⑩ Memory & Cinema
After cinema what does memory do? This is the question I am trying to answer. By 'after cinema' I mean after its advent as a globally accessible technology, a globally successful technology, which spread out to all four corners of the world, since the world then had them, within a handful of years from its first commercial public outing, in Paris, in 1895.
The reasons for its spread, it created its own market, it was a hit with the people, with every people, from those under the Tsar of Russia to Melbourne, where the first feature was shot in 1906. And it could fly on the wings of global commerce, which commerce had then, its parents were industrialisation and technology, who have lived in perfect sin happily ever after. This is all well known, the reason it captivated the capacity crowd in Paris, less so. Yet it did, with the result that the Lumières soon moved their start-up to a factory. It was they who sent their representatives to all four corners, under instruction not to let the curious look under the hood of their cinematograph, which was a projector and camera in one.
If that was the result, what was the cause? The forty or so who were there, left the Salon Indien, in the basement of the Grand Café, sure that they had seen the perfect depiction of nature. I mean, said one, the leaves on the trees were moving! Less well known is also that from this came, due to popular demand, the first film genre, the Wave Genre. It deserves its capitals, but why waves?
Waves are like leaves in their movement. It was nature in movement that had not been depicted before. Train films were also popular, but as much for their smoke, billowing into the atmosphere in quite fortuitous formations. Waves perhaps are more predictable.
What the Wave films let people do, which they were excited to do, not because they were nature lovers but for the fact of its depiction in cinema that it could now be done, was see in detail the movements of the waves. Each detail was caught on camera, how the spray shot up from the wave meeting the rocks around the lighthouse, and the next wave, and the next, how the foam caught the light and now individual droplets might be seen, if not this time. . . What film let people do was repeat. That time, did you see it? that particular product of a random process? And audiences would call for film, no matter, it lasted under a minute, to be both replayed and, on some occasions, played backwards.
Audiences most desired to see the random natural events, not even events, movements, be repeated and replayed, and reversed, in a way that linear time, which then was the rule, did not allow. My question throughout all this work has been, What effect did this have on their and our sense of time? at the levels of common and of expert knowledge? and, even though unacknowledged, of mathematics? Einstein after all came out of this juncture and another figure of equal renown, if not surpassing him, came first, Bergson. What consequence does the experience of cinema have for Bergson's concept of time, which preceded Einstein's Relativity, for duration?
Now I come to memory. Memory relates to movement in a way that differs from duration. In duration movement is not cut up and, if you think about it, cinema although it cuts up movement, does so for the sake of an overall movement. The basis for the shot, which is fundamental for cinematic time, is what captured those early audiences, and changed their minds sufficiently to lead them to think that the most chaotic of movements could be repeated, in a single movement. Duration is then maintained in the single movement of the cinematic shot.
Memory records that movement. Because of cinema it's thought to do so like it and, leaving aside where it is stored, like it, to be replayable. This is not however our experience. Cinema is simply a better medium for memory than whatever it is we use. That is, it's a better medium for image reproduction, but how does this play in time?
We are in our relation to the passage of time in the present. Yet we are unable to pin down exactly where this present is, so we make an approximation. We orientate ourselves in relation to the past and to the future, and extrapolate from this that we are in between. As Bergson says, we have one foot in the past and one in the future. Memory is how we stay orientated, disorientation results from its loss.
Yet we experience the intervening moment between past and present in consciousness. For us, whatever we are conscious of, whether it's a film, an hallucination, or the upsurge of memory, is present. In fact, in this gap we have a certain freedom. It is what Bergson calls a zone of indetermination, but not when it comes to memory, which requires from us that we toe the line, meaning, quite literally, that we stand in the immediate past.
The reason, the reason as soon as we think about the present moment it is past, is the fraction of a second which passes between the stimulus and its registration in consciousness. For memory this becomes a zone of determination. It determines what we experience before we are conscious of it: it is the past cohering to the present and making sense of it. The contents of memory are therefore our habits, of thought, speech or language and action; they represent what we recognise. Overwhelmed, say by the onrush of the future, we cannot make representation to ourselves, cannot recognise and cannot make sense of what we do not.
The shock is one in which the brain seems to open up all its files at once looking for some precedent, something of relevance, to its experience. The files are in memory. Bergson says something curious about them. He says each is a detailed account filed under its date and time. Yet, faced with a sudden shock, a trauma or accident, we normally, that is to say habitually, draw from the world of moving images the metaphor of slowmo. It is as if time stretches. In it we can see all the details of what is going on, such that any one might recall the whole scene later to us.
In addition, the movement in the scene, including that of our own bodies, does not seem contingent on us but we on it. We are, as it were, a function of it, a part of the wave. I saw myself, we might say, as if I was in a movie. The thread holding us to the present seems to have broken, seems cut, but all of the present plays out in it, as if belonging to a single duration, in one continuous shot.
It replays the same way. Dissociation seems the best way to approximate a mechanised medium for the recording and retrieval of memory. The scenario is so recognisable because so common, which would suggest that the unpleasantness is avoidable, but this is exactly what is not the case given the determination of memory, as a zone of determination, by the sense of time we get from cinema.
This time is one of dissociation. Memory represents its threat, which is that of radical contingency. While at once pulling us back from the brink, its assurance is that of withdrawing us from the zone of indetermination, in favour, that is, of safety.
Memory throws us back from the present, that line, to the safety of the passing present as able—
- to pass again
- to replay differently
it offers then this assurance to the imagination.
- it tends to place us in the recognisable: but not in order that we should know how to act. It withdraws us from the necessity or responsibility of action.
How does memory assume this role? because its process is that of passing. Duration, the break or cut, the zone of indetermination, what we perceive is the immediate past.
We would sooner be in memory as it is in representation. Cinematic memory does not avoid the new, but titrates it. Against the background of the generic there should always be something to engage our interest.
This conception of memory sits us in habit and recognition, in front of a future that projects itself, on screen. From, then, the past where memory places us, the future is out of reach of any of our actions. When things get a little or a lot out of control we have the feeling we are hurtling towards this screen. It engages us, but without touch.
We may always be in motion just not in action. Our bodies are centres of reception. Yet memory remains the condition enabling it to be conceived negatively, as here, and, being that which assures space for the passing present as a determinate process, positively imagined.
