The Heretical Archive: Digital Memory at the End of Film PDF
Preview The Heretical Archive: Digital Memory at the End of Film
c l i a t h e e t r e e v h r h i a c 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 This page intentionally left blank 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. This page intentionally left blank 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.
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