and
repeats the contents of the Armenian monologue. The voice
speaks tentatively of its own passionate bond to the
Armenian culture, despite the fact that the speaker
states that she has never been to the country and knows
no one who lives there. Although the
linking of a culture to the landscape in which the
culture is lived out has traditionally been decisive for
the collective memory of a people, an unmediated
connection to that landscape is usually taken as a given.
Indeed, Halbwachs notes that such a close bond is formed
between an individual and his or her surroundings that
these surroundings are vital to one's sense of permanence
and consistency. If one's surroundings are lost, the
result is a disruption in mental equilibrium and thus in
a human's capacity to remember. In the case of
Torossian's film, this group identity, which is marked by
the absence of a geographical referent, can be recognized
as a very effective construct, which functions without a
link to the real existing land, Armenia. There is a
correspondence here with the construct "Africa" which has
been described by Stuart Hall, and is a similarly
effective placeholder for people of African descent in
North America and the Caribbean. The notion of the
homeland that gives shape to identity need not be
conceived of as something with a spatial existence.
Girl from Moush points instead to the textual
nature of the process, which a person of Armenian descent
living in the Diaspora undergoes in the experience of
ethnic identity In the case of
this film, the name "Armenia" refers to the objects that
are of symbolic importance for diasporic culture, and
function like the "familiar objects" of a household to
support the processes of memory. However the film's dense
layering of these signs means that they are often
individually no longer recognizable. The layering means,
on the one hand, that the symbolic objects are placed
into a kind of spatial frame of reference: filmic images
of the objects are actually placed into the frames which
are cut into images of landscapes, mimicking the
spatialisation of the processes of individual
mnemotechnic. Yet paradoxically the layering itself
brings about the absence or loss of meaning in that the
overlapping of the images renders the signs
unrecognizable, replicating the layering of information
associated with cultural forgetting (and thus recalling
both Eco and Lachmann). Both the effort of wanting to
remember and the influence of cultural forgetting are
thereby simultaneously evoked. The disruption of the
indexical relationship between the image and its
profilmic referent denies access to the objects and
places which otherwise and elsewhere function as the
markers of an essential Armenian identity. In the case of
this film one is obliged to recognize the textual trace
of a history that is localized in the textual trace of a
place. Thus Girl from Moush rejects the
investigation of the ontological capacities of film which
otherwise are implicit in "Autobiographical cinema" and
insists on a discursive approach to the artefacts which
shape identity. However a
fundamental ambivalence dwells at the heart of this
project. At least two different audiences are implied in
the conception of this Canadian film. The use of a spoken
text at the beginning of the film which is exclusively in
Armenian privileges an exile Armenian audience, and the
exclusion of the majority of a Canadian audience. The
film thus stages the situation of exclusion from a
symbolic system, in that portions of the viewers are
excluded from the most essential layer of meaning in the
film. Indeed, the change from Armenian to English comes
suddenly and nearly imperceptibly. The exchange of
languages in this film is quite remarkable in that the
English text offers nothing more than a repetition of the
text that had been spoken in Armenian. If the text in the
film represents a telephone call to Armenia, why does the
Armenian text suddenly break off? Wasn't the caller being
understood? Is her Armenian already so poor? Does she
speak English to be understood? The exchange of languages
in Girl from Moush emphasizes unavoidably the fact
that the film was made in Canada. Despite all the
references to the location of film within the context of
an Armenian cultural inheritance, through the use of
English the viewer is inevitably confronted with the fact
of continuing exile. The
perspective implicit in Passing DRAMA differs
radically from that in Girl from Moush in that it
ostensibly no longer seeks to give shape to a particular
minority perspective. If Girl from Moush tells of
the melancholia of assimilation, experienced by the
second generation, Passing DRAMA claims to hold a
critical distance from the events of the past (i.e.
literally avoiding "drama") suggesting that assimilation
has already occurred. To what extent can Passing DRAMA
still be considered a depiction of minority
collective memory? While
Melitopoulos returns to the scene of the various events
in the life of her father, from Turkey to Austria, she is
more concerned to point out the silence of such locations
regarding the events of the past - the incongruity of the
time and place. In this fashion both the non-indexical
relationship of these images to their sources and the
non-identity of the original images with the temporally
processed ones is underscored. Unlike Girl from
Moush, which focuses on the trauma of forgetting,
Passing DRAMA considers the effects of time itself
on the range of perspectives still available; here trauma
is only present as an oblique residue. The
assimilation of this very disparate data is achieved
through the application of a schematic logic to the
digital processing of the images and sounds collected, in
turn creating a schematic relationship to the past. In
"Timescapes," a text on the video published by
Melitopoulos, she proposes that an adjustment to the
speed of the image and its compression or contraction is
suggestive of the transmission of a single narrative
through generations of storyteller. She
writes, But how may
such a strategy make itself felt in a work and in the
reception of that work? Images of landscapes are
dissolved into their individual pixels. Locations
pertinent to the testimony of the witnesses in the film
are processed according to their experiential distance
from the video artist herself, thus, according to
Melitopoulos, in her (English-language) "one sheet" for
the video, a range of "time zones" are created in the
work: But is it
possible for the viewer to be aware of these
distinctions? How does one become conscious of such
complex logarithmic processes during the viewing of
Passing DRAMA? One doesn't.
Melitopoulos is a very articulate and theoretically adept
filmmaker who sees to it that a screening of her video is
usually accompanied by either a discussion with her, or
access to her writing on the techniques employed in its
making. While she claims here that temporal alterations
of the material can be legible to the viewer as a means
of representing generations of storytellers (and
implicitly, Melitopoulos' own placement as storyteller
within these generations), this does not prove to be the
case in the work itself: the work remains, above all, the
product of an algorithm which does not make itself
legible in reception. And yet in this respect her
extensive comments on her own video are in themselves a
highly ambivalent act, which simultaneously seeks to
erase the presence of the author in the work but
underscore her presence in the room (or in the
programme). What are the
repercussions of this multiplicity of layers,
perspectives and times on the shape of the work? The
dissolution of a central subjective perspective palpable
within its aesthetic is the aim of this technique.
Melitopoulos writes: "subjectivization is nothing more
than the active synthesis of the various temporalities,
which correspond to the range of possibilities open to
the individual. This "virtual" past is a force that comes
into being in its moment of creation. [...] The
new (and political) subject begins to exist for me in the
moment when it succeeds in connecting fragments from
different levels of time."[14]
However, rather than positing (and displaying) a
subjectivity located in a relationship to the past, and
thus by extension in the past tense of the moment of the
work's creation, Passing DRAMA seeks to locate the
ordering logic only at the moment of its reception, in a
continual potential present tense. But where is the here
and now of this video? Who made it, when and
where? To date,
German media have demonstrated only a minor inclination
to take up the issue of minority identity within a
national identity otherwise defined by jus
sanguinis. Moreover, to speak of genocide in the
German cultural context, of slave labour and of the
contemporary question of the lot of the guest workers is
infinitely more fraught than a discussion of the Armenian
genocide in the Canadian context ever could be. However I
would not claim that Passing DRAMA seeks to
address this silence. On the contrary I argue that the
specific manner in which this work both constructs and
disavows group identity and subjectivity are markers of
the context of its production. Rather than
offer a reconstruction of the memory of the senses,
Passing DRAMA highlights both the increasing
distance from the specificity of the minority perspective
and the physical repercussions of assimilation contained
in the contradiction implicit in retention and
assimilation. The most sensuous images in the video are
those depicting the repetitive work performed, one has to
assume, by the people interviewed: planting fields by
hand, working industrial weaving machines, printing
presses, operating the machinery of industrial bakeries.
It is here that contemporary gaps in knowledge are pitted
against the indexes of toil and hardship found in
patterns in verbal phrasing and rhythms of physical work,
each of which are indicative of past experience - as
untellable as it may continue to be. The multitude of
times, places and perspectives implicit in the unwritten
history of refugees tend to hinder an assimilation of the
events into a single narrative. Nonetheless,
the process by which Melitopoulos combines material is
suggestive of a link between the storytellers in the past
and the one in the present: throughout the work, images
of hands performing various kinds of industrial and
pre-industrial work are edited together with images of
various landscapes. Weaving becomes the key motif in the
video providing the link between the "nomadic
storytellers of the orient" to which Melitopoulos refers
and the intellectual nomads working with digital
technology to which she allies herself. These two
temporally distant strategies are linked in a single
image only a few minutes into the work: landscapes are
literally woven into the cloth of this particular
fragmentary narrative, thus disparate fragments,
individual threads, are held adjacent to one another, are
spatially conflated, but are never completely
synthesized. This strategy at the heart of Passing
DRAMA ultimately resists a more synthetic analysis of
the relationship between past and present while drawing
the viewer's attention to the divisive nature of the
question posed by the work. The fact that Passing
DRAMA was the ex aqueo winner at the European
Media Arts Festival in Osnabrueck in 2000 suggests that
it has, in this fashion, also struck a particular chord
in its country of origin. (To
return to your place in the text, simply click on the
endnote number) [1]
Angela Melitopoulos, "Timescapes," Lab. Jahrbuch
1996/7 für Künste und Apparate, ed.
Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, (Köln:
Verein der Freunde der Kunsthochschule Köln, 1997):
175. [translation by the present
author] [2]
Maurice Halbwachs, Das Gedächtnis und seine
sozialen Bedingungen, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1985) 121. [translation by the present author
of the German translation of les cadres sociaux de la
mémoire: The available English translation of
Halbwachs' text is abridged.] [3]
Halbwachs, 201. [translation by the present
author] [4]
Frances Yates, The art of memory, (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1966). [5]
Jan Assmann, "Die Katastrophe des Vergessens. Das
Deuteronomium als Paradigma kultureller Mnemotechnik,"
Mnemosyne: Formen und Funktionen der kulturellen
Erinnerung, ed. Aleida Assmann and Dietrich Harth,
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag. 1991)
338. [6]
Renate Lachmann, "Die Unlöschbarkeit der Zeichen:
Das semiotische Unglück des Mnemonisten,"
Gedächtniskunst. Raum-Bild-Schrift, ed.
Renate Lachmann and Anselm Haverkamp, (Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1991) 111. [7]
Bill Nichols, Representing reality. Issues and
concepts in documentary, (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1991) 142. [8]
Stuart Hall, "Cultural identity and diaspora,"
Identity: community, culture, difference, ed.
Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990)
226. [9]
I am thinking here specifically of Stephen Heath's notion
of suture, which is applicable to non-narrative,
experimental or avant-garde film, outlined in Stephen
Heath, "On Suture," in Questions of cinema.
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1981). [10]
Bart Testa, Spirit in the landscape, (Toronto: Art
Gallery of Ontario, 1989) 1. [11]
See for instance Jonas Mekas, "The diary film," The
avant- garde film. A reader of theory and criticism,
ed. P. Adams Sitney, (New York: New York University
Press. 1978) 190-199; P. Adams Sitney ed., "Autobiography
in avant-garde film," The avant-garde film. A reader
of theory and criticism. 199-246. or Maureen Turim,
"Reminiscences, subjectivities, and truths," To free
the cinema. Jonas mekas & the new york underground,
ed. David E. James, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1992) 193-212. regarding the prototype
of this kind of filmmaking, Jonas Mekas. [12]
Hamid Naficy, "The cultural politics of hybridity,"
The making of exile cultures: iranian television in
los angeles, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993) 167-168. [13]
Melitopoulos, 175. [translation by the present
author] [14]
Melitopoulos, 180. [translation by the present
author]
6,759 words
Abstract
Forgetting
the catastrophe
Halbwachs
The
mnemonic frame of reference of collective memory
contains and connects our most personal memories. It
is not necessary for the group to be familiar with
those memories. It is enough that we do not have
access to them other than from the outside, that is,
in that we put ourselves in the position of others and
that in order to locate these memories we must take
the same cognitive route that others would have taken
had they been in our position.[3]
The
individual and the collective mnemotechnic
Social
memory functions in a reconstructive fashion: the only
part of the past which is retained by society in a
given epoch belongs to that which may be reconstructed
by means of its particular mnemonic framework.
Memories are retained because they are placed into the
context of certain thought processes. This context has
the status of a fiction. To remember means to give
experience meaning; to forget means to change this
context, causing certain memories to be
decontextualised and thus forgotten and others to be
reordered into new contextual models and thus
recalled.[5]
Cultural
forgetting
Identity as
process: The pathways of alterity
Girl From
Moush: (The stranger within) the Canadian landscape
tradition
Passing
DRAMA: The mnemonic of the professional
observer
As
was the case with the stories of the nomads of the
Orient, the duration of images vary from generation to
generation. Single frames become thousands of frames;
1/50th of a second can become
1000/50th or an hour. The movement of the
pixels in the video images contributes to the
stability of the objects that were filmed when they
are removed from their place within the flow of time.
The image generation (n-1) can become the image
generation (n-1), and it is not advisable to consider
the images (n-1) to be copies of the images n, but
rather to see them as an unknown land with new
possible trajectories, the lines of which trace the
contours of a geographic map. [13]
Real
time is representing the "here and now" time zone of
the narration. Half speed represents the second
generation of the narration and stands for the
documentary time zone of the narration. Half speed
represents the second generation of the narration and
stands for the documentary time zone (my fathers
recite). Images processed with dynamic motion
control are representing the generated imaginary of
places or paths known through stories told by others
(the third generation: my grand-parents) but not
perceived by oneself.
Endnotes
