Uploaded 1 December 2001
Forgetting the catastrophe
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.
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,
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]
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.
The individual and the collective mnemotechnic
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,
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]
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?
Cultural forgetting
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?
Identity as process: The pathways of alterity
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.
Girl From Moush: (The stranger within) the Canadian landscape tradition
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.
Passing DRAMA: The mnemonic of the professional observer
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,
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]
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:
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.
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.
Endnotes
[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]