The Heretical Archive: Digital Memory at the End of Film

148 Pages·2013·2.064 MB·English

by  Domietta Torlasco

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d i g i t a l m e m o r y a t t h e e n d o f f i l m
Domietta Torlasco
the heretical archive
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the heretical ar-
chive
Digital memory at the enD of film
Domietta torlasco
University of Minnesota Press
contents
Acknowledgments vii
An earlier version of chapter 1 was published as “Against House Arrest: Digital
Memory and the Impossible Archive,” Camera Obscura 26, no. 1 (2011): 39–63. An Introduction ix
earlier version of chapter 2 was published as “Digital Impressions: Writing Memory
after Agnès Varda,” Discourse 33, no. 1 (2011): 390–408.
1 Against House Arrest 1
Figures 1–6 copyright 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, 2 Digital Impressions: Writing Memory after Agnès Varda 25
Bonn
3 Folding Time: Toward a New Theory of Montage 51
Copyright 2013 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
4 Archiving Disappearance: From Michelangelo
Antonioni to New Media 75
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Notes 101
publisher.
Index 117
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
ISBN 978-0-8166-8109-9 (hc)
ISBN 978-0-8166-8110-5 (pb)
A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of
Congress.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
contents
Acknowledgments vii
An earlier version of chapter 1 was published as “Against House Arrest: Digital
Memory and the Impossible Archive,” Camera Obscura 26, no. 1 (2011): 39–63. An Introduction ix
earlier version of chapter 2 was published as “Digital Impressions: Writing Memory
after Agnès Varda,” Discourse 33, no. 1 (2011): 390–408.
1 Against House Arrest 1
Figures 1–6 copyright 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, 2 Digital Impressions: Writing Memory after Agnès Varda 25
Bonn
3 Folding Time: Toward a New Theory of Montage 51
Copyright 2013 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
4 Archiving Disappearance: From Michelangelo
Antonioni to New Media 75
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Notes 101
publisher.
Index 117
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
ISBN 978-0-8166-8109-9 (hc)
ISBN 978-0-8166-8110-5 (pb)
A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of
Congress.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This page intentionally left blank
acknowleD gments
It takes several to write, even to perceive. This book exists at the crossing
of multiple exchanges as they have occurred through the years in both for-
mal and informal settings. My gratitude goes to the friends and colleagues
who have read and commented on this project at different stages of its
production: Scott Combs (who responded to each chapter with enthusiasm
and acuity), Alessia Ricciadi (the first invaluable reader of the completed
manuscript), Brian Price, Patricia White, Homay King, Akira Mizuta Lip-
pit, James Cahill, Dudley Andrew, Nasrin Qader, Huey Copeland, Marco
Poloni, and Timothy Campbell. To Daniel Eisenberg, my teacher at the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a filmmaker whom I greatly
admire, I owe what I have relearned about the image. My gratitude also
goes to the University of Minnesota Press readers, Amy Villarejo and An-
gelo Restivo, for the generosity and sharpness of their insights. Thanks
to Luke Fidler, my research assistant, for gracefully mustering the last de-
tails. The Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University,
where I was a fellow in the 2009–10 academic year, provided me with
institutional support and a forum for debate that considerably facilitated
the development of this work. Finally, I wish to thank Danielle Kasprzak,
the editor whose professionalism and intellectual determination have made
the publication of this book possible.
This book is dedicated to Diletta and Matteo.
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introduction
For art and philosophy together are precisely not arbitrary fabrications
in the universe of the “spiritual” (of “culture”), but contact with Being
precisely as creations. Being is what requires creation of us for us to
experience it.
Make an analysis of literature in this sense: as inscription of Being.
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the Visible and the invisible
What happens before a film starts, or after it ends, or between scenes?
What happens not only to characters, faces, and landscapes but also to
colors and lines? Where do they go? Do they continue to exist somewhere
else, in a state of repose or pulsating activity, careless about frames and
rules of narrative continuity or hopelessly bound to them? How do they
change in time, through time, under the influence of different looks and
viewing contexts? In Poetics of Cinema, Raúl Ruiz writes that “every
film is always the bearer of another, a secret film,” indeed, of several films
existing simultaneously behind or next to the official one, inhabiting its
interstices, moments of pause, and off-screen spaces.1 To uncover the hid-
den films, the viewer should exercise her capacity for “double vision,” that
is, practice a manner of viewing that plays with the incompleteness of each
film, disturbing even the most seamless scenes, until the film’s “missing
fragments” begin to emerge and gather into new audiovisual configura-
tions.2 A prolific filmmaker and writer, Ruiz advocates for a cinema that
materializes such a viewing experience (at once receptive and intrusive,
exegetic and creative), a cinema capable of rendering visible the plurality
of images and stories that each image or story in principle contains. The
rebirth of cinema, assuming that cinema has died and that it has done so
only once, would lie in the discovery (never to become exhaustive) of its
multiple, conflicting, hardly lived pasts.