Violating Time: History, Memory, and Nostalgia in Cinema 9781628929164, 9781441151315

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To my parents, Gerk Hong and Eng Guan Lee

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Acknowledgments This anthology would not have been possible without the tremendous efforts of the contributors: Zoe Trodd, J. A. Rice, Pamela L. Kerpius, Steven Alan Carr, Roger F. Cook, Michael Sugimoto, Yiman Wang, Adam Trainer, Daniel Cross Turner, Michael Pigott, James Walters, and Chuck Tryon. I cannot thank them enough for their passion and energy for innovative scholarship in Cinema Studies, and their stamina in seeing this project through from its humble beginnings to its completion. On this journey, I was always grateful for the company of my fellow-travelers. I feel extremely fortunate to have had David Barker and Katie Gallof of Continuum Books guide me through the editing of the anthology and patiently field my barrage of questions. As it was unthinkable to put together a book on film without images, I am grateful to Sara Kirby from WireImage; Philippa Hutson, Adam Gastineau, and Lisa Marie Rae from Getty Images; and Jeremy Drouin from Kansas City Public Library for assisting in their acquisition. The Humanities Publication Grant from Curtin University of Technology provided financial assistance to complete the manuscript. Special mention goes to Wanning Sun, Ron Blaber, Jon Stratton, and my colleagues at the Department of Communication and Cultural Studies for their support and advice. Yet again, Denise Woods was invaluable as my fresh pair of eyes and sounding board. Many thanks go to Miyume Tanji, Melissa Loh, Alzena D’Costa, Kara-Jane Lombard, Joanne Jones, Tod Jones, and Zachary Whitely for their words of encouragement and measured doses of distraction. I am grateful to my sister, Josephine, for sharing my enthusiasm for good cinema and entertaining my numerous brainstorming sessions, and to my brother, Jason, for all things technical. Heartfelt thanks to Suzanne Galloway, Sergio Rigoletto, and Simonne Hurse for always reminding me of the beauty of words. Deepest gratitude to my parents, Gerk Hong and Eng Guan Lee, for their unfailing support, patience, and understanding that cinema was never just a pastime but a lifelong passion. I dedicate this anthology to them. ix

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Introduction Christina Lee

“Long ago I had a vague inkling of a machine—” “To travel through Time!” exclaimed the Very Young Man. “That shall travel indifferently in any direction of Space and Time, as the driver determines.” (Wells 1965 [1895]: 6) As the ultimate apparatus of power, time not only dictates how bodies move through space but also influences how events unfold, are recorded, and are remembered. We are either bound to its constraints and shackled to the global timekeeper of the clock or pushed outside of it altogether to become the ghosts of the past.1 The advent of the official “timekeeper”— both the mechanical apparatus and the wardens given the task of watching the clock and maintaining the timesheets of employees in the industrial age—clearly articulates the intimate relationship between time, power, and order (Thompson 1967: 60–61). For instance, a trade worker quoted in a late eighteenth-century autobiography stated: in reality there were no regular hours, masters and managers did with us as they liked. The clocks at the factories were often put forward in the morning and back at night, and instead of being instruments for the measurement of time, they were used as cloaks for cheatery and oppression. Though this was known amongst the hands, all were afraid to speak, and a workman then was afraid to carry a watch, as it was no uncommon event to dismiss any one who presumed to know too much about the science of horology. (Myles 1850: 12–13)

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This ruthless manipulation demonstrates the restrictions of being timebound. In postindustrial society, time must adhere to a logic of absolutism and strict chronology. But what if time were not fixed or linear? What potential does the theory of relativity hold? What chaos and creation could be imagined? These questions have long fascinated practitioners in the sciences and the arts, and flitted through the reveries of daydreamers. The time traveler—whether it be the historian or the character in a fictional narrative—commands an unparalleled authority to reimagine, even rewrite, history and vault through the fourth dimension. His or her ability to rewind, fast-forward, and alter the speed at which time unravels reveals the fantasy of the limitless potential of scientific advancement and furthermore the dreams, desires, and demons of societies and individuals. Reverting to the past is always an exercise in nostalgia, loss, and longing intricately intertwined with memory, and projections into the future are an attempt to improve on the present. Cinema lends itself to the appellation of the virtual time machine. It allows the filmmaker to “travel indifferently in any direction of Space and Time,” and the audience the privilege of partaking in this journey. Anne Friedberg writes: The cinema functions as a machine for virtual time travel in three ways: first, as a theatrical “set piece,” set in a period in the past or in the future; second in its capacity, through montage, to elicit an elliptical temporality; and third, in its ability to be repeated, over time, imparting to each spectator a unique montage-consciousness. (1993: 103) Allowing for leaps and breaks in the space-time continuum, the effects of time in cinema are not merely manifested—for instance, in the ubiquitous montage of pages falling from a calendar or the full cycle of a flower blossoming and then withering within seconds through the use of time-lapse photography and editing. Time itself becomes visible. We observe not history already remade but history in the very process of its remaking. Elizabeth Grosz posits that time is ephemeral: “thus erasing itself as such while it opens itself to movement and change . . . it disappears into events, processes, movements, things, as the mode of their becoming” (1999: 1–2). In time travel, however, it is rendered accessible and tangible as it enables a bodily transporting to past or future (Lowenthal 2006 [1985]: 20–21). This is reified in Alan Lightman’s book Einstein’s Dreams (1993), in which

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the author proposes a series of alternate realms of time, one of which is particularly apt for our purposes: In this world, time is a visible dimension. Just as one may look off in the distance and see houses, trees, mountain peaks that are landmarks in space, so one may look out in another direction and see births, marriages, deaths that are signposts in time, stretching off dimly into the far future. And just as one may choose whether to stay in one place or run to another, so one may choose his motion along the axis of time. Some people fear traveling far from a comfortable moment. They remain close to one temporal location, barely crawling past a familiar occasion. Others gallop recklessly into the future, without preparation for the rapid sequence of passing events. (1993: 133–34, emphasis added) It is this notion of “temporal location”—time as a place that can be traveled to—that cinema is able to realize and capture. Its most explicit expression is in the genre of the science-fiction time-travel film, where the past, present, and future become destinations for the characters. Outside of such visual arts, we find an equivalent in the erecting of monuments, museums, and memorials in which moments in history are supposedly “frozen in time”—and, we might add, “frozen in space.” Mao Zedong’s Mausoleum in Tiananmen Square, a futuristic exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Arts, and the recreated (and relocated) Globe Theater in London’s South Bank offer the opportunity to visit places in time. Even in proto-cinematic forms, such as the stereoscope, panorama, diorama, and daguerreotype, the audience was transported somewhere and some time else. New technologies allowed the past to be brought into the present, memory to be “captured” in the still image, and experimentation with temporal and spatial manipulation through movement onscreen. The often cited example of George Méliès’ omnibus metamorphosed into a hearse, as a result of a fortunate malfunction of his cinematic apparatus, exemplifies temporal ellipses “transform[ing] real time into a magical film time” (Friedberg 1993: 87).2 Violating Time: History, Memory, and Nostalgia in Cinema examines “time” as a defining factor influencing our experiences, interpretations, and knowledge of events. The essays herein explore the narrative and aesthetic possibilities opened up by disruptions to linear temporal logic that produce new cultural geographies of time and space. Through the politics

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of tactical remembering and forgetting, the authors investigate acts of subversion and the destabilizing of fictional and factual narratives, as well as the creative potential and empowerment offered by cinematic time travel where the course of history is, figuratively and literally, altered. Simultaneously, as the act of time traveling offers temporal mobility it also elucidates time as a regulatory mechanism. The chapters in this collection reflect the multifaceted nature of time and its significance for narrative. Although the past has become shorthand for antiquity (granting it a datedness, historical validity, and certain credibility) and the future is oftentimes dismissed as the domain of fantasy and whimsical speculation, the book anchors both firmly in the present to provide commentary on issues relevant to a contemporary readership. Representations of past and future are not isolated—the romantic reminiscences of yesterday or grand visions of tomorrow. They evoke the preoccupations and anxieties of the present, whether it be the skepticism of nostalgic kitsch and postmodern depthlessness (as in The Royal Tenenbaums) or the postmillennial fears of disappearing histories, manufactured memories, and loss of identity in a globalized, digital age (as seen in films such as Strange Days, Fight Club, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). Memory, history, and nostalgia are never just of the past, nor are they static and immutable. Through time travel, films allow the protagonist to “rehears[e] the known past” with the possibility of intervention and to foreshadow concerns about and fears of the future with the benefit of hindsight (Friedberg 1993: 106). Violating Time contributes to a burgeoning body of literature amid a culture of feverish documentation and memorialization of historical events. Andreas Huyssen argues that this call on memory and musealization works as a “bulwark against obsolescence and disappearance, to counter our deep anxiety about the speed of change and the ever-shrinking horizons of time and space” (2003: 23). This echoes Fredric Jameson’s contention that we are witnessing: the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions. (1998: 143–44) The proliferation of memory discourses in the academy and a prominent memory culture are symptomatic of the push to preserve the past, from restorative architecture and national monuments to dedicated private

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memorializations3 and homages to the vintage past in the media. Through still photography and the moving image of cinema and television, images and events have been seared into public consciousness and collective memory. This grants them immediacy and relevance as they become tantamount to the histories still of our time. For instance, the death in 2005 of Peter Casserly—the last surviving Anzac “Digger”—was cause for much media attention and commemoration in Australia, and for the evocation of a deeply felt nationalist nostalgia “lest we forget.” The urgency to document eyewitness testimonies of the last survivors of World War II concentration camps similarly reveals a fear of history slipping away—the passing of our era. Violating Time assembles a spectrum of filmic genres from documentaries, historic recreations, and biopics to science-fiction to illustrate a symbiotic relationship between what is regarded as “real” and what is regarded as “unreal.” A central tenet of the book is that cinematic narratives are inevitably pieced together from fragments of history and imagination, making the simplistic division between fact and fiction, objective and subjective, and history and memory a tenuous one. This is not to imply that such distinctions are irrelevant but to recognize the nature of mediated representations by which we know the world. How are events, myths, cultural narratives, and memories refracted through the cinematic lens over and through time? What socio-cultural and political shifts do they indicate? And what are the implications? These questions are raised throughout the text. Individual chapters look at landmark events in official historiography and mine the gaps in time where private accounts, shared recollections, and imagined realities reveal counter-memories and alternative histories that, to continue the metaphor of cinema as time-travel machine, simulate tangential and potential universes. There is a temporal progression in the book from proto-cinematic technologies for capturing events and time to the digital age of a so-called post-cinema that is represented by the bookends of Violating Time. In the first chapter, Zoe Trodd foregrounds the function of proto-filmic visual narratives, such as photograph albums, in the archiving of the American Civil War. Although these media were integral to documentation and remembrance, more important was that they articulated a visual rhetoric that gave temporal order and logic to historical events in which history became fixed and determined. It was the development of cinema that introduced counter-memories, micro-histories, and parallel stories of the conflict into public imagination. Drawing on such films as The General, Little Women, Gone with the Wind, and Sherman’s March, Trodd illustrates

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how motion pictures were able to negotiate visual memories of the war by opening the “cracks between.” J. A. Rice critiques the possibility, or rather impossibility, of historical representations in documentary filmmaking. In the 2001 series Jazz, the cinematic style and documentary/narrative method of director Ken Burns condense the history of jazz into what Rice dubs “its greatest hits.” Jazz history and time itself are rendered as a series of iconic, but static, stilllife portraits of notable personalities, locales, and images the audience of contemporary times has already come to expect. In short, the ideological investment of both filmmaker and audience is present from the outset, signifying a problematic relationship between the object (of history) and the subject’s interpretation of it. Burns’ Jazz reveals the limitations of historical representation and the impossibility of historical totality for the subject in the postmodern age. Through a study of the memoir All The President’s Men by journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and the film adaptation by Alan J. Pakula, Pamela L. Kerpius examines the similarities between fictional storytelling and written history. Although the boundaries of fiction and fact surrounding the 1972 Watergate scandal are softened in Bernstein and Woodward’s literary account and Pakula’s filmic adaptation, this does not negate their validity. Much has been written about the necessity in cinema and history to edit a story to present a coherent narrative, even at the expense of manipulating facts to transport the audience to a specific place and time, but it is the spaces and moments in-between that interest Kerpius. Personal detail and descriptions of mood can elicit an emotional dimension that can breathe more life into a history’s characters and events. Memory is no longer disregarded as unreliable but plays an integral part in remembrance. Kerpius demonstrates that in the case of All The President’s Men, the dramatic unfolding of the controversy onscreen is as much a reiteration of a shared memory as it is history in the making before our very eyes. As a defining event in contemporary history that has energized and spurred on memory discourses since the 1980s, partly due to “a whole series of politically loaded and widely covered fortieth and fiftieth anniversaries relating to the history of the Third Reich” (Huyssen 2003: 12), much has been written about the Holocaust.4 The emphasis has often been on the image and trauma. Steven Alan Carr takes a different approach in his study of the Holocaust and footage by Allied and European newsreel cinematographers by focusing on the organizing structure of time. Here, “time” not only refers to footage duration but also to the time between the shooting of events and their screening, the time taken for the footage to be regarded as

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evidentiary material in the courtroom and its appropriation by mainstream cinema, and the time between such imagery signifying localized suffering and becoming a signifier of universal atrocity. As Carr asserts, an acknowledgment of the importance of time and the context of audience reception allows us more accurately to gauge the mythology and master narratives representing the Holocaust and to understand how new realities have been produced in public memory over time, then and now. Roger F. Cook’s discussion of Good Bye, Lenin! illustrates the notion that as “fundamentally contingent categories of historically rooted perception, time and space are always bound up with each other in complex ways” (Huyssen 2003: 12). The film’s motif of space travel—itself symbolically significant as it connotes travels through time (often into the future)— weaves a thread back to past experiences to represent the utopian ideals of the pre-1989 socialist state of East Germany. The protagonist turns back the clock, aided by foreknowledge of the future (or his actual present), as he attempts to recreate a microcosm of the German Democratic Republic. Alex’s painstaking efforts to replicate the past, as well as the film’s mixing of actual documentary footage with fictional events, produces a temporally layered visual memory to generate longing for a collective national identity. Cook argues that the success of Good Bye, Lenin! resides in its power to rouse nostalgia that transcends national boundaries through tangible associations with commodity culture and the idealistic vision of an earlier age of innocence. Whereas Cook sees the unifying potential of nostalgia in generating a national identity for the present, Michael Sugimoto explores how filmic texts can destabilize our previously comfortable relationship to the past. Concentrating on Sino-Japanese war memories and Hiroshima, Sugimoto posits that “memory practices” such as educational curriculum and memorials recast national identity in terms of time and space. They reflect the workings of the nation-state to seal off history. In his reading of the temporal/spatial logic in Hiroshima Mon Amour and Rashomon, this problematic narrative closure betrays a national unease in recalling a traumatic past. How can the unimaginable be represented and remembered when it continues to be unresolved in the present and past? Does Japanese remembrance of wartime trauma exemplify a memory crisis in modernity? By analyzing the role of film in the ideological construction of public memory of war and of public acts of remembrance, Sugimoto asks whether we can ever truly know the past. If, as the adage says, “history repeats itself,” what is the point of repeating failure when given a second chance? This is the concern of Yiman Wang’s comparative reading of the 1948 film Spring in a Small Town

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directed by Fei Mu and Tian Zhuangzhuang’s remake in 2002. During a period of retrospection, celebration, and compulsive archivization in Chinese cinema, Tian’s admission that his remake is a “failure” is not simply a modest homage to the previous masterpiece. More importantly, the director’s remaking strategies use memory to rewrite film history on various levels by evoking nostalgia for Fei’s original film and the remembrance of a glorious but “ruined” past. Through the film’s settings—actual ruins of the small town—Tian foregrounds the site and mechanism of memory to offer an alternative view of cultural reminiscence and filmic history to the perspective of a postsocialist China. Wang considers the loss and repeated melancholia in both films and also the revisioning of history from the act of retracing the past. Recent decades have witnessed the escalation of a nostalgic commodity culture in Hong Kong in which the past is fetishized. This continual looking back is symptomatic of an uneasy relationship to disappearing memories and histories. In her study of the oeuvre of Wong Kar Wai, Christina Lee argues that this disjunction between time and space results in a state of uncanniness and out-of-time-ness. Individuals attempt to recapture and re-enact the past by visiting sites of nostalgic significance. When these sites no longer exist, or are so altered that they are unrecognizable, this threatens to destabilize memories and personal histories associated with the physical spaces. Focusing on In the Mood for Love and 2046, and with reference to several of Wong’s previous works, Lee critiques the notion of spatialized time as a way of preserving the past, or at the very least stalling the inevitable slipping away of time. The documenting of historical events raises concerns surrounding authenticity, accuracy, authority, and objectivity. The rewriting of history itself is never without an agenda. Whose version of events is (to be) privileged? And what exactly is an accurate historical representation of a cultural realm dictated by popular memory and personal experience? These issues are interrogated in Adam Trainer’s discussion of punk culture, specifically the Sex Pistols and the three films made about them: The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, The Filth and the Fury, and Sid and Nancy. Thrice-over, the story of Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, Steve Jones, and Paul Cook has been written and rewritten by former Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, Julien Temple, and Alex Cox. Through the biopic and rockumentary, Trainer looks at cinematic methods for the representation and recreation of the Sex Pistols and the past in British rock music, and at how film can function as a medium for cinematic and historical revisionism. Through popular memory, the myths and metanarratives of individuals and collectives are perpetuated,

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thereby ensuring that immortality for the gods of rock is inevitable and the future never arrives. Within a growing memory culture in the West, nostalgia and nostalgic kitsch have become de rigueur in commodity culture, as evidenced in recycled fashion and television programs, retro décor, and politicians spouting ideals and values emanating from the “golden era” of the 1950s. Daniel Cross Turner addresses this shift in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. As a deadpan parody of the traditional family film, The Royal Tenenbaums critiques the apparent depthlessness of cinema and the family unit as structuring agents of nostalgia. Diverging from the common perception of nostalgia as signifying longing for recovery of the past, Anderson’s dysfunctional family suggests a contemporary understanding of nostalgia as a construction of the past for public consumption—style without substance, or rather style replacing substance, and the past as pastiche. Characters in the film literally live in their past (their couture is meticulously 1980s), yet it is a decade in their lives that seems particularly empty and from which they appear detached. Turner poses the crucial question: if nostalgia as a restorative cultural ethos is no longer operative, is parody of the nostalgic past enough to sustain us? Michael Pigott explores the aesthetic potential of visually manifesting memory, and making those manifestations objects that can be actively engaged with and altered, in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Memories are no longer unchangeable visions of the past—as encapsulated in the traditional filmic flashback—but mutable and plastic. In director Michel Gondry’s fantastical world, the film’s protagonist Joel experiences a confusing convergence of his past and present, the real and imagined, as he attempts to erase all traces of his lover through a medical procedure, then to halt this process. Joel races against time, journeying through his memories as his past rapidly deteriorates before him. Drawing on Henri Bergson’s conceptualization of “pure memory” and the act of remembering itself as a case of “stepping into” memory, Pigott probes the blurred distinction between memory and perception, and the ramifications of digital technology for human experience where the effects are both destructive and (experientially and cinematically) creative and dynamic. One of the most acclaimed time-travel films is Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, which has, since its initial theatrical release in 2001, achieved cult status and generated critical debate. Set during the Dukakis–Bush presidential election in 1988, the film returns to a historical past to reflect on the illiberal politics of 1980s middle America. In Donnie Darko, time and memory are ruptured when primary and tangential worlds converge, and

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Donnie Darko is left with the task of averting a time–space catastrophe after he is warned that the world will end in “28 days . . . 6 hours . . . 42 minutes . . . 12 seconds.” James Walters proposes that the film’s resonance involves memories of real and invented histories that draw on our extratextual memories, knowledge, and understanding of the decade. The film is an exercise in remembrance: the audience is invited to revisit the 1980s, and the characters in the film “remember” through actual and phantom memories. By rendering the past as a strange and unfamiliar place, Walters contends that Donnie Darko reimagines history as something capable of being negotiated and refigured. Here, history can be learned from rather than blindly repeated. Ending Violating Time is Chuck Tryon’s exploration of the impact of new technologies on filmmaking and audience experience. In response to fragmented identities associated with the digital age, database narratives and avatar subjectivities (derived from video game culture) offer characters opportunities for reinvention. This idea of transformation is particularly significant as it accords marginalized and disempowered individuals agency over identity. Concentrating on three variants of the alternatereality narrative—the bifurcation in the past, the bifurcation in the present, and spiral or time-loop films—Tryon suggests that technological innovations may, despite claims of the “death of cinema,” ultimately give rise to new ways of thinking about temporality, virtuality, and subjectivity in film. Tryon’s chapter serves as a fitting conclusion to this book. Like the time traveler, the audience is not content to remain frozen in time but is always pushing forwards. This is a journey that always leaves traces/tracks of where we have come from and where we are going.

Notes 1. For further reading on the intimate relationship between time and power in postindustrial society, see E. P. Thompson’s seminal essay “Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism” (1967). 2. See Douwe Draaisma’s discussion of the camera obscura and early imaging technologies as a “mirror with a memory” (2000: 103–37). 3. An example of one such dedicated private memorialization is the Beatles Museum on Baker Street in London—a one-room time capsule located in a basement full of memorabilia, posters, and photographs for sale. 4. Andreas Huyssen provides a truncated history of the development of memory discourses in Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (2003). In particular, see pages 11–29.

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References Draaisma, Douwe (2000), Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas about the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Friedberg, Anne (1993), Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: University of California Press. Grosz, Elizabeth (1999), “Becoming . . . an introduction,” in Elizabeth Grosz (ed.), Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1–11. Huyssen, Andreas (2003), Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Jameson, Fredric (1998), “Postmodernism and consumer society,” in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. New York: The New York Press, 127–44. Lightman, Alan (1993), Einstein’s Dreams. New York: Warner Books. Lowenthal, David (2006 [1985]), The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Myles, James (1850), Chapters in the Life of a Dundee Factory Boy: An Autobiography. Dundee, Scotland: James Myles. Thompson, E. P. (1967), “Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism,” Past and Present, 38 (December): 56–97. Wells, H. G. (1965 [1895]), The Time Machine. London: Heinemann Educational.

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1 “The Cracks Between”: Cinematic and Proto-Cinematic Counter-Memories of the American Civil War Zoe Trodd

Reality has fallen into the cracks between life and film. (Ross McElwee in Sherman’s March) “Don’t you see the resemblance between me and Sherman?” asks Ross McElwee, as he retraces General Sherman’s 1864–65 march from Atlanta to Savannah and on through the Carolinas in his 1986 documentary film Sherman’s March. McElwee had set out to document the lingering psychological effects of Sherman’s campaign on the region but ended up producing, as the film’s subtitle puts it, “A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South during an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation.” Veering off track, the film offers a historical counternarrative and a new path through the South, complete with parallel-reality details like a Burt Reynolds look-alike who pops up throughout, some photographs airbrushed by a school, a story about Sherman changing hats and swapping places with someone else, and the imaginary world of McElwee’s friend and muse Charleen Swansea. Rerunning history, McElwee uncovers what he calls “the cracks between life and film.” McElwee’s is one of several Civil War films that offer counter-memories of the conflict. Civil War films have long countered what Stephen Crane calls, in The Red Badge of Courage, “the impulse of the living to try to read

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in dead eyes the answer to the Question” (1994 [1895]: 19). Films such as The General (1927), Little Women (1933), Gone with the Wind (1939), and The Red Badge of Courage (1951) have resisted attempts to impose a single meaning on the Civil War or make it part of a providential plan. “Once upon a screen there was a war,” ran a 1915 advertisement (Universal Film Co. 1915: 545). But Civil War films have insisted that twice and more upon a screen there were some wars: their narratological codes offered counternarratives against formulations like once upon a time. Immediately after the war, efforts at imposing meaning took the form of a national remembrance through monuments, memoirs, exhibitions, and biographies. Photograph albums also participated in the process of making sense of the war: part of America’s cultural self-definition at that moment involved the fusion of moral and technical progress, and photography, which symbolized technical progress, championed moral progress too. Civil War photographers updated the earlier format of photograph albums, which had included slotted pages for the viewer to arrange and rearrange images, and carved a permanent narrative and a definite order. The visual rhetoric of sequenced narratives in photograph albums suggested that historical movement—emblematized by the movement of the reader through the albums—was fixed and determined. This organization, each image in its right place, parts subordinated to whole, reflected the worldview of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Romantic and scientific historians, as well as the new order of rationality and regimentation visible in the industrial factories and in Sherman’s famous system of subordination and obedience. Twentieth-century Civil War films then bore traces of these photographs, as an advertisement for a 1911 Civil War film hinted: You’ll think the great Brady took a moving picture camera South with him and we discovered his long-lost reel. Certainly, all the rediscovered Brady Collection of war photos will not surpass this motion film as an accurate picture of Rebellion time. (Thanhouser Film Co. 1911: 626) As though unrolling this “reel” of war photographs, the Southern countryside in Buster Keaton’s film The General, especially the railroad depots and bridges, animates Alexander Gardner’s images in the Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War (1866), and the protagonist, train driver Johnnie, refers to photographs throughout. George Cukor’s film Little Women opens with a still of a snowy scene and then shifts to film footage of snow falling

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on the same scene—again, bringing to life a photograph. The film is then full of photographic tableaux around Marmee’s (Spring Byington) chair or Beth’s (Jean Parker) piano, and the characters are as self-conscious as Keaton’s Johnnie about the pervasive presence of photography: when Marmee looks at the girls as she leaves for Washington, she says, “I want to take away a picture of my girls,” and in another scene Laurie (Douglass Montgomery) watches the sisters through a window and comments, “Such a picture.” John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage is another film that exhibits a visual memory of Civil War photographs. Released the same year that Crane’s novel was reissued with several Mathew Brady photographs, Huston’s landscapes animated numerous images by Brady and Gardner. In 1918, Francis Trevelyan Miller, the founder of the Journal of American History and the steward of The Photographic History of the Civil War, had tried to break from this tradition, acknowledging the moving picture camera as a new and better historian of the conflict. He wrote to D. W. Griffith of his recent film Hearts of the World: “[Y]our work reaches millions of people where we reach only thousands . . . We feel privileged in greeting you as the Greatest of War Historians” (quoted in Wood 1990: 165). Griffith’s picture embodied “the spirit and soul of the War” with a “deeper reality” than Miller’s “nineteen albums of photographs,” and so Miller offered greetings “from an historian of the old school of typography, to a historian of the New School of Cinematography” (ibid. 167). Yet others believed that photographs endured as a living history of the Civil War, one veteran apparently insisting of Miller’s Photographic History of the Civil War: “These vivid pictures bring history into present tense . . . There are revealed to the eye through these photographs, as if through a vitascope, the successive scenes of the great life and death drama of the nation’s struggle for existence” (Miller 1911: 60). This Civil War veteran’s focus on the photographs’ vitascopic “successive scenes” suggests their ongoing recontextualization within what Miller calls “the New School of Cinematography.” In fact, one reason for the enduring influence of nineteenth-century albums of war photographs on twentieth-century Civil War films was the albums’ filmic—or vitascopic—quality. For example, George Barnard and Alexander Gardner took thousands of war photographs and distilled them into Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign and the Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War, both published in 1866. Both photographers sequenced their albums and wrote the accompanying narratives, and both albums have visual emplotments and containing narratives that control the disruption of history by war: tight grammars of seeing that work, machinelike, against fragmentation. The albums resist Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous

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“decisive moment” for photography (what he explained in 1952 as a symbolic single moment in an individual frame; 1999: 22). Carefully ordered, the two albums offer a story of reunification and progress, akin to that of Jo in Louisa May Alcott’s war-era novel. Like Barnard and Gardner, Jo makes story out of fragment and historical disjectia: the chests in Little Women (1868) contain “relics” out of which Jo crafts the sisters’ individual “histories” in verse. These relics “tell tales” that bring Mr. Bhaer as “knight” and “fairy-prince,” and make her own life a story. Dead treasures of the garret come to life, and Jo’s own ossification becomes renewal in the “falling summer rain” of her poem—rain that falls as she re-reads it with Bhaer (Alcott 1989 [1868]: 475–79). This postwar impulse to find story out of trace and erase interruption similarly appeared in the song “John Brown’s Body”: if John Brown’s soul marched on, lifted out of the moldering grave, then the nation’s soul could march out of the wasteland and into reconstruction. Confronting that wasteland, and partaking of this postwar impulse to renew life out of relic, Gardner and Barnard sought to fit the war into the continuous trajectory of the nation’s history. Their albums equate the unity of a political structure with that of an artifact, re-member fragments through narrative, and restore the devastated landscape to its Edenic state. Timothy Sweet maintains that “the arrangement of images constructs relatively few historical relationships and continuities” (1990: 138), and Alan Trachtenberg notes that photographic sequences have a literary narrative but that “continuity from image to image [in Barnard’s album] depends entirely on the parallel narrative” (1989: 95). Continuity, however, is far from dependent on the parallel narratives. For example, Barnard’s album has a damaged white house in plates 38–39, and the sequence of plates 39–42 functions as an explanation of how the white house was damaged. The hole in the house is made by a cannonball: plates 40 and 42 are similar shots, and plate 41 is a close-up of the cannon, so the shape around the head of the cannon created by the sandbags and the cannon-wheel directly echoes the shape and size of the large hole in the side of the white house. A visual syntax of horizontal meaning between images creates narrative relationships elsewhere in the album. Plates 4–5 are a close-up on a bridge followed by the view from the bridge, so opening outwards (and this device is echoed in plates 6–7, 13–14, 49–50, all of which move from inland to sea-view). Plates 4–5 are further linked by the human figure who in plate 4 takes the camera’s view in plate 5, and vice versa. Similarly, plates 9–10 have their views shot from each other’s locations (“Mission Ridge from Orchard Knob” and “Orchard

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Knob from Mission Ridge”). Placing the reader into this narrative, plates 9–11 survey an area and then reach plate 12, “Scene of Sherman’s Attack,” enacting the likely movements of Sherman himself. The filmic shot-reverse-shot of plates 2–3 is another sequence that makes the reader an aggressor, who surveys then captures the Capitol (and this device is used in plates 31–32 and 56–57 as well).1 Progress marches on. Though plates 52–53 echo and alter plates 2–3 (in 52–53 the Capitol is ruined and so the album seems to chart a downward spiral, from 2–3 to 52–53), the last image of the collection runs the perspective away to the right, so that the direction of the book continues forward, suggesting the possibility of progress into the future. Equally, devastation initially overwhelms plates 54–55: plate 54 has clusters of white flowers in the foreground, whereas plate 55 has piles of broken white bricks, suggesting a pastoral under rubble. Reconstruction seems fraught, and in plate 60 (reproduced here) the white figure sits higher than the black: the image implies that their social positions will remain the same. But at the center of plate 60 is renewal in the form of the building’s scaffolding. In addition, the black figure sits closer to the water, gazing right into it, beginning the reflection that will renew the pastoral and restore the flowers. Through the naturalizing project of pastoralism and the picturesque, Barnard provided a narrative with which to approach the chaos of death and war. Gardner was another photographer who answered the cultural need to impose meaning on the conflict. Like Barnard, he made the coming of the Civil War as inevitable as the journey of Johnnie’s train over its tracks in The General. His album has a clear beginning and end. Plate 1 is a photograph of the corner of a building, the angle forcing the picture in two directions to make a “house divided.” Then plate 3 shows two men watching and reading: they face to the right, anticipating the approaching narrative. In plate 4 the photograph’s figures begin the narrative journey: passing over ruins, men drag a cart up a stony path, perhaps all the way to the bridge in plate 98. This bridge, though “rather insecure,” can be crossed “slowly”: the house divided is reunited.2 A narrative flows between this careful beginning and end. Some images are sequenced through variation of angle (plates 9–10, 12–13), and some by theme (plates 97–98 share the theme of railways, and plates 47–48 have a close-up then a long shot of white tents). Clues in the captions link other images: plates 40–41 move from the corpse of one sharpshooter to another via the caption to plate 40, the last line of which describes sharpshooters who “secreted themselves so as not to defy discovery,” leading the reader

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“Ruins in Charleston S.C.” in George N. Barnard (1977 [1866]), Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign, plate 60. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

toward the hidden sharpshooter of plate 41. Gardner also uses captioned sequences to restore natural cycles: plate 5 makes war part of nature, its caption moving from “east” to “west” while the photograph shifts perspective from right to left, and plates 47–48 depict different scenes but connect through the evening sun in the caption to plate 47 and the dawn in the caption to plate 48. Gardner was attempting to move beyond the symbolic presence of the sharpshooter’s corpse—a body-in-the-garden that disrupts America’s Edenic pastoral. He insists on the corpse-less pastoral of the future when “the artist . . . again visited the ‘Sharpshooter’s Home’” to find the body gone. This restorative future appears again in the captions to plates 3, 4, 10, 11, 30, and 39, which imagine the landscape after its recovery from death and war. Gardner also summons the pastoral in his famous image “The Harvest of Death.” Here the wheat stalks parallel the bloated chests of corpses that rise vertically toward the sky: despite the Grim Reaper figure in the background, the dead men seem to live and grow even as they decay. Gardner imbues the figures with further life through placing the image

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within a sequence: plates 36–37 are two angles on the same scene, so the reader feels the movement of the wind that gives the corpses “such an appearance of life that a spectator could hardly help thinking that they were about to rise to continue the fight,” as the caption puts it. Gardner does acknowledge the pervasive fragmentation of the pastoral, observing that a historically significant “apple tree” is broken into pieces, “not even the roots remaining” (1959 [1866]: 99). He admits traces of death on the landscape, observing “traces of the engagement,” “relics of that great struggle,” “relics of the past” (ibid. 4, 19, 63). But he claims that the landscape recovers its tracelessness: “[W]ith returning peace, the husbandman finds that nature has not forgotten its fruitfulness in the years of war and devastation.” The final image is a monument because traces have vanished: “mementoes” have been “carried away in pieces,” and monuments must take their place (ibid. 99). Even when tracelessness is impossible, he contains traces and “relics” safely in the form of monuments, gathering them like the corpse-collectors in “The Burial Party,” so that a stone wall is a “monument” to dead men (ibid. 94, 20). This process of memorialization might also be a comment on the aesthetic of the album, for it too is a memorial “in pieces”; built of individual images and, like the country, attempting to be whole. Gardner used the album as a “defense against anxiety” through “ghostly traces” of continuity, and as an “imaginary possession of a past that is unreal” (Sontag 1990 [1977]: 8–9). The album presents the war as no big interruption, but rather something like the “little halt” in plate 50. As the reader pauses between the album’s two volumes, the image shows a horse and rider having what the caption calls a “rest,” or a “little halt,” before the second volume marches on past this interruption, into the continuous trajectory of the nation’s history. The visual grammar of these two albums places them not only alongside postwar efforts to make narrative out of fragment—like that of “John Brown’s Body” or Jo in Little Women—but also into the context of proto-filmic visual narrative. This context included Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s dioramas, large transparent paintings that through lighting gave the illusion of movement and change, before the introduction of daguerreotypes in 1839, and George Catlin’s theatrical displays of paintings during the 1830s and 1840s, which combined art and theater in the manner of Gardner’s photographs and captions. Other artists unrolled painted panoramas on reels over about three hours using speech and music. Stereographic series and multiplate panoramic city views in the 1850s and 1860s imitated painted panoramas, with a narrative from left to right across the frame. In the 1860s

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and 1870s photographers gave magic lantern slide shows, using speech and positive photographic images on glass, in “panoramic form, in their relative and proper order,” as one slide show artist, Stephen Sedgwick, put it (Parrison 1960: 340). Before the invention of the negative/positive process, travel and landscape photographs were only profitable when exhibited en masse, automatically raising the question of each frame’s relation to the others. Photographers of the American West embraced and developed the narrative techniques of painters as they unfolded the story of their ever-expanding country. The onrush of the belief in science at the same time as the birth of photography made the camera an instrument of the expanding world vision of the West and a harbinger and instrument of progress as it ventured into remote or unexplored territories. For example, Robert Vance’s 1851 exhibition of daguerreotypes, “Views of California,” used 300 whole-plate daguerreotypes in a sequence that recreated a journey through the state, so illustrating photography’s ability to formally contain the narrative of progress and offer temporal and spatial movement. Those photographing the railways emphasized the linear format of their panoramas or albums with the symbol of the expanding railroad and evoked in the viewer a sense of linear travel, of settlers moving methodically westward. The connection between railway photography and war photography is more than a visual or philosophic analog, for many photographers worked in both fields. Andrew J. Russell photographed the war and then the Union Pacific Railroad in 1868–70, also painting “Panorama of the War for the Union,” based on Brady’s war photographs. Gardner’s photographs of the 35th Parallel were the first large-scale photographic presentation of the terrain beyond the frontier, published as the album Across the Continent on the Kansas Pacific Railroad (Route of the 35th Parallel) in 1867, just one year after the Sketchbook. Another example of his pictorial storytelling, Gardner’s Kansas album sets up an east–west narrative through the railroad construction across the flat plains of Kansas. He engages the concept of Manifest Destiny, titling his first photograph “‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way.’ Laying track 600 miles west of St. Louis, Mo, 1867,” in reference to Emanuel Leutze’s 1862 painting “Westward, the Course of Empire Takes its Way.” Gardner was paid by the railroad company, which wanted a narrative of the changing country that portrayed expansion to people in the east in order to attract investors and immigrants. Gardner was aware of the album’s literary possibilities, including a Shakespeare quote beneath one image: “Last scene of all in this strange, eventful history.”

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Gardner’s use of photo-narrative in his Civil War album was part of the same visual culture as this documentation of the linear railroad and the propagandist government surveys of the West, as well as the sequentially arranged exhibitions, photographic panoramas, and photography with theater, lighting, speech, and music. All made photography a didactic narrative medium and broke down the borders of the individual frame. Sequenced photographs brought order and re-membered fragments. The reader of Gardner’s and Barnard’s war albums finds coherence in their arrangement and continuity in rupture. Memory, stripped of counterfactual narratives, is restored to a “relative and proper order.” Ironically, it would take the more obviously linear medium of film to dis-member the war and complicate the rigid histories offered by Barnard and Gardner: infused with the visual memory of Civil War photographs, Civil War films also introduce counter-memories. The General reworked William Pittenger’s Daring and Suffering: A History of the Great Railway Adventure (1863), a true Civil War story originally told from a Northern perspective. Now the hero is a Southern Confederate train engineer. As so often in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art, the railroad does symbolize a relentlessly linear vision of history that denies this other perspective: a train wheel carries Johnnie along in the first few minutes of the film, and he dangles there, passive. But the theft of his train, named “The General” and bearing the initials W.A.R.R., represents the Civil War’s interruption of America’s history of unbroken progress—that “big surprise,” from the song that recurs throughout the film (“If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise”). The rails are even torn up. Embracing counternarrative, Johnnie goes on to fight his own private, parallel war after failing to join the army. Troops, horses, and wagons repeatedly move in a different direction from his train, and at one point a whole army retreats and another advances while Johnnie chops wood in the foreground, oblivious. The tension between his history and the nation’s comes to a head in the final sequence, when Johnnie and his lover—finally united—are caught in a rush of soldiers and Johnnie has to salute them instead of kiss his girl. He eventually manages to do both at the same time, and so straddle the “cracks between” micro and macro narratives of the war. The individual counter-realm also appears in the 1933 film of Little Women. Like Sherman’s March and The General, this film dwells in the “cracks between”—finding a counterstory between official, public histories. The opening juxtaposes rows of marching men with rows of working women, one group then blending into the other as the march fades into the factory room. A scene between Mrs. March and the elderly shopkeeper

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Southern Confederate train engineer Johnnie chops firewood on top of his train, oblivious to an entire retreating Southern army as it passes behind him in the opposite direction in The General (1927). The Kobal Collection, Getty Images.

makes parallel his four sons (two dead, one a prisoner, and one ill in hospital) with her four daughters at home “to comfort me.” This counter-realm of the feminine is a parallel civil war, where Professor Bhaer (Paul Lukas) plays at marching with the children, Jo (Katharine Hepburn) wants to go to war but also be a “little woman,” and a letter from their father (Samuel S. Hinds) instructs the sisters in military terms: “fight your bosom enemies, conquer yourselves.” In their private world, as in the country outside, everything is about to change. There are numerous tableaux scenes of family members holding one another before breaking apart, for John (John Lodge) and Meg (Frances Dee) are going to “break up other people’s happiness,” as Jo puts it. Another example of filmic counternarrative is Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind, which at one point shows Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) searching for a doctor while the camera sweeps panoramically across rows and rows of dead and wounded. Her individualized and small story emerges from the “cracks between.”

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For in fact, though famous for its “moonlight and magnolias” approach to American history, Gone with the Wind develops both romantic and anti-romantic strands of history. The anti-romantic strand shows Southerners destroying themselves, and even time itself. Although children are “life renewing itself,” as Melanie (Olivia de Havilland) explains, the film’s children keep dying, and the inscription on a sundial, “Do not squander time. That is the stuff that life is made of,” is immediately juxtaposed with a shot of slave children fanning sleeping girls: time and life being squandered through sleep and slavery. The civilization that has “gone with the wind,” the fairytale land of “knights and their ladies fair” that “is no more than a dream remembered,” as the film narration puts it, is stagnant, rightly swept away by fresher air. It is also significant that the narrative describes a “dream remembered,” for dreams are negative things throughout the film. Melanie is the only dream Ashley (Leslie Howard) ever had that did not “die in face of reality,” but of course she does die. Or, when Scarlett’s dream of finding something in the mist does come true, after her unrequited love for Ashley, and she finds Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), it is too late. Crying “Wait for me, wait for me,” she is left behind. Nonetheless, Scarlett does have a more complex historical imagination than Ashley and his wife Melanie. She can act “moonlight and magnolias” but knows she is acting. Sometimes she moves against the tide of romanticization: when war is declared, she struggles up the stairs as everyone else rushes down (like Henry in the 1951 film The Red Badge of Courage, who moves away from the crowd in his first scene while everyone else is magnetically drawn toward the soldier and his rumor). Ultimately, however, Scarlett ends up as rigidly bound to the past as Ashley and Melanie. She instructs Ashley not to “look back” twice: the repetition undoes them, for they linger too long and are caught together. The chances of Scarlett and Rhett’s daughter Bonnie (Cammie King) are ruined and the future is spoilt. Scarlett’s reliance on the past is further underscored when she stands with the same posture, shot from the same camera angle, both times that Mammy (Hattie McDaniel) ties her corset, at different ends of the film. Scarlett’s tragedy is her ultimate failure to embrace a counternarrative. If she had to “do it all over again” she would “do it no differently,” she proclaims. And beyond Scarlett, the film emphasizes the danger of failing to develop a counternarrative when other characters repeat history exactly. For example, Bonnie breaks her neck in the instant the comparison between

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her and “Pa” is made. Ashley reaches for counterfactuals, claiming he would have freed his slaves after the war anyway, but this is cancelled by his romantic memories of “the lazy days, the warm soft country twilight, the high soft Negro laughter from the quarters, the golden warmth and security.” It is further cancelled by his acknowledgment that if it had not been for the war he would have spent his life “happily buried” at Twelve Oaks and his insistence at the end of the film that Scarlett has not changed “a bit since the last barbecue”—which she denies, replying, “That girl doesn’t exist anymore.” Ashley’s vision at this moment recalls an earlier scene when he wants to remember Scarlett “as she is now.” As for Melanie, she finds the cracks between life and art—but only briefly. In one scene, she reads aloud The Personal History of David Copperfield as events unfold outside. The phrase “in my eyes,” from the novel, is followed by a close-up on Scarlett’s eyes. Then the novel’s phrase “I remember nothing” is repeated by Melanie as an instruction to the women. Immediately afterwards, in a rare moment of flexibility, Melanie convincingly acts a part and saves Ashley. During the rest of the film, however, Melanie avoids the “cracks between,” proffering naïve statements such as “No war can come into our world.” Only Rhett Butler explores the cracks of a counternarrative for any sustained length of time. He announces that it is “a black day” while wearing a brilliant white suit, demonstrates that he can come into Scarlett’s room whenever he wants by kicking the door out, and is self-conscious about romantic history, telling Scarlett: “It’s a historic moment. You can tell your grandchildren how you watched the old South disappear one night.” He thinks of himself as “neither noble nor heroic” and interrupts one of Scarlett’s speeches with “Never mind the rest, I follow the general idea.” The romantic music that plays during Scarlett’s first love scene with Ashley ends as Rhett rises up from behind the couch: he has been a spectator, observing the actors alongside the audience, from the crack between life and film. Eventually, however, he lets history repeat itself exactly. He throws a glass at his fireplace, echoing Scarlett’s earlier action, wants Scarlett as she was “before poverty did things,” and expresses a desire for life to have “grace and charm”—two words repeatedly used by Ashley, Melanie, and the narrating scrolls. Eventually he refuses to bury Bonnie, and, exhausted, the pregnant Melanie dies. Rhett heads off to live where he was born, and to bury himself in the past. A few years later, John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage took up this theme of counternarrative and used its relationship with Crane’s novel to

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create a story with two lines of development. Its opening credits are in the form of a book’s turning pages and have a description of Crane: Stephen Crane wrote this book when he was a boy of 22. Its publication made him a man. His story is of a boy who, frightened, went into a battle and came out of it a man with courage. More than that it is a story of many frightened boys who went into a great Civil War and came out as a nation of united strong and free men. Author, character, and history’s boys develop in parallel, their stories running as simultaneously as Crane’s and Huston’s. The film’s camerawork echoes this philosophy of counternarrative. Shots are consistently very close to characters’ faces, or else at strange angles (directed at tops of heads or from below the chin): numerous personal angles on the war that resist an impersonal, straight middle-distance narrative and confirm that, as Crane put it, “the world was a world for him [Henry Fleming]” (1994 [1895]: 98). To emphasize this personal counternarrative, clear shots of the letters on Henry’s knapsack (“US”) come when the “us” of these letters is painfully ironic. We see “US” when Henry walks away from his regiment, ashamed by their laughter at a pig-stealing incident, when he runs from battle, and again as a fleeing soldier pushes him over. The “US” appears on his water bottle when his regiment finally meets some soldiers from the other side. Each shot is a bitter reminder that there is no “us” within the regiment—whose members have a fist fight just before the first march of the film—and no “us” in the U.S. during a civil war. Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage is yet another Civil War film that resists the idea that there is any “us” to American collective memory of the historical event. If, as Robert Penn Warren claimed on the centennial of the war’s beginning, “the Civil War is our only felt history—history lived in the national imagination,” then Civil War films negotiated the visual memory of the war through an insistence on the felt imaginative presence of counter-memories (1983 [1961]: 4). With their microhistories, parallel stories, and counternarratives, they opened the cracks between.

Notes 1. For Barnard’s full album, see: http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/hargrett/barnard 2. For Gardner’s full album, see: www.geh.org/ar/sketchbook/sketchbook_sld00001. html

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References Alcott, Louisa May (1989 [1868]), Little Women. New York: Penguin. Barnard, George N. (1977 [1866]), Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign. New York: Dover. Cartier-Bresson, Henri (1999), The Mind’s Eye, Writings on Photography and Photographers. New York: Aperture. Crane, Stephen (1994 [1895]), The Red Badge of Courage. New York: W. W. Norton. Gardner, Alexander (1959 [1866]), Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War. New York: Dover. Miller, Francis Trevelyan (1911), The Photographic History of the Civil War, Vol. 1. New York: Review of Reviews Co. Parrison, William D. (1960), “Westward by rail with Professor Sedgwick: a lantern journey of 1873,” Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly, 42: 335–49. Sontag, Susan (1990 [1977]), On Photography. New York: Doubleday. Sweet, Timothy (1990), Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Thanhouser Film Co. (1911), “Advertisement,” Moving Picture World, 8 (12): 626. Trachtenberg, Alan (1989), Reading American Photographs. New York: Hill and Wang. Universal Film Co. (1915), “Advertisement,” Moving Picture World, 26 (4): 545. Warren, Robert Penn (1983 [1961]), The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wood, Richard (ed.) (1990), Film and Propaganda in America: A Documentary History, Vol. 1. London: Greenwood.

Filmography General, The (1927), Dir. Buster Keaton. United Artists. Gone with the Wind (1939), Dir. Victor Fleming. MGM. Little Women (1933), Dir. George Cukor. RKO Radio Pictures. Red Badge of Courage, The (1951), Dir. John Huston. MGM. Sherman’s March (1986), Dir. Ross McElwee. First Run Features.

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2 Our Impossible Failings: The Rhetoric of Historical Representation, Ideology, and Subjectivity in Ken Burns’ Jazz J. A. Rice

Most jazz films aren’t really about jazz. But then, most jazz isn’t really about jazz. (Gabbard 1996: 1) In matters of representing historical phenomena on (or through) documentary film, rhetorical invention and contextualization are often the soft-spoken underside of every idea, meaning, or systematic effort. An ideal historical filmic representation of, say, jazz music and culture assumes a circular interpretation that derives from publicly agreed-upon concepts. As Bill Nichols puts it, “[D]ocumentary is about the effort to convince, persuade, or predispose us to a particular view of the actual world we occupy . . . it may entertain or please, but it does so in relation to a rhetorical or persuasive effort aimed at the existing social world” (2001: 69). Rhetorical argumentation/exposition, visual representation, conceptual alteration/revision, and cultural-artifactual fetishization all play a part in the properly and publicly visualized art form and its ideologies. Put simply, without a visible focus on what history teaches us or what a certain historical event means, the filmic representation of historical phenomena ceases to make any sense. And yet this equation of the documentary’s representative capabilities and rhetorical production overlooks too many variables. For example, combing history with a pragmatic goal of finding “what it means or what it 26

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can teach us” presupposes an unproblematic causal relationship between the historical phenomenon itself and its representation, while simultaneously dismissing specific historical distinctions and contexts. Thus, those filmic and historical representations that posit history as a unified and perfected totality miss the point. If both representational systems are imperfect totalities and determined by cultural contexts and public opinion, then they are rhetorically and ideologically invested from the outset. For this reason, there is a need to investigate and theorize documentary filmmaking’s ability to faithfully present history insofar as it produces a hegemonic, if only contingent, history for the present. Nowhere are these questions more necessary than in relation to Ken Burns’ documentary Jazz (2001). Jazz illustrates the history of jazz as a cultural artifact, as an unchanging and static object, rather than as a living historical and cultural phenomenon. The film implicitly addresses the boundaries of historical narratives through the structural and philosophic limitations of the historical subject/object dynamic. What happens when documentary filmmaking renders the constant, fluid, and dialectical motions of history impotent? What is lost in our perception of history when we attempt to represent it? What is gained through documentary filmmaking’s attempts to (re)construct a history? To address these questions, this chapter explores three main points. The first section focuses on Burns’ narrative/documentary method positing Jazz’s historical account as the historical narrative. Second, I argue that Jazz’s representation of jazz history actually signifies an unbridgeable gap between the music genre as a historical event and the subject’s interpretation of it. The final section argues that the limitation, or impossibility, of representing jazz as an objective history belies its ideological aspirations. In particular, Jazz implies the idea of Žižekian ideology in its representation of history, and it is precisely through this ideological depiction that Burns questions historical representation in the postmodern age.

Meet Me in New Orleans/St. Louis/Chicago/Kansas City Throughout the ten-episode Jazz series, Ken Burns provides a glimpse of the history of jazz music through a traditional practice of documentary filmmaking: the expository mode.1 Burns follows the systematic practices of expository documentary by relying on familiar places, people, things, and formats that render the history of jazz as something intelligible and narratable. However, he slightly alters this traditional style through what is now called the “Ken Burns effect”: shots focus on spaces or objects within

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a photograph, for instance a figure in the upper-right-hand corner, and then slowly move around the image, corresponding different mise-en-scènes with voice-overs and focal emphases.2 In the first episode of the series, entitled “Gumbo,” jazz’s birthplace of New Orleans is depicted through turnof-the-century images: a shot of Jackson Square and Bourbon Street, a close-up (and eventual long shot) of railroad cars on St. Charles Avenue, and so forth. In addition to locations in the Big Easy, the film explains jazz history through key figures—the musicians, speakeasy owners, and cultural leaders who not only founded jazz but also pushed the music to new heights. We see Jelly Roll Morton sitting among prostitutes at his piano, Duke Ellington dancing on stage, and an extended scene of Burns’ favorite jazz musician, Louis Armstrong, speaking of his musical background to an audience. Sandwiched between, or perhaps above or behind, the photographs, record albums, and figures are contemporary experts in jazz music and jazz history. Musician Wynton Marsalis is often used to make poignant remarks about a musician, city, or theme. Hollywood celebrities, such as Samuel L. Jackson and Keith David, narrate key scenes, letters, or written copies of recorded transcripts from various notable figures. Commentaries by American music historians, such as Gary Giddens, are littered throughout the film in the hopes of furnishing a context and presence for the history of jazz. For Burns and for the film, these musicians, places, and words represent jazz history best. Yet, the history Jazz explains connotes more than a mere filmic representation. One realizes that for Burns, these images of New Orleans life represent the great or “official” American historical identity. They are portrayed to illustrate that jazz is the American history. As Theodore Gracyk contends: There is a standing distinction between two types of history: chronology and narrative. A chronology traces a temporal succession, and Jazz would be notable for its scope and insight even if it were merely a string of chronologies. A narrative is more ambitious than a chronology. Burns construct[s] a narrative. (2002: 176) Gracyk’s emphasis on Burns’ historical narration is significant. The American story that Jazz endeavors to represent primarily highlights the context of the historical event in place of history itself. In Burns’ use of expository documentary, he “captures” a historical context, makes it digestible for the public at large, and transforms history by repeating it for the present.

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Paradoxically, this filmmaking style does not create the seamless historical narrative Burns desires. Rather, Jazz reduces jazz history to its “greatest hits” and effectually subverts the very history it is trying to represent. If we take a closer look at the Jazz series, we can see the metaphorical framework Burns uses to ensure the American history. Much like the rest of the series, episode six, entitled “Swing: The Velocity of Celebration,” presents famous musicians, images, and metropolises that narrate the cultural events of jazz, therefore garnering the right to be called “jazz history.” On the screen, this is illustrated through the camera’s motions and the film’s reliance on narrative association. In one scene worth describing at length, the camera begins with a close-up on a busy 1930s Kansas City, Missouri, street. As the camera zooms out to show the larger photograph, writer Gerald Early’s commentary synchronizes with the movements onscreen: Just imagine. It’s the Thirties, you’re a young black musician, you got some talent, there’s this exciting, new music out there that people are calling “swing.” And you know that some of the best people in the world are playing in Kansas City . . . Of course you’d want to go there—anyone would want to go there. It’s the place to be. Toward the end of Early’s exegesis, the film switches photographs from the bustling street to a close-up of a pub sign and then zooms out to reveal an entirely different street. Over the new image, Early continues his narration: “By the Thirties, everyone is migrating there. It’s called ‘the territory.’ This is in some ways the drama of the great American West for African Americans.” The image switches again to a shot of yet another thoroughfare full of cars and pedestrians, and continues with people walking down the sidewalks of what looks like a vibrant downtown. Swing music suddenly begins to play in the background, tying the images of the city to pictures of well-dressed African American men drinking, laughing, and smoking in a restaurant; a fashionable man with his back to the camera; a woman standing outside of a deli; ending with four young, smiling, African American boys leaning up against the back of a bus. At the moment the montage ends, actor Keith David, Jazz’s main narrator, succeeds Early’s commentary by supplying a metanarrative that solidifies and animates the images we just saw: “Like New Orleans at the turn of the century, like Chicago in the Twenties, Kansas City, Missouri, was a wide-open town. And it flourished, even in the midst of the Depression.”

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“Oak Street, Kansas City, 1922” in Jazz (2001), episode 6 “Swing: The Velocity of Celebration.” Missouri Valley Special Collections, Kansas City Public Library, Kansas City, Missouri.

These images, however, are far from objective. In fact, the camera’s movements and the various narrations posit jazz history in a certain context, a certain time and a certain place marked with identifiable artifacts, that is, the various photographs of Kansas City. This filmic, contextual practice, as Bill Nichols points out in Ideology and the Image, creates its own self-referential meaning: The appearance of movement pries film away from the world it re-presents at the very moment it deploys codes similar to those presiding over our perception of the physical world . . . [t]he cinema takes on an organizational coherence as a distinct system of signs and codes . . . [it is] both everywhere and nowhere; it is an ordering principle, an algorithm, not an entity we can point to. (1981: 69, 71) The apparent movement of the photograph (or camera angle or shot) produces slippage between the phenomenon the film is attempting to re-present and what it actually represents that is best exemplified through the illusion

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of on-camera movement. In “Swing,” the Ken Burns effect aligns spatially, temporally, and (sub)culturally disparate images into a constant and flawless montage—the various photographs of the city merge with individual shots of people and places without incident—and creates a homogeneous impression of what jazz culture must have been like in 1930s Kansas City. Yet this movement is not real; it only happens between the camera’s focus, the narratives, and their juxtaposition against the photographs. In other words, the pictures of the African American men drinking and young boys leaning against a bus cannot speak for Kansas City or jazz history. Instead and in their place, the camera and narration must tell the story by recreating history, by making it “live” or “move” for the present. Motion, in this respect, represents visual and historical meaning, but only as it relates to the narrative structure from which it derives. Jazz’s reliance on audible narration is worth considering in further detail. At many times throughout the film, we are seduced into believing the sounds of the voice-overs as the authentic truth in jazz history. As we have seen, historical authenticity often resides in the oral narration and therefore belies the significance of Jazz’s historical account. It is no surprise that the meaning of jazz history is disclosed for a contemporary audience, but the trajectory each commentary participates in is of a larger and more political design that is exemplified in the frequent narrations of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. That Marsalis is the central representative and contemporary “prophet” of jazz music and history in Jazz is not coincidental. His smooth, urbane image and music not only evoke the polished and flawless narrative Jazz attempts but also provide his commentaries the cultural capital needed to anchor Burns’ historical politics. In the final episode, “A Masterpiece by Midnight,” Marsalis is touted as the great heir of jazz music: he discusses when he first discovered it, when he started playing, how he dropped out of Juilliard to join his first jam band, and so forth. He functions as the logical and historical link between the origin of jazz music and the end of the twentieth century. The series begins with New Orleans in “Gumbo” and ends with his New York in “A Masterpiece by Midnight.” Perhaps more importantly, as music producer George Wein claims in Jazz, Marsalis is the natural heir to jazz music: I never thought I’d hear a young black musician play that way. I could hear that he’d been listening to Louis Armstrong . . . the only musicians—young musicians—that paid attention to Louis Armstrong were white musicians. Young African American musicians did not pay attention to Louis Armstrong.

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In this manner, Marsalis is also an extension of the film’s central historical figure, Louis Armstrong, and serves as a constant and prophetic reminder of jazz’s musical glory. Marsalis’ narrative presence is absolutely essential to Burns’ historical truth; without it this version of jazz history could not be represented, because he is the authentic voice of jazz history. With its sharp contrast between movement, sound, and temporality, and because of its overreliance on voice-overs, photographic montages, and direct historical/musical lineage, Jazz situates the narrative of jazz as a fixed history—as a teleological historicism. In Burns’ eyes, jazz history is always condensed to “Once upon a time in New Orleans/Chicago/ St. Louis/Kansas City” and always ends happily in Marsalis’ New York. Yet this rendition of history presents significant problems for the music genre, reconceptualizing it as a substantive thing rather than as a representative reality or dimension. The voice-overs and the images consequently guarantee an ahistorical representation, where jazz history exists only as a wellcontained, categorized series of events or as an artifact to be studied. Time, space, and motion are all recast as concrete nouns or concepts, and the fluid qualities of each are suppressed. In turn, jazz’s conceptual identity indicates that the “essence,” “substance,” or “cultural event” of jazz lies elsewhere, perhaps in the museum or historical vault, rather than in something still happening. To recall Nichols’ point, mentioned above, the film’s logic signifies an unbridgeable gap between jazz-as-a-history and our interpretation of it, and this must be taken into account if we are to think about how Jazz tries to traverse this gap.

Jazz and the Internal Dialectic The commodification of jazz history removes the musical genre from its historical event (or moment) and instead produces a filmic context “to which it belongs.” The difference between a historical event and context is more than merely semantic: the former includes the temporal point at which some thing generates its identity according to the historical happenings at that time. Jazz’s historical event would therefore involve a multiplicity of notions and concepts but would also maintain a reflexive relationship with its historical environment. As a musical form, jazz’s identity might change from struggling with technological advances, artistic theories, or national and global politics. Moreover, as jazz also symbolically and empirically engages with social and philosophic formations—accepted ideas of gender, community, truth, beauty, and so on—it alters those very historical meaning(s). For instance, jazz music modifies historical ideas and identities

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through its manifestation of and interaction with larger American culture and politics. By defining and legitimizing unorthodox modes of thinking, jazz produces new conceptions and problems for, say, racial and sexual tensions and discriminations.3 In contrast, a historical context characterizes, translates, and represents the meaning of something according to the context’s self-referential parameters. Instead of disrupting the social and acting as a catalyst that introduces a radical alterity, jazz music is adapted and incorporated into the already existing social context. The difference between the historical event and context is filmicly unimportant unless the discrepancy assumes our apprehension, as historical subjects or audience, of the phenomenon’s history. Accordingly, Burns’ filmic rendition of jazz history follows critic Michael Renov’s outline of a historical discourse that has “come to be regarded as the representation of people, forces, and events from a particular perspective” (2004: 109). For Jazz, then, the historical subject is, if nothing else, an idealized, localized, and singular impression of “history” and of “subjectivity.” The subject is a presupposed continuity in consciousness, a unified Cartesian subject that experiences jazz history as a faultless and distinct narrative through the medium of film. In Burns’ film, the event of historical jazz is regulated via the utilization of the expository documentary’s belief in historical distance between the observer and the event. This distance in Jazz evokes the theories of Walter Benjamin, most notably “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” (1968), as it speaks directly to the representational relationship between art, culture, and history. For Benjamin, the replication of the art object is a movement to render the object within proximity. When it is removed from its physical history, the object is positioned within a historical (although false) relationship with the viewing subject. Consider, for example, how frequently silkscreen replications of the “Mona Lisa” appear on T-shirts. While the T-shirt reproduces Da Vinci’s work to perfection, the mystery, allure, and history of the painting are lost because the representation no longer adheres to the originality of the painting’s creation. These missing attributes of the original artwork greatly concern Benjamin. Benjamin consequently names those elements forever lost in the reproduced artwork the “aura,” and it is through this “aura” that the viewing subject’s perception of the artwork’s individuality and aesthetic/historical value gains credibility (1968: 221). Burns adheres to Benjaminian thinking to a point but in the process reverses the dialectical emphasis by implying that the aura of the music and history can be returned through the advent of imagining or representing

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the event. We find the history of jazz compelling, both cinematographically and narratologically, in Jazz because the film’s trajectory creates a mysterious and fascinating experience through a romanticized disclosure of lesser recognized American pasts and identities. In “Swing,” for example, Burns combines a montage of club patrons and culture, a voice-over by Keith David, and Big Joe Turner’s song “Shine Like Klondike Gold” as background music to provide that experience. The sequence begins with David’s narration of a letter from an unknown newspaper reporter—“If you want to see some sin . . . forget Paris”—and quickly moves to images of young, attractive African American men and women dancing, drinking, gambling, and so on. It ends with David completing the quote over a photograph of a petite, bikini-clad African American woman dancing on the bar: “Go to Kansas City.” By keeping its physical and original history as a potentiality, Jazz makes us believe in the film’s narrative structure. To claim that the imaginative representation of jazz’s history simply reconstitutes its aura, however, is to overlook the finer points of both Benjamin’s theory and the cinematographic movement within Jazz. Benjamin argues that experiencing the reproduced art object changes the way that we relate to the production of the artwork itself. “If changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura,” says Benjamin, “it is possible to show its social causes” (1968: 222). As a consequence, he claims that “instead of being based on ritual, [the relationship to artwork] begins to be based on another practice—politics” (ibid. 224). Just as the association between the “Mona Lisa” image, the T-shirt on which it is printed, and the product of the “Mona Lisa T-shirt” points to a purpose beyond mere art appreciation, the relationship between montage, voice-over, and soundtrack selection in “Swing” contradicts the knowledge or experience we gain from Burns’ documentary narrative. As there is this disjunction between content and artistic (political) construction, we can question not only Burns’ intent but also the chasm that exists between ourselves and the original event of jazz music. Later in the essay, Benjamin cites film as having the revolutionary potential to break the aura of the art object: “[T]he painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped the scene than it is already changed” (ibid. 238). As the cinematography of the film forces the subject to notice the movement of the film itself, knowledge or experience of the documentary subject cannot derive from the movie’s representations. Instead, filmic movements always reference another image, another film, another historical record. By sustaining

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the revolutionary potential of Benjaminian filmmaking and maintaining the aura and historical distance of jazz history, Jazz rests on a fine contradiction. On the one hand, it presents a narrative based on heroic acts, exotic places, troublesome events, and successful perseverance over a heinous racial culture. On the other, jazz is brought too close to us. When we consider the aesthetics of the film, such as its emphasis on close-ups and jump cuts, the conspicuousness of jazz history is evident; we immediately become aware of its political dimensions. With the contradiction of the film exposed, we can recognize that the audience is also part of this structure. If Burns’ film conceives jazz as a history that can only be narrated to us rather than experienced by us, then the apprehension of ourselves as historical subjects is entirely called into question. Burns’ jazz narrative implies that as the audience, our historical knowledge is inherent in the very processes we use to discern history in general. There is no “pure” mediation or representation of jazz history because interpretation is always situated. “Gumbo” does not offer a glimpse of jazz’s total “objective” world but rather shows us general and categorical examples with which we are already familiar. We recognize the Western concepts, variations, and associative logics of “origin,” “city,” “music,” and “person,” which is why we can so quickly and effortlessly grasp “New Orleans gave birth to jazz through Louis Armstrong” in a visual medium. These distinctions in interpretation put the audience in one of two undesirable positions: we are isolated from history (as there is no objective or total jazz history available for us to discover) or we can only relate to ourselves as a limitation or short-circuit of a representative totality. In other words, we are always alienated from our historical positioning. This has a significant consequence for how we think about historical documentary films: the relationship between the historical subject and representation is an impossible relationship. Both subject and object are fragmented entities that exist as imagined continuities or totalities. More specifically, jazz history, as long as it is represented as “history,” will only allude to historical meanings and never quite actualize them.

Jazz’s Ideological Dreams At the heart of Jazz, then, is a great philosophic and epistemological divide that claims to have its cake and eat it too. It asserts “pure” mediation in the historical relationships it discusses, yet it also denounces that mediation through its filmic style and method. This contradiction is Jazz’s compulsion: it still imagines (and still represents) the historicity or event of jazz

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through the images, background music, and musicians’ biographical information as a history, even though it cannot be recapitulated in a substantial, complete narrative. The rhetoric of this impulse evokes several implications. First, it contends a blind and equitable conceptual exchange between what we think of as history and how we view that history as official. Second, it rests on the actual production of representational failure. In both cases, historical meaning does not refer to something that concretely exists but rather advocates a third or objective position that effectually bypasses any theory of documentary film and history that acts and changes in time. To produce historical meaning in documentaries really means manufacturing a static ideology. In many ways, the desire to represent history filmicly parallels the theory of ideology found in Slavoj Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). Žižek claims that “ideology is not simply a ‘false consciousness,’ an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as ‘ideological’—‘ideological’ is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence” (1989: 21). For Žižek, the ideological is that process by which the social entities necessarily do not comprehend the inner dynamic of any rhetorical system, including film. The apparent congruity of meaning, space, and time we endure and appreciate on a daily basis is the very definition of ideology, not a more “true” or “real” reality that lies elsewhere. Yet what is more relevant than the content of Žižek’s definition is its spatial and metaphorical evocation of precisely the “more real” reality he rejects. That is, how does one begin to understand reality as false? If we return to Burns’ film, Jazz means “something” because jazz history is ideological. By rhetorically presenting jazz’s substance via a historical context, the so-called truth of jazz will always reside in this particular representation because it portrays a realness that only the audience can experience. In the second episode, “The Gift,” Burns focuses almost exclusively on Louis Armstrong. The film frequently lionizes Armstrong to the point of absurdity. He is often put in opposition to pimps and lowlifes, referred to in letters and interviews, featured on stage, speaking at an airport, and in TV guest appearances in much of the 1940s and 1950s film footage. In one scene, jazz historian Gary Giddens claims: it’s a general rule that children look for heroes. And in [the 1913 New Orleans] community at that time, you were either going to emulate the guy with the pistol who whipped his whores in the bar to

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show what a man he was, or the musicians . . . the musicians were very highly respected; they were essential to the community. In conjunction with Giddens’ quote, Jazz cements Armstrong’s destiny as a musician by treating the audience to a long shot of blurred streetlights and a double-exposed character walking on St. Charles Street at dusk. This blurred image acts as a nodal point through which the audience glances at “history in the making.” Thus, these images and voice-overs convey to the present the authentic past in a supposedly unbiased narrative. In actuality, the historical immediacy and authenticity we feel when we hear of Armstrong’s upstanding character and see 1913 New Orleans frozen is the confession that the present cannot represent the past. Instead, we can only ideologically imagine it as a supplement to presupposed present reality. We realize that jazz history is never present in the film or in our conception of it—“jazz” and “history” are nothing but definitional concepts. Yet we still act as if they are faultless ideas and inherently meaningful moments in time/space, both in the film and off. We recognize the film is an ideology, but refuse to remember it as such. Perhaps Krin Gabbard’s quote at the beginning of this chapter points us in the right direction when thinking about documentary filmmaking and history. Jazz films, as Gabbard points out, are rarely about jazz; more crucially, most jazz is not about jazz. For Gabbard, jazz’s meaning always lies elsewhere and cannot be found in the context of the music itself. Similar to Gabbard, Burns’ notion of jazz history is always in a state of referring. Even though subject and object are always already historically fragmented from one another because of their respective contexts, Jazz nonetheless stresses the imaginative and ideological foundation of historical representation in documentary film. For if jazz history is purely ideological, it is also a limited or impossible basis for our knowledge of the music. Part of this belief in the “realness” of jazz history manifests itself through Burns’ documentary method in Jazz. While the film seems to assert, perhaps implicitly and unknowingly, that history and the historical subject cannot be represented totally, the demand to believe in these representations comes not from the disappointment or nihilism of the representation’s limitations but in celebration of these failures. With the postmodern subject in mind, the mystery, the uncertainty, and imperfect knowledge itself imply that this mode of narrating jazz history is the only way to tell the story of jazz in the postmodern age. In other words, to not take into consideration the postmodern condition—the virtual nonexistence of

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a substantive history and discontinuous narrative—when composing a narrative is to not take into consideration the ideological foundation of our historical knowledge and our interpretation of that knowledge.

Notes 1. As Jazz is close to twenty hours long and in consideration of space, I will not be referring to every episode in the series. Rather, I will focus on four installments—episode 1, “Gumbo”; episode 2, “The Gift”; episode 6, “Swing: The Velocity of Celebration”; and episode 10, “A Masterpiece by Midnight.” 2. It should be noted that the “Ken Burns effect,” although it follows this same basic pattern, might slightly adjust its movement or direction in an effort to maximize scenes’ comparative accentuations. For instance, the mise-en-scène might zero in on a face and then zoom out or vice versa; concentrate on a photographic border, zoom out to show the larger picture, and then reorient itself on a different part of the photograph and so on. 3. To strictly narrate jazz history necessarily overlooks other historical meanings through which jazz as a cultural art form participated and created. Specifically, Jazz downplays much of the grittier and violent racism, sexism, drug addiction, and economic hardships members of the jazz community underwent daily in favor of a polished and resolved ideology. Although at first glance this does not seem detrimental to the representation of jazz history, many sources—interviews with jazz musicians, autobiographies/ biographies, prose, poetry, and film—claim jazz history is nothing but a representation of suffering and conflict. See the following texts: Robert O’Meally’s The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (1998) and Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings (2002); Art Lange and Nathaniel Mackey’s Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (1993); Miles Davis’ Miles: The Autobiography (1989); Billie Holiday’s Lady Sings the Blues (1956); LeRoi Jones’ (Amiri Baraka) Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963); Sherrie Tucker’s Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s (2001); and Charles Mingus’ Beneath the Underdog: His World As Composed by Mingus (2001).

References Benjamin, Walter (1968), “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” in Harry Zohn (trans.) and Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 217–51. Davis, Miles (with Quincy Troupe) (1989), Miles: The Autobiography. New York: Touchstone Books. Gabbard, Krin (1996), Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gracyk, Theodore (2002), “Jazz after Jazz: Ken Burns and the construction of jazz history,” Philosophy and Literature, 26 (1): 173–87.

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Holiday, Billie (with William Dufty) (1956), Lady Sings the Blues. New York: Penguin. Jones, LeRoi (1963), Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: Perennial. Lange, Art and Nathaniel Mackey (eds) (1993), Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. Mingus, Charles (2001), Beneath the Underdog: His World As Composed by Mingus. New York: Vintage. Nichols, Bill (1981), Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other Media. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. — (2001), Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. O’Meally, Robert (1998), The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. — (2002), Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings. New York: Modern Library. Renov, Michael (2004), The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tucker, Sherrie (2001), Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s. Durham: Duke University Press. Žižek, Slavoj (1989), The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso Books.

Filmography Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns (2001), Dir. Ken Burns. Public Broadcasting Service.

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3 “Zero Percent Chance of Rain”: The Watergate History and All The President’s Men Pamela L. Kerpius

October 25, 1972. Afternoon. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein shield themselves from the rain as they walk back to the Post offices. As recounted in the two journalists’ memoir, All The President’s Men, they are “soaked and shivering” by the time they make it indoors (Bernstein and Woodward 1974: 187). Yet the front page of the Post read that “the chance of rain is near zero,” with the October 26, 1972, edition finally confirming that there was no rain in the Washington DC area that day. Adrian Havill notes this discrepancy in his book Deep Truth, though to the effect that the pair deviously manipulated this fact for the sake of drama in their story (1993: 85). Havill is only half right, however. It did not rain on Woodward and Bernstein that day—that part of the reporters’ memoir is (as the record shows) fiction—but this embellishment is not a misleading point meant to create controversy: then President Richard Nixon and his administration provided the impetus for the reporters to write the intriguing narrative they did without the aid of such a trivial detail. Rather, that would-be meteorological event does tell the reader how things felt; it is a symbol for an abstract element of history, part of what the historian refers to as “emplotment,” a rhetorical device of language that forms historical fact into narrative. It illustrates, moreover, the common

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element between written history and fictional story: the subjectivity and manipulation of fact to relate a single perspective. The faulty weather report on October 25 is a minor error, but it shows that dramatic detail enhances the readability of a historical event, even if it deviates from verifiable fact. As historian Simon Schama says: In its original Greek sense of the word “historia” meant an inquiry . . . But to have an inquiry, whether into the construction of a legend, or the execution of a crime, is surely to require the telling of stories. And so the asking of questions and the relating of narratives need not, I think, be mutually exclusive forms of historical representation. (1992: 325) Thus, neither written history nor fictional prose strictly adheres to “fact” per se. There is no whole truth and nothing but the truth for a narrative to follow. To tell a story, people and places are strategically introduced or omitted, symbolic of their social, political, or historical context that leads the reader down the author’s path to arrive at his or her respective conclusion. These edited facts—the names and events that are removed in the case of All The President’s Men—are essentially shortcuts through time that condense the story for narrative clarity. Think of them as a vehicle to transport the reader to a specified point in space and time that gives a historical narrative form and direction: it provides a frame around a picture of the past. A history without breaks in time, if visually translated, would look something like a filmstrip run through a projector without a shutter: a blurry projection of figures, objects, or locations with no defined form. As an edited art form, film links existing pictures together in abridged time to reveal a space that the viewer would not otherwise be privy to. It might be argued that film is the most effective medium to exhibit history, because the conscious act of editing written historical information resembles the basic editing conventions of filmed narrative. But perhaps it is the process of remembering that garners the most authenticity to Woodward and Bernstein’s story. Though memory is unreliable (internalized mental reflections are of an ineffable form), relating a story from memory gives the reader a cacophony of words and emotions, names and faces, which, though disconnected spatially and temporally, have the convincing ability to make a story real. Memory is not an invalid form of history; the imprecise geography of this information is understood because the listener fills

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in the gaps in time by the storyteller’s inflection or embellished cues, just as editing is used to create context for a written history or a filmed story. Take the body of historical memoir: it is a type of history dependent on colloquial thoughts and descriptions, a conversation piece that supplements formal written history. The reader is aware of how the author manipulates history because it is strung together by personal nuance, anecdotes, or digressions. Woodward and Bernstein’s account of the Watergate investigation in All The President’s Men weaves their personal memories into this kind of story. Their book is a memoir, though it is told in a third-person voice. The first-person “I” account in memoir overtly tells the reader that this is something I saw, something I felt, or something I did; there is no authorial guesswork in a narrative told from this angle. Conversely, a third-person narrative replicates the writing style of formal written history, using the singular “he” or “she” or plural “they” to create critical distance between the reader and both the author and the historical/fictional subject. The reader, in the case of history books, becomes an omniscient spectator of the historical event. No less effective is memoir, an active conversation in history that is edited with a personal coloration of fact. The third-person narration in All The President’s Men does more than create critical distance between the reader, the subject, and, more significant in this case, the authors. The authors, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, are dramatized by their own pen. Each is introduced like a character in a work of fiction, complete with exposition detailing his personality, rank among the Post staff, and personal background. In a few sentences they are identified as the protagonists. In this moment of reflexivity, the names of the authors printed on the cover of the book are aligned with the characters in the text. Woodward, the freshman investigative reporter at the paper becomes the written character “Bob Woodward,” the “prima donna who played heavily at office politics.” “Yale,” they state, as an independent credential, “A veteran of the Navy officer corps. Lawns, greensward, staterooms and grass tennis courts.” The less-refined Bernstein is now the character “Carl Bernstein,” the “college dropout” who “occasionally wrote about rock music for the Post. That figured,” the authors parody. “When [Woodward] learned that Bernstein sometimes reviewed classical music, he choked that down with difficulty. Bernstein looked like one of those counterculture journalists that Woodward despised” (Bernstein and Woodward 1974: 15). These alter egos, or characters that mirror Woodward and Bernstein the authors, follow the fictional and dramatic approach at the start of the book, a preface, a “Cast of Characters.” It is a list of the players, from those on the

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inside of the Watergate scandal to those on its periphery; it includes President Nixon, his Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, and his Counsel John W. Dean, the five Watergate burglars, prosecuting attorney Earl Silbert and Judge John Sirica, editor of the Post Ben Bradlee, and numerous others. The “cast” imitates the format of a theatrical play. Before Woodward and Bernstein begin their story they have already established that this history will read as if it is fiction. Chapter 1 opens with scene description, “June 17, 1972. Nine o’clock Saturday morning. Early for the telephone” (ibid. 13). The introduction of one of the two main characters follows and is accompanied by an incident that sets the story in motion: Woodward fumbled for the receiver and snapped awake. The city editor of the Washington Post was on the line. Five men had been arrested earlier that morning in a burglary at Democratic headquarters, carrying photographic equipment and electronic gear. Could he come in? (ibid.) The dramatization of their personas on paper is somewhat ironic considering the level of accuracy they wanted to retain, and yet, as a literary device, it projects the illusion of distance they needed to tell the story straight. The third-person voice is implemented as insurance of the story’s accuracy, yet this fictional style inherently questions its verisimilitude. The writing style consequently softens the line between history and fiction as it maneuvers between points of historical fact and the language of fictional prose. From the outset Woodward’s and Bernstein’s stories piqued the attention of Hollywood actor Robert Redford, at a point when the break-in was still small news. Redford kept up with the stories. After the reporters’ book deal was in place with Simon & Schuster he contacted them with the prospect of a film adaptation, which had an immediate influence on the way the reporters told their story. “No, it’s not about Nixon,” Redford says. “It’s about something else. It’s about investigative journalism and hard work,” thus locating Woodward and Bernstein as lead characters in this history. Now they were active characters as pertinent to the story as Nixon himself. Jake Coyle reports that it was “Redford’s idea to tell the story from the journalists’ perspective which the reporters quickly adopted, refashioning their book to focus more on their experience” (2006: n.p.). It is precisely this blending of fact and fiction, the emphasis of the reporters’ roles over an explicit list of crimes committed by Nixon, his administration, and those his administration hired, that makes All The President’s Men an affecting, and almost abstract, type of history. Woodward and Bernstein’s story

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performs a balancing act between its dramatic stylistic attributes and the hard facts of their investigation, all tightly woven into a clear, readable space and time. No rain fell on October 25, 1972, but it created a mood. The history books for the day show that the reporters made a major fumble in one of their newspaper pieces. The papers read that Hugh Sloan, key witness and former Treasurer of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), testified that H. R. Haldeman controlled the campaign money that funded the break-in at Democratic headquarters. We know now that Haldeman did control the fund, but at the time Sloan was never actually asked under oath. This gave the Press Secretary to the President, Ronald Ziegler, an open invitation to discredit the Post and the two reporters, saying he did not “respect the type of shabby journalism that is being practiced by the Washington Post,” a blow of epic proportions for two reporters struggling to gain recognition at the paper and credibility among the public (Bernstein and Woodward 1974: 186). Thus the rainy weather is a simple (though perhaps accidental) metaphor for the erroneous report on Sloan’s testimony printed on October 25. Interpretation of the chronology of the book’s publication further blurs this line between dramatic embellishment and reality, as the book was commissioned in 1972 and completed in late 1973. At the inquest of the book Woodward and Bernstein planned to outline the facts they had already uncovered as a coherent narrative, to provide a framework for the stories they had already published in the Post, and presumably to boost the momentum of the ongoing investigation. In fact, new information was constantly surfacing, making it impossible for the reporters to write the book at that time. The year 1973, Woodward says, “was filled with so many new developments—the Ellsberg burglary, the secret White House tapes, the appointment of Cox and his wide-ranging grand jury investigations— that we got little or nothing written” (Woodward 2005: 108). As Woodward says, it was “virtually impossible” for the reporters to tag their investigation with a clear beginning, middle, and end; there could be no narrative coherence until this story had a final destination (ibid. 109). As time wore on, in the late months of 1973, White House involvement was undeniable and impeachment appeared imminent. That allowed the reporters to inject themselves into the narrative as lead characters, and subsequently they appeared as active forces toward the revelation of the final events. President Nixon’s resignation—the climax of the scandal—chronologically succeeds Woodward and Bernstein’s book, implying that their investigation was initially intended to pin these crimes on Nixon. The reporters’

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motivation was simpler than that. They did not originally foresee the scandal reaching as far as it did, but dissatisfied with the inconsistencies that accumulated after each story, they continued to investigate. “No one,” historian Louis Liebovich states, “not even the Post staffers, were quite certain where exactly this story would lead, who was involved, and what the implications were . . . even [Woodward and Bernstein] had no idea until late 1972 what they were on to” (2003: 70). Because the scandal unfolded so quickly, the reporters acknowledge that the timeline is often misread. It struck Bernstein in conversation with Woodward in late 1972 that on the basis of the facts they had, the President could already be impeached. Bernstein intentionally omitted that thought from the manuscript to avoid misperception of his and Woodward’s investigative intentions. “To recount it then,” he says “might have given the impression that impeachment had been our goal all along. It was not. It was always about the story” (Woodward 2005: 230). Woodward and Bernstein’s role in the Watergate scandal—the publication of Woodward’s first story following the June 17 break-in, the publication of their memoir, and ultimately the release of the film adaptation All The President’s Men (1976)—is a division of the Watergate era as a whole. The gaps in time between these events are short enough that they are condensed into one clearly defined time frame. The stories were released in rapid succession and were simultaneously intercut with the final moments of Nixon’s disintegrating presidency, so the book and film are not so much products of this time as they are its constituent parts. It was in April 1976, roughly a year-and-a-half after Nixon’s resignation, that the film was released. The paranoia and fear that permeated the presidency still saturated the political atmosphere. The general secrecy and covert actions that characterized Nixon’s presidency are translated abstractly through shadowy imagery and confusion expressed on characters’ faces in All The President’s Men. The historical characters involved in the scandal are rarely seen or heard, the overcast mood of the narrative their substitute. The film deviates from a written history’s account of these factual faces to convey the emotions and mood that surrounded them. Fictional performance is brought close to historical time and space when screen time matches real time for approximately six minutes. This scene opens as Woodward (Robert Redford) arrives at his desk and calls Kenneth H. Dahlberg, the contributor of a $25,000 check that he and Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) discover was subsequently deposited into the bank account of Watergate burglar Bernard Barker. The scene concludes with Woodward at his typewriter, hanging up with Bernstein on the other line.

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In between the two calls a sequence of carefully staged simultaneities create urgency and a sense of authenticity to Woodward’s actions. The film is premised on the impression of historical accuracy, a point that is enhanced when the action in screen time occurs in the real time ticking away on the clock. For those six minutes the audience witnesses Woodward in a fluid motion, working with the other reporters and writers and with the unpredictable buzz of office phones and equipage. The office is an atmosphere of perpetual distraction and chaos so realistically staged that for the sake of scene fluidity, the camera never stops rolling. There is no splice that joins together this multifaceted image, which is made even more effective by the set, an identical match to the Post newsroom back in DC, complete even with the contents of wastepaper baskets—a paper trail all the way from the Capitol to a soundstage for added authenticity. The shot begins as Woodward picks up the phone; the camera holds him in the foreground at medium range while the rest of the Post newsroom is laid out in long shot in the background. In the far background a crowd of Post staffers are gathering around a television, watching intently. We watch Woodward as he dials the number and anticipates Dahlberg’s voice on the other end. The crowd behind him explodes in a jeer at the

Out of the past: Robert Redford as journalist Bob Woodward in All The President’s Men (1976). The Kobal Collection, Getty Images.

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TV set, and instinctively Woodward jams his finger in his ear to better hear Dahlberg. Dahlberg nervously denies wrongdoings with CREEP and abruptly hangs up on Woodward. As the shot continues, the camera holds steady, not yet cutting away, and Redford maintains his character in place of editing: Woodward is in the foreground, and the newsroom stays in long shot in the background. The crowd of staffers disperses along the aisles as people return to their desks. Woodward checks his notes, turns, and in one smooth motion dials another number. This time Clark MacGregor, CREEP Campaign Director, is on the line. Woodward asks him about the funds; MacGregor denies any knowledge and refers Woodward to John Mitchell, the former U.S. Attorney General and CREEP Director. A secretary waves for Woodward’s attention: Dahlberg has called back on another line. Almost imperceptibly the camera zooms in to a tighter shot on Woodward’s face. Gradually the background of the newsroom fades away and the audience gets closer to Woodward. Dahlberg says the name of the person he gave his money to. “It goes all the way to Stans,” Woodward exclaims over the phone to Bernstein. In this singular moment, the audience is focalized through Woodward’s character as he learns the Finance Chairman on Nixon’s staff, Maurice Stans, is involved; the viewer has all the information required to understand the gravity of this historical moment. The viewer is caught up in the momentum of Woodward’s choreographed movements, as he swings from his notes on one side of his desk to the phone on the other, and finally to the typewriter, where the story is drafted before the viewer’s eyes in real time. Here, the audience witnesses history in the making. The expression of emotion on Woodward’s face is synthesized as proof of what this part of Watergate was about: shock that the top political and law enforcement officials in the United States orchestrated the crime, a moment that fills in as proxy for other historical characters. One of those characters is Bernard L. Barker. On May 24, 1973, Bernard Barker, one of the five Watergate burglars, testified before Senator Sam Ervin’s Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities that he had no previous knowledge that anyone above his immediate supervisor, E. Howard Hunt, was involved in the break-in. On the basis of this individual piece of testimony, Barker may not have been aware that the chain of command reached higher than Howard Hunt, but Hunt worked as a consultant to the White House, and Barker and the four other burglars knew that. The initials “W. H.” or “W. House” were scribbled on papers with Hunt’s telephone number that were found in the men’s possession and confiscated

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by police the night of the burglary. On the morning of June 17, 1972, mere hours after the burglars’ predawn arrest, an unsolicited council arrived at the courthouse to represent Barker and his cohorts. Neither Barker nor any of the burglars made a call that morning for their own legal representation. Their lawyers appeared at the request of another party. “Now isn’t it true that some lawyers showed up immediately after you went to jail following the break-in at Democratic national headquarters?” Georgia Senator Herman Talmadge asked Barker at the Committee hearing. “That is correct.” “And did you not send for them?” When Barker replied “No,” the senator requested confirmation that the other burglars had not called either. Mr. Barker said that that was correct. “Do you have any idea how those lawyers were alerted and came down to attempt to aid you?” “I have no idea.” “Were you surprised that they showed up?” Mr. Barker said no, but the senator wanted a clarification. “You anticipated that they would?” “Yes.” “How did you anticipate that if you had no previous knowledge that they would?” “On the philosophy that if you are caught by the enemy,” Barker speculated, “every effort will be made to rescue you.” The senator pressed on, “Who did you think would attempt to rescue you?” “Whoever my backers were.” Barker’s answers, patronizing though they were, didn’t affect Talmadge. Remaining composed he continued, “Who did you think your backers were?” “Sir, I was not there to think. I was there to follow orders, not to think.” “Didn’t you wonder who was giving you the orders?” “No, I had absolute confidence in—as I do now—the people I was dealing with, sir.” Talmadge quipped, “Well, you knew you weren’t working for Castro, didn’t you?” “That I did know.”

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And the senator asked again, “Who did you think you were working for?” “I was working for Mr. Hunt and those things that Mr. Hunt represents.” (U.S. Senate Resolution 60 1973: 371) Hunt represented the White House, a sponsor of Hunt’s activities, and the overall planning and carrying out of the Watergate break-in. Here, Barker functions under the covert protocol common among all the participants in the Watergate scandal; his testimony is terse and ambiguous, and he will not acknowledge the Committee’s implication of the White House. Despite Barker’s knowledge that Hunt was an employee of the very institution questioned in connection with the crime, he will not affirm their association; he lies. The vague language in Barker’s testimony sets a mood that All The President’s Men is able to convey through a spooky filmed aesthetic rather than by incorporating the historical record of these precise and rather minute statements. Then there are images of real locales and buildings in Washington DC that lurk in the fictional frame of the film. As a reminder of what the investigation stemmed from, the Watergate building appears for the first time in the film like a ghost out of the darkness, in a scene where Woodward is on his way to meet Deep Throat for the first time. It is visible for a brief moment and is gone perhaps before its presence is even realized. Though we see it for only a second or two, the building is both a character and a piece of scenery. It is a tangible symbol that embodies the conflict of the story. The building is a character that is injected as fact into the fictional film. The complex haunts the space it occupies as the skeleton of its framework peeks through the heavy drape of shadows around it. Similarly, the President’s tone is steeped in dark paranoia as he talks to his staff in hours of taped Oval Office conversations. On March 13, 1973, Nixon and his Counsel, John W. Dean, discuss the dangers of White House testimonies before Senator Ervin’s Committee. Both know that once the administration is called to speak, its orchestration of the cover-up will be exposed. Dean tells the President, “There is a certain domino situation here. If some things start going, a lot of other things are going to start going, and there can be a lot of problems if everything starts falling” (The Nixon Tape Transcripts 1974: 150). The elusive language that Dean tactically employs in place of stating outright that the administration will crumble if the cover-up is exposed is a code that maintains the President’s feigned ignorance of the situation. The ramifications of Watergate were

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clear by the time the conversation took place. Nixon had ordered the cover-up roughly nine months earlier, Dean had obeyed his instruction, and if White House testimonies came to the fore, both knew that the President’s credibility was on the line. Yet Nixon and Dean veil their conversation with indeterminate qualifiers, almost as if by not admitting their lies out loud they were somehow not guilty of them. Dean concludes, “There are dangers, Mr. President. I would be less candid if I didn’t tell you there are. There is a reason for not everyone going up and testifying” (ibid.). To avoid implicating himself in the crime on tape, Nixon is careful not to acknowledge involvement, despite the fact that no one was listening—at least not yet. In a tirade, Nixon blames the Democrats for the impending dissolution of his administration, and again he is taken over by a paranoid conscience; the fear that someone may be listening to his conversation comes through in the content of his speech. He denies fault to his putative audience, not through an explicit denial of the cover-up but covertly with censure for political rivals who have frustrated him in the past, as a means of shifting blame. “I tell you,” he says, “this is the last gasp of our hardest opponents. They’ve just got to have something to squeal about . . . They are going to lie around and squeal. They’re having hard time now [sic]” (ibid. 152). He continues almost incoherently: They got the hell kicked out of them in the election. There is not a Watergate around in this town, not so much our opponents, even the media, but the basic thing is the [Democratic] establishment. The establishment is dying, and so they’ve got to show that despite the successes we have had in foreign policy and in the election, they’ve got to show that it is just wrong just because of [the Watergate scandal]. They are trying to use this as the whole thing. (ibid.) His paranoia is compounded a few days later, on March 21, 1973, when Dean reports that the administration has “a cancer within, close to the Presidency, that is growing.” Dean refers to the two scapegoats for the burglary, Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy, namelessly as the “people” who are “going to start perjuring themselves . . . to protect other people in line” (ibid. 174). The others were his own, the members of his administration, leading up to Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Dean, and subsequently Nixon himself. By then it was difficult for Nixon to contain his administration’s involvement. Strings of curse words punctuate his conversations. He swears thirty times during the above conversation alone, each word marked “expletive deleted” on the transcript (ibid. 170–249). Nixon’s oratorical

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skills must have eluded him, for on that day (like many others previous and subsequent) with Dean and Haldeman he is, more accurately, ranting. The film never references the taped conversations to vouch for its historical accuracy, but its visual technique preserves their essence as a substitute to show how out of control Nixon had become. One sequence ensnares the entire Washington community in Woodward and Bernstein’s investigation through a series of overhead surveillance shots, which are intercut with medium shots of the reporters’ interview subjects. This technique alters the scope of their investigation from the general DC public to specific people within it. It captures the long hours of groundwork the two pushed through to find the point-people stretched out across the city who substantiated the claims of White House involvement, but it is also a reflexive moment that comments on the general fear of surveillance. The movie camera works as a device that surveys the diegetic surveillance within the frame. The result is a dizzying realization that the presidency (and perhaps the whole community) is corrupt. The sequence starts with a close-up of a list of names of CREEP staffers and moves to an overhead shot of a car-packed parking lot. The names and the cars are indistinguishable from one another and remain anonymous to the viewer as they are focalized, or seen through the eyes of Woodward and Bernstein. From the reporters’ perspective the names on the Committee list are a blur of black characters inscribed on a piece of paper. Similarly, the parking lot is checkered with brightly colored cars on one flat plane without movement or distinction. Finally, Woodward and Bernstein’s car pulls out of the mass, and in a single shot the camera tracks the car along the street until it again becomes indistinguishable among the traffic. Reappearing in the background of this shot is the Watergate complex; its wall of windows acts like a barrier for the endless names and faces implicated in the investigation. With the list of names in hand the reporters arrive on Committee members’ doorsteps. After scores of doors have been slammed in their faces, one woman greets them long enough to allow the reporters to get a word in. She is nervous and will not answer their questions. In a reverse shot, the reporters stand on the doorstep enveloped in shadows; their faces are ghostlike points of light in a blanket of darkness. “They’ll see you,” the woman warns and closes the door. The employee list appears in close-up with most of the names crossed off. This shot pattern repeats: the reporters at the door, the door slamming, another name struck off the list. The search widens with each Committee employee’s refusal to speak, and, in coordination, the camera tracks the

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reporters’ car, which pulls out into the street until once again it is lost in the sea of traffic. Bernstein’s voice-over reads through the list of names alphabetically while the camera continues to pull back, slowly, until the entire Washington DC grid is surveyed overhead, finalizing the reporters’ implication of the entire government in their investigation. All The President’s Men’s linchpin character, Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook), is introduced in the same way as the Committee workers: hooded in darkness, this time in an underground parking garage, and only half revealing himself in his shifty language and maneuvers. Before Deep Throat was revealed in the spring of 2005 to have been Mark Felt, the former Deputy Director of the FBI and the number two in command at the Bureau in the latter portion of Nixon’s presidency, there was an indeterminate amount of speculation as to his true identity. In a sense, his character was irrelevant. What mattered in terms of Woodward’s and Bernstein’s stories was that there was an inside source who chose to speak out, no matter how covert his words were. Former Counsel to President Nixon, Leonard Garment defines Deep Throat as an “organizing principle” for the reporters’ memoir and the film that gave shape to the story (2000: 130). Woodward was not allowed to quote Deep Throat as a source for the Post stories—not even anonymously, because of the sensitive nature of his position—but Deep Throat promised to guide Woodward through the facts he gathered on his own and to provide context for those disconnected bits of information. Garment initially hypothesized that Deep Throat was a character made up of a composite many, who took on the label as a single individual for the sake of narrative clarity, hence “organizing principle.” Anecdotally, he later abandoned this theory and gave the title role to John Sears, a former White House administrator. Time may have proved Garment’s theory incorrect, yet an aura of mystery around the character Deep Throat remains, even if we know Mark Felt is his official identity. For instance, the film audience remembers the face of actor Hal Holbrook lurking in the shadows of the parking garage, an image practically burned on the collective mindscape. When we reference Deep Throat, we think of Holbrook because his was the only face put to the name until very recently. Although Holbrook may play a fictional character, his face itself becomes “fact” the longer it is referenced, and thus Holbrook himself becomes ingrained in the fabric of history. Even Woodward notes Holbrook’s authenticity: “It was a powerful performance capturing the authoritative and seasoned intensity, cynicism and gruffness of the man in the underground garage” (2005: 123). Regardless of Deep Throat’s identity,

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Garment’s assertion that he is the organizing principle remains intact. He will always be a character who provided the thread linking the reporters’ investigative facts. Deep Throat as a character exemplifies the secretiveness of the Watergate era. He emerges in the film under circumstances that are anxiety defined: the threat of being surveilled in an abandoned parking garage in the middle of the night. Deep Throat’s face emerges from the shadows like an apparition. He guides Woodward, wide-eyed and panicked, through the facts of the case. “Did you change cabs?” he asks Woodward abruptly. It was a procedure he had Woodward employ to confuse anyone who might follow him. The camera cuts to a long shot of the two men, allowing the audience to scan the entire garage for suspicious figures. The tension is relieved as the camera brings them back into a medium shot; it was a false alarm. These clandestine meetings are plagued with the terror that they might be caught, with a fear that they are being observed. It is a threat extended to the whole narrative, finally building to the climactic point when Deep Throat warns Woodward, “Your lives are in danger.” The film builds to this point through the presumption that Nixon would have gone so far as to commit (or at least order) murder to protect his reputation. The extremity of murder, however, is speculative, dubious at best, and deliberately emphasized as an element of sheer suspense in the film. The actual conversation between Woodward and Deep Throat was worded differently, with Deep Throat quoted as saying that “electronic surveillance was going on and [the reporters] had better watch it.” Later that night Woodward scrawled a note to Bernstein in his apartment as a precautionary measure to ensure no bugging devices picked up their conversation. One sentence Woodward wrote read, “Everyone’s life is in danger.” But it is not clear from the preceding paragraph if Deep Throat actually said their lives were threatened, or if Woodward was just editorializing: did he type Deep Throat’s words verbatim, or did Deep Throat simply warn them to “be cautious” (Bernstein and Woodward 1974: 317)? Regardless, Woodward felt the danger was real. He was nervous, overworked, and fighting a power much greater than he. As a history from the reporters’ perspective, this element of danger in the film, though unconfirmed, is real. More significant facts are omitted from the film that make the reporters seem a little more infallible than they might be. For instance, Judge John J. Sirica reprimanded the reporters for speaking with grand jury members, whose names Woodward memorized from a confidential record book. Woodward privately approached the jurors, and though none

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disclosed any information, Sirica stated that he “was ready to take them to task for tampering.” He concedes, “The newspaper had performed an invaluable public service in keeping the spotlight on the Watergate case, but now they had gone too far, interfering, [he] thought, with the administration of justice” (1979: 54). Nonetheless, critics rate the film for its historical accuracy. Bruce Crowther remarks that the film “ranks highly as one of Hollywood’s most accurate depictions of the nation’s political history” because it follows historical fact and the reporters’ record of the investigation so closely (1984: 190). In addition to the attention paid to historical detail, the film uses its own brand of stylistics that reflects the growing component of the mass media in American cultural and political life. In the film, it is only through the secondary interface of the television that the audience sees documentary footage of the White House Administration; the television is the only means by which footage of the historical figures are shown. Framed as a separate image within the mise-en-scène by the borders of the television screen, Richard Nixon makes his entrance for the State of the Union address in the film’s opening sequence. Later, Attorney General Richard Kleindienst denies shredding White House paperwork that documents the break-in. His face is framed by the television, detached from the reporters’ papercluttered table. The office scenery, separated from the subject on the monitor, reminds the viewer that the images presented are edited, that some pieces are omitted and others emphasized. The television camera manipulates time in Kleindienst’s interview so that it conveys one piece of information: the Attorney General’s denial. At the same time, the frame of the shot that encloses this particular piece of edited information contains something else pertinent to the story: Woodward and Bernstein’s presence, a veritable contradiction of Kleindienst’s testimony. Thus, in this frame we have a factual representation of part of a historical narrative. The shot is a microcosm of the filmed story as a whole: portions of the truth that the reporters uncover in moments among the chaos of the investigation. Woodward and Bernstein’s story is edited with the same precision as Kleindienst’s denial playing on the screen before them. The reflexive framewithin-a-frame shot remarks on the synthetic ability written history and story have to create a complete image of the past. It concurrently shows the viewer one character’s misleading statement (Kleindienst on the television) and the external forces working against him in real time (Woodward and Bernstein). Historian Robert Toplin claims the film “provided a valuable history lesson” and that “too many Americans forgot what was at stake in the scandal, and consequently, they considered the crisis to be far

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less serious than it really was. All The President’s Men offered them a useful reminder” (1996: 193). The frame-within-a-frame shot style occurs again in a concluding scene. The reporters sit at their Post desks typing in the background. In the foreground, a television is airing Richard Nixon’s inauguration; he places his hand on the Bible and swears to faithfully execute the duties of the Office of the Presidency. No one in the newsroom pays much attention to the television. At first a crowd gathers around the screen, but it soon dissipates as the camera gradually zooms in. The faces and voices on the television blend with the din of the fluorescent lights overhead and the general office shuffle. Woodward and Bernstein continue to type, each of their keystrokes functioning as a blow to Nixon’s credibility, their movements a piece-by-piece deconstruction of the Nixon administration’s corruption. In this shot, Woodward and Bernstein are woven into the grain of history. They are in the midst of drafting the first narratives that untangle the web of characters, names, and misleading facts that this story has become. They are writing the first draft of history, and the audience is there in simultaneous time, watching.

References Bernstein, Carl and Bob Woodward (1974), All The President’s Men. New York: Simon & Schuster. Coyle, Jake (2006), “Robert Redford looks back on ‘All The President’s Men’ 30 years later,” Associated Press, February 16: n.p. Crowther, Bruce (1984), Hollywood Faction: Reality and Myth in the Movies. London: Columbus Books. Garment, Leonard (2000), In Search of Deep Throat: The Greatest Political Mystery of Our Time. New York: Basic Books. Havill, Adrian (1993), Deep Truth: The Lives of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. New York: Birch Lane Press. Liebovich, Louis W. (2003), Richard Nixon, Watergate, and the Press: A Historical Retrospective. Westport, CT: Praeger. Nixon Tape Transcripts, The (1974), Submissions of Recorded Presidential Conversations to the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives by President Richard Nixon, Vol. 1, April 30. Schama, Simon (1992), Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations. New York: Vintage Books.

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Sirica, John J. (1979), To Set the Record Straight: The Break-in, the Tapes, the Conspirators, the Pardon. New York: W. W. Norton. Toplin, Robert Brent (1996), History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. U.S. Senate Resolution 60, Presidential Campaign Activities of 1972 (1973), Hearings before the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities of the United States Senate, Ninety-Third Congress, First Session. U.S. Government Printing Office. Woodward, Bob (2005), The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Filmography All The President’s Men (1976), Dir. Alan J. Pakula. Warner Bros.

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4 Staying for Time: The Holocaust and Atrocity Footage in American Public Memory Steven Alan Carr

Any discussion of atrocity films must address the “fallacy of presentism,” in David Hackett Fischer’s words, characterizing a modern-day response to these images (1970: 135–40). Given public concern over the dwindling generation of eyewitnesses and survivors who can offer direct testimony of the Holocaust, exploring the specific issues of context and reception for so-called atrocity films seems more important than ever, yet they have received scant scholarly attention. In some cases, such as in the work of artist Alan Schechner, attempts to highlight the significance of context in viewing documentary imagery of the camps have met with public opprobrium. The political dimension of this footage does present particular challenges, given the unusual circumstances of how these films initially were produced, distributed, and exhibited. This chapter begins to chart some potential new directions to reimagine how early audiences might have encountered and responded to atrocity footage of the camps, organizing these potential directions around some of the more popular myths regarding how and by whom this footage was seen. Popular memory of how Holocaust imagery first was screened, and of how these screenings forged a distinctly American public memory of the Holocaust, remains embedded within an actual and locatable history. Previous attention has been concentrated mostly on the visual, but this

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chapter focuses on the relevance of time, with the images themselves a secondary concern. Time, as phenomenon and concept, reveals how audiences can understand atrocity footage differently according to various contexts of reception. An awareness of time puts critical distance between what is represented by the mythology and the representation that the mythology itself offers. This is not to suggest that documentary footage of atrocity is inauthentic or inferior to an unmediated encounter with sites of atrocity, though some extreme positions either denying or affirming the Holocaust have made this claim. Rather, this chapter focuses on how the context within which this footage is screened and seen produces new realities for public memory. These realities are not static but change and unfold over time. At the simplest level, consider the duration of footage as bestowing cultural capital on footage. Early audience experiences with atrocity footage were brief, coming through short newsreels shown before a feature film, or in cities such as New York at theaters playing only newsreels. During World War II, the Roosevelt administration’s War Production Board limited each newsreel to a length of 750 feet, or approximately 8 minutes, and releases of new issues to every other week. On the eve of a public screening of official U.S. Signal Corps footage of concentration camps, New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther railed against these restrictions, claiming they inhibited the “social obligation” for theaters to present “such evidence graphically” of “horrors coming hot out of Germany” (1945: X1). By the late 1950s, and well after these restrictions had been lifted, film duration had become a cultural signifier of the epic American Holocaust film. Major American films of this period treating the Holocaust included The Young Lions (1958) at 167 minutes, The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) at 171 minutes, and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) at 186 minutes, the latter encapsulating actual Signal Corps footage—a short film-within-a-film—within its epic narrative. Duration similarly has conferred importance on representations of the Holocaust on television. Although American television has engaged Holocaust-related themes since the 1950s, as the work of Jeffrey Shandler (1999) indicates, ABC miniseries such as QB VII (1974) and Holocaust (1978) paved the way for Holocaust-centric programming on American network television with running times of 390 and 475 minutes, respectively. ABC aired both of these miniseries over consecutive nights, rather than following the more common practice of scheduling a weekly timeslot. Such programming variations further connoted what was not ordinary television but a special event. Time also leaves ideological traces within its disjunctures: between when the footage was shot and when it was seen; between when the footage

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served evidentiary purposes for documenting atrocity and when this footage became a quotable visual text for use within other films, both documentary and fictional; between unmediated and signified suffering, and moments of mediated suffering as the signifier for atrocity, the latter either recreated by actors or captured indexically through footage shot during Liberation; and ultimately between Holocaust memory, and instantaneous or near-instantaneous depictions of a Holocaust aftermath, propelled by the 1961 broadcast in Israel of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal. The trial, shot live by four television cameras running simultaneously, became a watershed moment in which the Holocaust could serve as a newsworthy media event in its own right, complete with press conferences and daily excerpts appearing on nightly network news.

Time, Mythology, and the Use of Atrocity Footage Inverting the typical paradigm emphasizing image over context, a consideration of time reveals a mythology surrounding films depicting Holocaust atrocity. Although certainly not a definitive inventory, three distinct myths drive the popular understanding of films shot during the liberation of concentration camps: the myth of “seeing is believing”; the myth of clear delineation between documentary and fiction films; and a presentist myth of the prior prevalence of atrocity imagery. Myths concerning the exhibition of atrocity footage are deceptive not because they are untrue but because of what they choose to select and ignore to be relevant to particular people at particular moments in history. For example, the paucity of atrocity footage appearing in American feature films of the 1950s is as striking as the prevalence in mainstream media today. To deduce from this that Hollywood callously avoided this footage, however, ignores the significance of newsreels in introducing American audiences to Nazi atrocities. Such assumptions mask the political economy of the film industry. In fact, as many theaters at that time were either owned by one of the major film studios or dependent on one for content, the vertically integrated structure of the industry streamlined the ability to get atrocity footage shot by the U.S. Army Signal Corps into studio-produced newsreels. Similarly, European films and American-European co-productions played an integral role in introducing American audiences to the plight of Holocaust survivors and displaced persons. MGM, for example, co-produced Fred Zinnemann’s The Search (1948) with Swiss Praesens-Film. The Oscar-winning The Search, shot in postwar Berlin, details the struggle of children displaced by the war to return to some semblance of a normal life. The narrative

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focuses on the reunion between a mother and son who had been separated at Auschwitz. Only three years after Liberation, the film already had begun to treat the painful complexities of memory and the passage of time, especially in how the narrative portrays the young boy as he pieces together fragmented recollections of his mother. The disjuncture between present and past is further elaborated in The Last Stage (1948), filmed on location in Auschwitz and featuring professional and nonprofessional personnel who survived Auschwitz and who recreate their experiences as camp survivors for this narrative film. The co-writer and director of the film, Wanda Jakubowska, herself was imprisoned at Auschwitz. Publicity for The Last Stage touts it as the first to document the conditions of the camps.1 The disconnection between lived experience and its filmic recreation suggests, at least in the case of The Search and The Last Stage, that the representation of the Holocaust in cinema is more complex than simply a matter of absence from the screen. In one of the best-known documentaries about the Holocaust, Night and Fog (1955), issues of time and memory become central to the film as it smoothly cuts back and forth between present-day color footage of Auschwitz in ruins and black-and-white newsreels of a decade earlier. Rather than offer a linear chronology of events, the film evokes a sense of timelessness, in terms of the aftermath and the constant threat of forgetting what happened during the Holocaust as new atrocities are being committed. Like many of Alain Resnais’ later films, Night and Fog offers a world where past intermingles with the present. This perspective has garnered the film both controversy and accolades, as some critics contend that the film contains historical inaccuracies. Indeed, the film is often employed as a documentary to teach the Holocaust, with its most crucial motif—the unsettling possibilities it offers for chronology and memory—ignored in pedagogy. These films, like almost any film about the Holocaust, pose challenges in terms of the footage itself, its factors of production, and how it was intended to be used; in terms of reception, pertaining to who saw this footage, under what circumstances, and when; and in terms of the imaginary, or how an audience of today might, or might not, imagine its own relationship to this footage and how it was seen by previous audiences. As Richard Slotkin observes with regard to cultural mythology: all myth, to be credible, must relate the problems and aspirations of particular cultures to the fundamental conditions of human existence and human psychology. But the viability of myth depends upon the applicability of its particular terms and metaphors to the peculiar

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Postwar films such as Night and Fog (1955) recombined archival photographs, newsreel, and Signal Corps atrocity footage into powerful meditations on memory and collective responsibility amid the passage of time. The Kobal Collection, Getty Images.

conditions of history and environment that dominate the life of a particular people. (1973: 14) For example, a mythology concerning atrocity footage may reveal more about how a post-9/11, post-Schindler’s List society would like to see itself in relation to the Holocaust than about what audiences in theaters encountered in 1945. Just as the Eichmann trials turned Holocaust memory into a modern media event, distinctly American memories of the Holocaust became the explanatory framework amid post-9/11 popular discussion for everything from comparisons between George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler to justifications for war with Iraq, complete with recollections of the Reichstag fire, accusations of Chamberlain-like appeasement, comparisons of mass human suffering, assertions of good and evil, and depictions of Iraqi liberation. Both Schindler’s List (1993) and media coverage of 9/11 mark defining moments for a particular historical context in which public standards, aesthetics, and expectations of representations of atrocity were radically

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renegotiated. Between the release of Steven Spielberg’s film in 1993 and the live coverage of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in 2001, media saturation and the increasing acceptance of its simulations became familiar features of American public life. Perpetually negotiating and renegotiating the terms of Holocaust film with audiences reiterates extant standards and establishes new ones. Self-consciously drawing on the visuals of wartime newsreels, for example, Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography for Spielberg’s film helped set a visual benchmark for Holocaust films to deploy the very visual conventions of Signal Corps photography that grimly documented atrocity in the first place. This footage has become an instantly recognized signifier for the Holocaust, with its grainy black-and-white photography and extensive use of hand-held cameras documenting scenes of the emaciated, skeletal, and barely clothed bodies of survivors and the Allied bulldozing of rotting and nude corpses left by the Nazis into mass burial pits to prevent the spread of disease in the camps. Appropriating such imagery, the onscreen violence and the nudity in Spielberg’s film became media events in their own right. They generated additional media coverage from students of color laughing at an execution scene to Republican Senator Tom Coburn rebuking NBC for broadcasting the film unedited over most of its affiliates.2 Despite these controversies, or perhaps because of them, audiences have come to expect a heightened graphic quality from Holocaust films. Such explicitness and a certain literalness reinforce the notion of photographic truth that goes back at least to nineteenth-century discourses celebrating the triumph of the mechanical objectivity of the camera shutter over the imperfect subjectivity of the human eye or hand. As Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright note, the “paradox of photography” is the acknowledgment “that although we know that images can be ambiguous and are easily manipulated or altered . . . much of the power of photography still lies in the shared belief that photographs are objective or truthful records of events” (2001: 16).

Time and the Manipulation of Atrocity Footage Given the widespread saturation of images depicting atrocity and a residual belief in photographic truth, decrying the lack of overt Holocaust imagery in films released during the wartime and immediate postwar era has recently become more fashionable. However, this attitude imposes an anachronistic set of contemporary standards on the past. As time can blind contemporary audiences to the impact Holocaust imagery originally had on historical audiences, such lack of understanding is symptomatic of an

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ongoing cultural desensitization to these visuals that completely ignores the gravity of General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s decision to release this footage commercially. Such expectations that important events were media events belong not to past but to present-day audiences. Perhaps some wartime audiences might have found forthright recreations of atrocity in fictional film highly distasteful and exploitative. Or perhaps others saw the place of atrocity as being in newsreel footage and not in entertainment films. Or perhaps they did not even want a photographic image to capture the full extent of the atrocity. A brief scene from Orson Welles’ The Stranger (1946) demonstrates how reactions to atrocity footage can alter over time. In a 1946 article in The New York Times entitled “Ding dong bell: a passing regret on the cinematic decline of Orson Welles,” Crowther excoriates Welles’ latest production, which briefly features some atrocity footage near the film’s climax. In this scene, FBI agent Wilson (Edward G. Robinson) uses a film projector to show a disbelieving Mary Longstreet (Loretta Young) that her husband is in fact a Nazi war criminal. Genuine footage of survivors is intercut with faked newsreels in which Welles portrays a high-ranking Nazi. “The brief usage of some actual atrocity news film at one point would be most effective if the picture itself were in line,” writes Crowther. “As it is, the employment of this footage from a classic record of horror in a slick, unconvincing melodrama is meretricious in the extreme” (1946: 41). Given its brutal nature, even the sparing use of atrocity footage might backfire, bringing accusations of cheapening and debasing the gruesome nature of this footage and the power it held for audiences at the time. Today, inclusion of actual footage or recreations of events are common practices within the feature film. The determination of such expectations is highly elusive, and American audiences probably harbored complex and even contradictory responses to this footage. However, we do know that atrocity footage existed within a context of other mediated representations of human brutality and suffering. Although the myth of “seeing is believing” presumes that American audiences’ first experience with atrocity was a visual one, it was neither the first nor the exclusive mode of how they learned of the Holocaust. The earliest reports of atrocity occurred in print. For example, a front-page story in The New York Times on April 18, 1945, describes in great detail the forced tour of Buchenwald taken by 1,200 German civilians. Even before this story appeared in print, Edward R. Murrow had reported on Buchenwald in his live weekly radio broadcast from London on Sunday, April 15, 1945, at 1:45 p.m. over the CBS radio affiliate WABC. Although Murrow stops short of the detail featured in The New York Times article, his broadcast catalogs

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the familiar archive of atrocities that would appear in subsequent newsreel compilations: the contrast between what Murrow describes as “an evil smelling horde” and “well-fed Germans,” the tattooed numbers on arms, the description of human skeletons, the pervasiveness of death. Although Murrow’s broadcast did not establish this taxonomy of camp atrocities, it demonstrates the necessity of viewing subsequent atrocity footage within a constellation of different media. Radio more closely parallels television than film in the sense that it was a domestic medium. Public opinion polls of the time, such as those conducted by American sociologist Hadley Cantril (responsible for the groundbreaking audience study of Orson Welles’ 1938 radio production War of the Worlds), revealed that more Americans received their news from radio than from any other source (Cantril 1966 [1940]: 68–70). A second and related myth surrounding Holocaust footage imagines a clear delineation between documentary and fiction films, which is a relatively recent development. One can trace the almost total acceptance of the documentary film as different from fiction at least back to the embrace of cinema verité in the United States beginning in the 1960s. Cinema verité eschewed older, more traditional documentaries, which made frequent use of studio-bound sets, employed the “voice of God” narrator, and relied heavily on staged recreations, in favor of using newly available, lightweight, and portable technology that better allowed for on-location shooting of events as they unfolded, without interference from a camera crew. Advocates of this cinematic form, such as filmmaker Richard Leacock, emphasized that at a certain point, the cinema verité filmmaker would become like “a fly on the wall,” able to capture events as if the camera were not even there. American popular culture so thoroughly appropriated cinema verité techniques that today these techniques virtually have come to define mainstream documentary practice. However, before the 1960s blurring the lines between documentary and fiction rarely provoked an outcry, and the staging or recreation of action in documentary footage was regularly practiced without rendering documentaries of the time inauthentic. Cinema verité reinvigorated the artifice of photographic image as unmediated reality. The work of artist Alan Schechner is instructive here, particularly his “Self Portrait at Buchenwald: It’s the Real Thing” (1991–1993), which was part of the Jewish Museum’s contentious 2002 art exhibition Mirroring Evil in New York. Schechner digitally manipulates a familiar photograph taken within one of the barracks at Liberation, inserting his likeness into the picture as one of the inmates wearing a striped uniform and holding a Diet Coke can. Beyond its admonition of an encroaching

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commercialization of Holocaust imagery, the photograph reminds us of the ease with which seemingly objective images can be appropriated to enhance the power of fiction. The “real thing” just as easily refers to a commercial trademark as it does to our willingness to accept the surface reality of images simply because they appear to be real. Schechner’s image warns of a current gullibility for documentary images, as opposed to an alleged naïveté on the part of earlier audiences. It is not that audiences at the time of Liberation were unable to distinguish between documentary and fiction, but that staged recreation and actuality could comfortably coexist within the same documentary at one historical juncture. It can be argued that before the advent of cinema verité, less emphasis was placed on the authenticity of the events depicted and more on the place and the players, as can be seen in Jakubowska’s The Last Stage. In pre-Liberation newsreels, staged re-enactments were also a conventional documentary practice. In the December 1938 The March of Time newsreel “Refugee—Today and Tomorrow,” numerous takes were staged on location (presumably outside of Manhattan) of Jews fleeing to safety from the Gestapo. According to Raymond Fielding, scenes of the Gestapo headquarters were shot at The March of Time’s New York studios, with Staten Island serving as the surrogate backdrop for a concentration camp. On the other hand, some location footage of recent refugees being debriefed was shipped from London with a note from the cinematographer stating, “[T]his was not a re-enactment, but an authentic case” (Fielding 1978: 236– 37). The acceptability of such intermingling of staged footage and actuality points to the greater weight documentary and particularly atrocity footage assumed after World War II in evidentiary proceedings. The use of such footage may well have ushered in a whole style of documentary filmmaking now known as cinema verité.

Legal and Political Uses of Atrocity Footage After Liberation, the political use of atrocity footage as war crimes evidence in court proceedings helped establish a new form of documentary practice. Coming from foreign newsreel services and the U.S. Signal Corps, it augurs a style of filmmaking that looks like that of cinema verité. As courtroom evidence, this footage understandably shunned staging or recreating events and actions. As a standardized practice, however, the look and feel of these films have influenced postwar culture far beyond the courtroom. Scholars such as Barbie Zelizer (1998) and Dagmar Barnouw (1996) have analyzed how photojournalism and the Signal Corps footage

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developed a consistent and influential point of view—through the use of camera angle and placement, composition, and framing—from the perspective of the occupying victors. This recent research suggests multiple possibilities for how audiences see images of atrocity: as seemingly transparent evidence as part of a conscious and overarching institutional practice, and as establishing a new benchmark for subsequent documentary filmmaking. In outlining the use of film as legal evidence in war crimes proceedings, the Allies articulated an aesthetic that conforms to more modern documentary conventions. A letter from the judge advocate of the European Theater of Operations dated April 27, 1945, specifies a set of standard practices for the U.S. Signal Corps to shoot and process “still and motion pictures . . . taken of liberated prisoners and Concentration Camps.” Anticipating the imminent filming of Dachau, the document calls for a range of coverage, including wide shots (“general conditions”) and medium shots and close-ups (“individual cases of atrocities”). It goes on to describe production practices. A war crimes officer will direct the shooting of evidence. After receiving the processed footage from London, the officer will review it before it is edited. “It is . . . both practicable and extremely desirable,” the letter states, that the films “be returned to the War Crimes Officer who supervised and directed the shooting of the scene in order that he may make an affidavit as to the accuracy of the scene depicted.”3 In establishing a production practice in which the camera supposedly functions not as active participant but as a transparent recorder subsumed by personal eyewitness, the memo foresees many of the same assumptions inherent in the cinema verité movement fifteen years later. Atrocity footage appearing in New York by the end of April 1945 achieved some degree of exposure, though not on the scale that actual and recreated images of the Holocaust have achieved today. The history of newsreel exhibition in New York reveals some of the various pressures exerted on these screenings. On April 25, The New York Times announced that the U.S. Signal Corps had released footage of Ohrdruf and Holzen to the five major newsreel services for upcoming issues. The next day, the Times announced that additional footage had been shown to the press, but that a general screening would be postponed until the following week. By Sunday, April 29, critic Bosley Crowther was urging all theaters to screen the footage. “Some theaters may be reluctant,” he warns, “as many of them have been in the past, to exhibit the more frightful evidence for fear of bad audience response” (1945: X1). Already in the same issue of the Sunday Times, two newsreel theater chains were advertising films depicting “Nazi Death Factory” and “Effects

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of Atrocities.” On Tuesday, May 2, the Times reported that the first newsreels of Nazi atrocities were released to first-run theaters. Despite fears of an audience backlash, the Times reported that “patrons were determined to see” the films and quoted one theatergoer as saying that these were the pictures that “General Eisenhower and the Army want you to see.” Predictions that female audiences would stay away proved unfounded; one theater even reported an increase in the attendance of women to see the films. By Sunday, May 6, two theaters affiliated with the Trans Lux Newsreel chain advertised that the “first pictures of atrocities” would be screened before the feature. Embassy Newsreel Theaters cautioned that the footage “will shock all Americans, but it must be seen.” Beyond anecdotal accounts of the immediate reception of the footage, determining its political meaning has proven problematic. Locating a complete and accurate list of early films that compiled atrocity footage is a difficult task as the newsreel—the medium by which American audiences were introduced to atrocity footage—has received less attention than other film genres. Many of the earliest compilations exist in numerous versions and vary in terms of language and even editing. The exhibition of these films is complicated by the fact that civilian audiences did not see them, at least initially, and that many of these titles were prepared only for the purposes of re-educating German civilians, of providing evidence of war crimes in military tribunals, and of orienting American soldiers stationed overseas. The intent for how these films should be used changed over time as well. For example, plans for compulsory viewing of atrocity films in German theaters quickly gave way to a policy of screening Hollywood narratives for German civilians to help build the country’s morale through entertainment. What this meant is that many of these films were never fully released, or even released at all. Further research should explore the cultural context of film exhibition of this footage and the context of production of these images at the level of both institutional military practice and documentary style. In addition, it would be a worthwhile venture to investigate shifting audience expectations of authenticity and documentary, and how use of Signal Corps footage as courtroom evidence may have profoundly influenced subsequent documentary style. Thinking about the role of time—from the significance of duration to more abstract issues of cultural memory—is valuable in gaining some critical distance from images that now permeate a shared consciousness with regard to the Holocaust. Recognizing a moment when visual evidence of atrocity did not so thoroughly suffuse the culture may be difficult, especially after Schindler’s List and the televised images of 9/11.

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That difficulty should give rise not to a certain arrogance assuming it is the visual that defines the importance of the Holocaust but to a humility recognizing the difficulty of seeing, both now and then.

Notes Earlier versions of this chapter were presented in December 2005 at the American Jewish Studies conference in Washington DC and in April 2006 at the Cultural Studies Association Fourth Annual Meeting in Fairfax, VA. Research for this essay was made possible through the generous support of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Indiana University– Purdue University Fort Wayne. 1. For more on The Last Stage and other films of Wanda Jakubowska that treat the experience in Nazi concentration camps, see Loewy (2004). 2. For more on student laughter, see Cook (1998). For more on NBC’s broadcast, see Carr (1998). 3. I am grateful to Lisa Yavnai of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies for sharing this document with me.

References Barnouw, Dagmar (1996), Germany 1945: Views of War and Violence. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cantril, Hadley (1966 [1940]), The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Carr, Steven Alan (1998), “Have you witnessed a Holocaust lately? NBC, Ford, and the network premiere of Schindler’s List,” Revisiting Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List—Five Years Later, International Communication Association Annual Convention, Jerusalem, Israel. Cook, Bernie (1998), “‘Only idiots would laugh at pain and death’: Castlemont High students’ response to Schindler’s List and the need to teach film violence,” Sites of Trauma in Public Memory (unpublished manuscript), Society for Cinema Studies Conference, University of California, San Diego. Crowther, Bosley (1945), “The solemn facts,” The New York Times, April 29: X1. — (1946), “Ding dong bell: a passing regret on the cinematic decline of Orson Welles,” The New York Times, July 14: 41.

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Fielding, Raymond (1978), The March of Time, 1935–1951. New York: Oxford University Press. Fischer, David Hackett (1970), Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Loewy, Hanno (2004), “The mother of all Holocaust films? Wanda Jakubowska’s Auschwitz trilogy,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, 24 (2): 179–204. Shandler, Jeffrey (1999), While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust. New York: Oxford University Press. Slotkin, Richard (1973), Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright (2001), Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zelizer, Barbie (1998), Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Filmography Diary of Anne Frank, The (1959), Dir. George Stevens. Twentieth Century Fox. Holocaust (1978), Dir. Marvin J. Chomsky. ABC. Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), Dir. Stanley Kramer. United Artists. Last Stage, The (1948), Dir. Wanda Jakubowska. P. P. Film Polski. March of Time, The (1935–1951). Time, Inc. Night and Fog (1955), Dir. Alain Resnais. Argos Films. QB VII (1974), Dir. Tom Gries. ABC. Schindler’s List (1993), Dir. Steven Spielberg. Universal Studios. Search, The (1948), Dir. Fred Zinnemann. MGM. Stranger, The (1946), Dir. Orson Welles. RKO. Young Lions, The (1958), Dir. Edward Dmytryk. Twentieth Century Fox.

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5 Nostalgic Travels through Space and Time: Good Bye, Lenin! Roger F. Cook

In the years immediately after the reunification of Germany in 1990, mainstream German cinema portrayed the assimilation of former East Germans into a capitalist society as primarily an eastern matter. Following the popularity of New German Comedy of the 1980s, western German filmmakers concocted a mix of the Beziehungskomödien (situational comedies) and cinematic Heimat humor to produce a series of successful films that presented the East’s struggles to “catch up” with the West as an entertaining comedy of errors—Go Trabi Go (1991), Das war der wilde Osten (That Was the Wild East, 1992), and Wir können auch anders (No More Mr. Nice Guy, 1993). A few eastern German directors who had been trained by the now defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR) state film company DEFA made films in an auteur tradition that depicted the social despair facing many eastern Germans in the 1990s. Lacking experience within a commercial film industry, even the most successful of these filmmakers were not able to break into mainstream cinema, including Andreas Dresen (Nachtgestalten [Night Shapes, 1999]; Halbe Treppe [Grill Point, 2002]), Andreas Kleinert (Verlorene Landschaft [Lost Landscape, 1992]; Wege in die Nacht [Paths in the Night, 1999]), and Olaf Kaiser (Drei Stern Rot [Three Stars Red, 2001]).1 It was not until the end of the first decade of unification that German filmmakers were able to bridge this divide between escapist comedy and dark social pessimism to produce box office hits that addressed the economic and 70

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psychic pressures bearing on unification. Two films in particular, Sonnenallee (Sun Alley, 1999) and Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), find a common formula for overcoming the “wall in the head” between eastern and western Germans. Both take a nostalgic and fondly humorous look back at the GDR to address questions about the lingering problem of German identity. If nothing else, the box office success of these two films has shown that the lure of nostalgia for the culture of divided Germany is by no means limited to eastern Germans. Sonnenallee, whose writers (Thomas Brüssig and Leander Hausmann) and director (Hausmann) grew up in the GDR, drew strong attacks from some, mainly western, critics who thought it fueled a romanticized eastern German nostalgia (Ostalgie) for aspects of everyday life in the GDR that had disappeared after the Wende (literally “the turn,” referring to the collapse of the GDR and its incorporation by the Federal Republic). While the film’s detractors claim that it glosses over the oppression and atrocities of the GDR state (Buch 1999), more attentive readings have provided a critical perspective on the dangers that accompany such nostalgia (Cooke 2005: 111–19, Cafferty 2001). As several scholars have shown with regard to Ostalgie in general, the kind of nostalgic look back at happier moments in the GDR in Sonnenallee plays an important role in helping shore up a fragile eastern German sense of identity in unified Germany. It is, on the other hand, not so readily clear why Sonnenallee’s nostalgic depiction of an admittedly naïve, unsophisticated GDR cultural milieu would appeal to western Germans as well. More recently, Good Bye, Lenin! has had far greater success inducing western German participation in Ostalgie. Directed by Wolfgang Becker, who coauthored the script with fellow West German Bernd Lichtenberg, the film displays prominently many of the products and lifestyles popular among Ostalgie enthusiasts. Its popularity, however, has reached far beyond what one might expect to be its target audience of former GDR citizens. The biggest German box office hit since the Wende, Good Bye, Lenin! touched, according to film critics, Germans in both East and West on a visceral level, even prompting a feeling of community (Gemeinschaftsgefühl) between them (Göttler 2003: 12). As a much bandied-about phrase from a review of the Berlin premiere has it, the film generated a “gesamtdeutsches Geflüster” (whisperings of German unity) (Mommert and Kerkmann 2003; Göttler 2003).2 In contrast to Sonnenallee, Becker’s film was also a major international hit, screening in seventy countries and easily outdrawing other recent international hits such as Nirgendwo in Afrika (Nowhere in Africa, 2001) and Lola rennt (Run Lola Run, 1998). When asked about its popularity outside of Germany, Becker attributed it to

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the family drama, calling it “a very human story, a story which can be easily understood by everybody” (“‘Goodbye, Lenin!’ charms US audiences too,” n.d.). Good Bye, Lenin! opens with a short sequence of scenes from the family’s life in the GDR in 1979, the year the father settles in West Germany, leaving Alex (Daniel Brühl) stranded in the East with his mother and sister. After this initial vignette of the family’s past the film leaps forward ten years to October 7, 1989, the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the GDR. The first in a sequence of unprecedented demonstrations against the despotic rule of the East German Socialist Unity Party occurred on that day, setting off a fast-evolving protest movement that would bring down the GDR government. When she gets caught up in the Berlin demonstration by accident and sees her son being arrested, Alex’s mother, Christiane (Katrin Sass), falls into a coma in which she remains for the next ten months. During this time, the Berlin Wall comes down and the forty-year division of Germany gives way to impending unification. When Christiane awakens, her doctor tells Alex that if she hears about the Wende the shock could send her back into a coma. Alex decides that he must by whatever means necessary keep her from finding out and devises a plan to simulate the continued existence of the GDR. He digs out of storage all the GDR-era furniture, clothes, books, and furnishings that had already been replaced by western goods and restores the family apartment to its pre-Wende state. When he brings his mother home from the hospital, he keeps her confined to the apartment and painstakingly controls her access to the outside world. This storyline requires Alex to account for many of the changes that occur as the Berlin Wall comes down and the two Germanys negotiate the terms of unification. Displaying enormous resolve and resourcefulness, he must devise one ruse after another to explain the sudden appearance of all manner of consumer goods from the West. As he eventually has to explain radical social and political transformations in the GDR, including the influx of West Germans, his fabrications become increasingly creative, contrived, and humorous. The artifice holds up until his mother succumbs to her illness. However, her death does not effect a tragic turn to the story. Rather it provides the occasion for a final cathartic celebration of the nostalgia for the GDR that Alex’s schemes had aroused. The synchronized correlation between the personal drama and the epoch-making events that led to German unification gives the film story a historical dimension that reverberates with audiences in both the East and the West, and outside Germany. Alex turns their apartment into “79 square meters of continuing GDR,” according to the German tagline to the film,

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and produces a model of what East Germany could have become if it had responded differently to the sweeping changes that dismantled the Eastern Bloc in 1989. Alex’s deception requires that he construct a microcosm of its material culture. This aspect of the historical reconstruction enables Good Bye, Lenin! to tap into the strong wave of nostalgia that had swept over the former citizens of the GDR after their absorption into the Federal Republic. The abrupt economic colonization of the GDR by the overwhelming force of Western capitalism transformed everyday culture in the East almost overnight. Products from the former Eastern Bloc countries simply disappeared from the stores. However, when eastern Germans acquired western consumer products, assumed their styles of fashion and design, or attended their cultural events, they were often derided as laughable posers. The former citizens of the GDR began to yearn for the familiar consumer goods and cultural life they had discarded in 1990. By the mid-1990s Ostalgie had become a full-fledged countercultural movement that was restoring various aspects of GDR life. These included retro cafes and discos, cinemas that showed GDR films, supermarkets specializing in East German products, card and board games quizzing one’s knowledge of life in the GDR, museum exhibits of GDR culture, and a museum dedicated specifically to everyday life in the GDR—the Documentation Center for the Everyday Culture of the GDR in Eisenhüttenstadt. Good Bye, Lenin! takes this restoration one step further. Through the immediacy of the film image, it transports the viewer back in time for an emotionally charged reunion with the material culture of the GDR. In the climactic moment of his rewriting of the East German Wende, Alex envisions a far different motivation for German unification. To explain to his mother the presence of West Germans in East Berlin, he has the GDR government admit its mistakes and open up the wall. In his inverted historical account West Germans pour into the GDR. Using actual footage and a spatial rule of thumb, Becker produces a mirror image of the flow of the masses through the wall from East to West. He shows archival news clips of the crowds moving from left to right, that is, footage shot from the north looking south. This simple trick works—for both Alex’s mother and viewer—because the natural inclination is to orient oneself as if looking at a map with north at the top. As the reversal of this key event openly denotes, the film offers its alternative to the actual Berlin Republic strictly in the realm of the imaginary. Nevertheless, Good Bye, Lenin! does not come across as a fairy tale but rather engages the desire of the spectator in a fictional narrative that holds open the possibility of realization in the social realm of a unified Germany. The activation of nostalgia hedges

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against the story devolving into pure fantasy. This clever hook provides a fictional opportunity for rewriting the Wende and in doing so plays out one of the strongest national fantasies of eastern Germans living in unified Germany. While former citizens of the GDR acknowledge that there is no way back to an autonomous and open East German state, many nonetheless look back at the rush to unity in the eleven months following the fall of the Wall as an enormous mistake. They now believe that East Germany missed the opportunity to carve out a “middle way” between state-imposed socialism and unchecked capitalism. Good Bye, Lenin! does not indulge idle wishes to go back and redo what has already happened. Rather it fashions an imaginary social construct that offers in some respects resistance to the western colonization of East German values, identity, and way of life.

Looking Down (and Back) from Above: Space Travel As Time Travel Good Bye, Lenin! is able to invoke a shared nostalgia for a national past by turning back the clock to a time in the GDR when, at least as it is portrayed in the film, an idyllic existence with a small group of friends and family actually existed. Space exploration, a motif that runs throughout the film, provides a distanced perspective that dismisses the grand goals of the East German socialist state and gives renewed importance to the enjoyment of life in an insulated private sphere. When Alex becomes caught up in the possibilities of the fictional GDR he is creating for his mother, he has a Sigmund Jähn (the first German cosmonaut) look-alike assume the role of secretary general. In his inaugural address this fictional cosmonautnow-head-of-state (Stefan Walz) invokes the cosmic perspective he had gained in his space travels: Sigmund Jähn imposter: Someone who has experienced the miracle of observing our small planet from outer space sees things from a different perspective. Up there in the vast emptiness of space life on Earth seems small and insignificant. You ask yourself what humanity has achieved, which goals it has had, and which it has accomplished.3 The space travel that enabled this reflective assessment of human achievement replicates spatially the film’s journey back through time to the year of momentous change in Germany (1989–1990). By offering through Alex’s eyes a nostalgic look back at the GDR space program, the film is able to take a fresh look at its equally ambitious “socialist experiment.” Without dismissing East German socialism, as has been the prevailing tendency in

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Germany since unification, this insight gained from the GDR’s investment in space exploration tempers the idealistic vision that had justified its pursuit. With respect to the more worrisome questions facing the Federal Republic in the twenty-first century, Alex’s fictional version of a postWende GDR offers feel-good narrative relief from the contradictions and problems presented by the new global economy. The “big picture” Alex offers from the vantage point of space corresponds to a post-Romantic longing to lead a simple life with modest rewards. In November 1989, Martin Ahrends, an East German writer who had resettled in the West five years earlier, counseled and urged East Germans to consider carefully what they were about to sacrifice willingly for the sake of inclusion in the West German economy, touting the benefits they had gained from their years of experience in the GDR. He outlined how their ability to escape harsh realities through imagined scenarios would serve them well in the capitalist society of unified Germany. Convinced that they would not be able to resist the pull of the Federal Republic, he reassured them that they possessed “virtues that will be desperately needed in a postindustrial society, ascetic virtues on the margins of Western civilization” (1991: 49). Passive resistance to the totalitarian forces of the GDR, Ahrends argued, yielded new forms of freedom: freedom from all-consuming obsessions with work, from a tyrannical structuring of both work and leisure time, and from the colonization of wishes, desires, and consciousness by the marketing industry. And also freedom to let things take their course, to dream and explore one’s subconscious, to remain like a child, and “to remain in the Not-Yet, the temporary” (ibid. 45). The success of Good Bye, Lenin! among western Germans substantiates Ahrends’ prognosis in certain ways. The film engages the western desire for relief from the socioeconomic rat race to create a bond between eastern and western Germans. As we see the images purporting to show western Germans flowing through the openings in the wall into the East, Alex’s friend Denis (Florian Lukas), playing the role of a GDR television reporter, explains, “Not everyone wants careerism and spiraling consumption (Konsumterror). The rat race (Ellbogenmentalität) is not for everyone.” When transplanted into the present context of unified Germany, this imaginary construct suggests the ability to live on the margins of a prosperous free-market economy without joining the rat race. In the GDR there were political and economic limits that caused the majority, like Alex, to go through the motions of participation without being driven by the necessity to achieve more or to accumulate wealth. Finding themselves disadvantaged

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in a strange and unfamiliar culture, eastern Germans will be able, according to Ahrends, to capitalize on this experience and find on the margins of the Ellbogengesellschaft (“society of elbows”4) a comparable way of life where romantic fantasy compensates for the lack of opportunity. Good Bye, Lenin! promotes this romantic vision through a fictional leap across time similar to that of Rip Van Winkle, who also slept while a revolution (the American Revolution) was taking place and awoke unaware of the changes that had occurred. As East Germany gets pulled into the economy of the Federal Republic, Alex muses in a voice-over, “Mother kept on sleeping. In her long, deep sleep she orbited like a satellite around the human hustle and flow on our small planet and in our even smaller republic.” Once again time travel becomes conflated with the distanced remove of space flight. In this orbiting-the-planet metaphor, “the human hustle and flow” that his mother skirts is the economic activity of Western capitalism that was beginning to consume the former GDR. The film’s retreat into a fictional past appeals as well to many western Germans who, much like Alex, dream of respite from a competitive free-market economy that promotes the continuous, spiraling growth of production and consumption in and of itself. In this regard, the film functions in a manner common to nostalgic forms of remembrance. It provides a selective view of the past in order to relieve fears and anxieties about an uncertain present. Like the Ostalgie movement, the film does this while openly accepting that it is offering its fiction to bolster a fragile sense of identity. The scene from which the film takes its title exhibits how the immediate visual impact of film images reinforces this dynamic. When Christiane is finally able to slip past Alex and get out of the apartment, she sees a massive statue of Lenin that is being removed by helicopter looming above her in the sky. This dramatic shot of the displacement of a monumental fixture in communist East Germany leaves no doubt that an era has passed. The magnified onscreen presence of Lenin with his raised finger pointed at Alex’s mother calls attention to the nostalgia aroused by the film’s foregrounding of physical objects from the past. The ability of such an impersonal monument to have this effect reveals the disconnect between the emotional investment and the actual object. With respect to eastern Germans, the film’s invitation to escape disquieting realities in the new Germany is being tendered to viewers who are already well versed in such strategies. The eastern German viewer may even more fully accept that there is no path back from a free-market economy to the unrealized ideals of the GDR than the western German. Film reviewers indeed noted a stronger irony in the eastern German response

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to Good Bye, Lenin! than in that of some western German viewers (Mommert and Kerkmann 2003). Eastern Germans seem to understand that as consumers of Ostalgie, they are involved in a cultural campaign to “escape the dominant order without leaving it” (Berdahl 1999: 206). In particular, nostalgia for two aspects of life in the GDR drives the spectator’s emotional involvement with the film. My critical reading of how these two modes of nostalgia conjoin in the narrative to produce a post-Wende sense of community uncovers a subtext that serves, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, a decidedly western agenda.

A World Apart: Nostalgia for the “Society of Niches” Good Bye, Lenin! rides the wave of nostalgia for the everyday culture of the GDR and works these elements into a narrative in which its East German characters find the resilience to withstand the impact of western colonization.5 For this, the film draws less on GDR material culture than on a form of social interaction that stirs nostalgic impulses among many eastern Germans. In Good Bye, Lenin! this look-back recalls the possibility of a private life with friends and family within the oppressive, but also in many ways protective, confines of the socialist state. In a society where speech and actions were closely monitored by the government and personal advancement depended on collusion with the authorities, many East Germans decided to invest their energies in quiet domestic pursuits. This common choice led to the sense of an unofficial shared way of life that became widely known as a Nischengesellschaft (“society of niches”). The film’s opening shots, filmed to simulate a grainy home movie, clearly evoke this idea. They show the family enjoying happy moments together at their datscha (a typically small weekend cottage) not long before Alex’s father absconds to the West. The unprofessional quality of the home movie imbues the scene with a genuineness that distinguishes it from similar situations in the Federal Republic, where visual entertainment and advertising depict personal relationships in a slick, professional way and transform even the most intimate forms of human interaction. The film’s central narrative event produces an allegorical representation of this alternative community. Alex creates a microcosm of the society of niches within his mother’s apartment. As he sits and looks after his mother with the sole purpose of guarding against her finding out what had transpired while she was unconscious, Alex discovers that he too can find refuge there in isolation from the outside world. He falls asleep on the job, while his voice-over offers a comment that is certain to excite longing in some

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A weekend trip to the family datscha in their new Trabi. Under the pretense of giving her a surprise, Alex blindfolds his mother to conceal the collapse of the GDR in Good Bye, Lenin! (2003). Photographer: Conny Klein, Getty Images.

eastern Germans: “Life in our little country kept getting faster . . . But far from the hectic pace of the new era was an oasis of calm, a place of peace and quiet where I could finally get some rest.” Even the film’s romantic subplot kindles nostalgia for the more idyllic moments of private retreat within the Nischengesellschaft. Lara (Chulpan Khamatova), the Russian nurse intern who becomes Alex’s love interest, helps in his search for the GDR products needed to make his ruse work. She hears from co-workers about a Berlin apartment abandoned by East Germans who had fled through Hungary into the West in summer 1989. She and Alex visit the apartment, which is in an elegant older building (Altbau) complete with an old-fashioned tiled stove (Kachelofen), a vine-shrouded balcony, period furniture, modernist nude paintings, and a full stock of GDR grocery items—including Tempo-Bohnen, Globus grüne Erbsen, and Mocha-Fix Gold Kaffee. Once the home of privileged party members, the apartment now becomes the site for the film’s main romantic interlude. Resembling the classical literary trope of a locus amoenus, this scene harks back to happier moments in the GDR when work and financial pressures did not intrude into every aspect of life.

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Through its narrative construct Good Bye, Lenin! is able to resolve potentially destructive self-contradictions in its revival of the GDR Nischengesellschaft. As an alternative social sphere that rejected the state vision of “real existing socialism,” it tends to confirm the western German idea that the forty years of life in the GDR can simply be discarded. However, eastern Germans need a more positive historical account of public life in the GDR to stabilize a cultural and national identity threatened by the erasure of the social and cultural world that had shaped their existence. Shared memories of the everyday culture in the GDR can help fill the breach opened up by the Wende, but narrative is required to form a continuous, meaningful whole out of these diverse, isolated memories. These narratives of self are also always interconnected with collective narratives that define a nation or culture. In a society where productivity and labor were constantly celebrated, a collective eastern German narrative about life in the GDR that excludes the work world would remain fragmentary and impede the eastern Germans’ ability to forge a stable identity in post-Wende Germany (Berdahl 1999: 198–99). Good Bye, Lenin! provides a framework through which the audience can participate in the restoration of an East German “tissue binding self and society” (Betts 2003: 207). With the dual story of Alex and his mother, the film crafts a narrative of individual and family life in the GDR that suggests how active participation in the East German socialist state may still be seen as worthwhile. First the film establishes Alex’s rejection of the official communist vision, perhaps the only stance that would not risk alienating a large portion of the audience from the outset. In fact, the film makes it clear that his experiences working in the GDR system led to his cynicism about its official goals. As a boy, Alex watches the 1979 televised launch of the first German cosmonaut into space, while two Stasi agents interrogate his mother about his father’s visits to the West. When Christiane loses her temper and shouts at them to get out and leave her alone, Alex glances over at her with a worried expression, but he is too young to comprehend the significance of their visit. Inspired by his country’s accomplishment in space, Alex joins the Junge Raketenbauer (Young Rocketeers) club. During the last shot of the opening sequence, Alex’s voice-over tells of his dream to become a rocket scientist who would advance space exploration for the benefit of all humankind. The film cuts from this shot, one of Alex’s model rocket spiraling skyward, to a point ten years later on the fortieth anniversary of the GDR. Alex, who has a day off from his television repair company, sits alone on a park bench, now disenchanted by and disencumbered of the idealistic dreams of his youth. The sarcastic voice-over— “The GDR was turning forty. I had the day off from the Adolf Hennecke

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Television Repair Company and felt myself at the pinnacle of my radiant manliness”—shows his disillusionment with a corrupt system based on party favoritism and supported by police control. The events surrounding his mother’s collapse and his efforts to protect her provide Alex a different way of understanding participation in the GDR socialist project. While Alex has become disillusioned, his mother has continued to work tirelessly to improve in small ways the life of her fellow citizens. As the government is staging a grand fortieth-anniversary celebration, she is writing a letter to draw attention to the fact that East German industry manufactures only a single style of female underwear, one designed for the bodies of slim, younger women. As she dictates the letter, Alex makes cynical remarks about her involvement. But later, when he creates the fictional GDR, he realizes that she had fashioned her own “middle way” between the contradictory extremes of the GDR. Christiane had been content to remain on the margins, working on relatively minor, concrete issues while eschewing involvement in high-profile projects and the status or privilege that came with it. On the fateful anniversary of the GDR, the same day she collapses into a coma, the state recognizes her as a socialist “hero of labor.” However, she is not the typical “hero of labor” but rather a fictional figure who represents what this hollow propaganda phrase could have meant. She believed in the principles of “real existing socialism” and worked for positive change within the institutions of the state, but against the grain of their actual modus operandi. She neither reaped the benefits usually granted those who played along with the system for personal advantage nor believed blindly in the GDR propaganda about its achievements. The film reinforces this response through other narrative elements. The theme of space exploration addresses the issue of socialism’s worthy goals in a way that gives validity to certain ideas and actions of East Germans. In his last act of benign deception, Alex has the GDR’s first cosmonaut replace Erich Honecker in the post-Wende GDR he creates for his mother. Having the Sigmund Jähn Doppelgänger assume this role weaves a thread back to the young Alex’s belief in a socialist society that lives up to its core values and alludes to the utopian ideals that were part of its downfall. In this context, space exploration represents the absolute goals that steered East Germany theoretically toward a socialist workers’ state, although the political and social reality resembled more an Orwellian nightmare. The movie plays out this space exploration/socialist utopian fantasy allegorically to its own dissolution. In his voice-over introduction to the final birthday celebration for the GDR, Alex says that, in contrast to the real one a year earlier (that is, on October 7, 1989), they will now give the GDR the farewell it deserves: “We should celebrate the birthday of our socialist

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Fatherland one last time, but in contrast to the actual birthday celebration, we will give it a worthy farewell.” Being laid to rest are the ideal visions of what a socialist state could or would be, but not the well-meaning efforts of individuals who worked conscientiously toward those goals. The narrative ends in a ritual act of myth-creation that gives meaning to Christiane’s work and to that of eastern Germans viewing the film. Alex moves up his staged forty-first anniversary celebration of the GDR to the evening of October 2 so that his mother will think that the fireworks actually celebrating the birth of a unified Federal Republic are meant for the GDR. A few days later, presumably on what would have been the eve of the actual East German anniversary, he takes up his old hobby of rocket building once more. From the rooftop of their apartment he fires his mother’s ashes into the air and explodes them into the night-time sky above a now united Berlin. The film’s final voice-over accompanies them: “The country my mother left behind was one that she believed in and one that we let stand right up to her last second. It was one that never existed in reality.” Through this ritual act of release and enshrinement, her ideal visions are laid to rest and yet retain a formative power. As symbolized by the dissemination of his mother’s ashes over both halves of Berlin, these socialist ideals are to become part of a founding myth that can unite Germans in the new Federal Republic into an imagined community.6 The rocket that carries them skyward also marks the end of Alex’s own life in a socialist state both inspired and doomed to failure by overly idealistic aims. In his “worthy farewell” to a Fatherland that had never lived up to its lofty goals, neither the basic socialist vision nor the efforts of those who had faith in it are simply degraded and discarded.

Real Existing Consumerism: Western Nostalgia for East German Products The second mode of nostalgia generated by the film draws from the Ostalgie revival of everyday culture of the GDR. Alex’s quandary in Good Bye, Lenin! provides an unlikely yet feasible context for recreating the material world of the GDR within the culture of post-Wende Germany. Every aspect, from style of clothing to the apartment furnishings, from the cuisine choices to the brand of consumer goods, must be correct down to the finest detail so that Alex’s simulated GDR will work. This filmic reproduction evokes for eastern Germans a sense of continuity. Particularly in the first years of unified Germany, many eastern Germans lacked the knowledge to participate as equals in important areas of social practice in the Federal Republic, summoning some of the strongest reactions from the residents of the New Federal States. The instructions to Ferner Osten (Far East), an

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Ostalgie game that tests knowledge of GDR culture, explain that “around 50 percent of the knowledge [East Germans] acquired during the course of a lifetime was rendered useless through sudden and unforeseeable events” (Berdahl 1999: 204). Conversely, eastern Germans have their own monopoly on the knowledge needed to participate in the Ostalgie discourse. This shared knowledge unites them as a discourse community, establishing a link with their previous lives that is missing in the western-dominated culture of unified Germany (Klein 2000: 159). It includes the ingenuity and know-how East Germans had often needed to locate consumer articles. In Good Bye, Lenin! the consumer products of the GDR are once again in short supply. Alex’s efforts mirror those of “ostalgic” eastern Germans as they search for GDR products that had been swept away by western products. Alex’s ingenious ability to cope with their disappearance is delightfully funny and likely elicits among eastern Germans bittersweet memories of their own successes securing goods in times of scarcity. It must also be self-reflexively ironic for many who in hindsight question their decision to discard all that was the GDR to have ready access to an abundance of western products. Objects have a particularly strong potential for carving out an autonomous sphere shielded from the hegemony of the West. Nostalgia for material culture generates tangible associations that can produce palpable memories and an unshakeable account of past experience. In contrast to consumer goods in a capitalist market system, GDR brands have endured over generations, remaining basically unchanged in their style and packaging. Consequently, they can function as in the case of Ostalgie as “transgenerational markers of East German culture and identity” in ways that western consumer objects cannot (Betts 2003: 201). Furthermore, the lack of consumer choice means that cultural memory focused on GDR goods is not divided among subgroups with differing brand loyalties. Rather than marking the nostalgia for these products as something open exclusively to eastern Germans, Good Bye, Lenin! works the eastern German fondness for them into an engaging narrative that makes these objects attractive to a more inclusive audience. The GDR brands are unfamiliar to western consumers, and their novelty derives from a qualitatively different mode of consumer appeal. The absence of the advertising spin that usually accompanies brand names in competitive free-market economies sets them apart and has an unintended effect of innovative marketing. Florian Illies’ attempt to create a parallel western nostalgia in his book Generation Golf (2000) highlights this difference. He claims that the Volkswagen Golf provides a sense of continuity for his generation comparable to that of the old GDR consumer goods. He chooses the Golf certainly in

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part because it serves as a West German counterpart to the darling of Ostalgie, the Trabi. He limits his address to the relatively narrow generation born between 1965 and 1975, and even then the disposition and way of life he describes would apply to only a certain segment of that group. It is also questionable how many of even this generation would identify any more with the Golf than with other makes of cars. Most importantly, the significance he claims for the Golf is radically different from eastern German nostalgia for the Trabi. He parodies the former as a nondescript product that manifests the vacuous culture of his generation. The title of each chapter in his book is a slogan from one of the Golf advertising campaigns (for example, “A twelve-year guarantee against rust? I would like that for myself as well” and “The striving for a goal has now come to an end”). Illies’ cynical attitude toward the Golf reflects how nostalgia in a capitalist culture tends to show attachment to the image that was created by advertising and the media rather than the actual consumer product or memories of it.7 Playing on the distinction between the consumer societies in East and West, Good Bye, Lenin! presents the emotional bond with the brand names of the GDR as an attractive alternative to the disaffected allegiance to them in the West. When this mode of relating to material culture begins to appeal to western Germans it threatens to undermine the logic of consumer demand in a capitalistic system. It exposes the emptiness of consumer choice and reveals that the process of constant innovation is grounded in a circular desire for desire. This offers resistance to the hegemony of the West, but it does so within the very economic order that it is protesting. As Daphne Berdahl has argued, the “framing of eastern German identities and of resistance to western German dominance in terms of product choice and mass merchandising entails . . . practices that both contest and affirm the new order of a consumer market economy” (1999: 206). In this sense, the play with East German consumer goods in Good Bye, Lenin!, as in the Ostalgie wave itself, offers little real resistance to the free-market economy that has engulfed the citizens of the New Federal States. By ratcheting up the desire to participate in a nostalgic discourse on GDR culture Good Bye, Lenin! offers an apparent alternative to the pervasiveness of capitalist goods and their marketing hype. The alternative depends, however, on a notion of authentic consumerism that, in effect, validates the market economy of the Federal Republic. The validation of free-market consumerism through an eastern German nostalgia for material culture has its roots in the economic and political system that produced that culture. As Paul Betts has shown convincingly, “East Germany’s political destiny was built with the same mortar that has underlain Western social politics for the last half-century, namely

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consumerism as political legitimacy” (2003: 202). The shift in the 1960s toward expanded industrial production in the consumer goods sector presented the GDR leadership with a paradox in political ideology. As GDR citizens began to invest more of themselves into the economy with the expectation that the reward would come in the form of consumer goods, they began to measure the achievements of socialism more in terms of its ability to meet consumer demands, and they began to compare their economic system with the far more successful economy of West Germany. The shift toward “consumer socialism” left the GDR lagging behind the West without a clear-cut moral or ideological distinction that could make up for the difference. These ideological contradictions resurface in an Ostalgie that focuses on material culture to forge an eastern German sphere of autonomy and a distinct cultural identity. The eastern German desire to escape from a capitalist market economy has a potential western counterpart. Western Germans feel a comparable anxiety with respect to an open and free global market that could flood their economy with less expensive products from developing countries. The Federal Republic had already gone through a preliminary stage of economic globalization with the gradual formation and expansion of first the Common Market and then the European Union. A 1980s wave of nostalgia in the Federal Republic for the West German products of the 1950s may have been in part a reaction to fears about the economic consequences of the European Union. The memoirs, exhibitions, and nostalgia boutiques featuring 1950s goods steered away from the more sophisticated international style objects of the period, favoring instead inexpensive domestic goods. In more serious design circles the hallmark piece of this nostalgia wave, the three-legged, kidney bean-shaped night table known as the Nierentisch, was considered kitsch (Betts 2003: 186–87). The nostalgic return to a time when American modernism exerted a strong influence on German consumer culture focused not on the high-end articles from a more affluent society but on goods “Made in Germany.” This first wave of West German nostalgia for consumer goods looked back to the postwar period, when the German sense of national identity was most fragile. Like Good Bye, Lenin!’s idyllic portrayal of the GDR society of niches, the 1980s fascination with early West German domestic culture was fueled in part by the longing for withdrawal into a domestic sphere insulated from international political contention. The film’s imaginary escape also travels back in time to the stasis of divided Germany that sheltered the Federal Republic from some of the responsibilities expected of the Western economic powers. As long as the status of “Germany” was in limbo, West Germans could work toward economic progress without

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facing all its ethical or world political implications. Thus the nostalgic time travel in Good Bye, Lenin! relieves fears of economic infiltration not merely from the European Union but, more importantly, from developing countries that are becoming major players in the global economy. Although Good Bye, Lenin! takes the viewer back only some fifteen years to Germany’s awakening out of its comfortable stasis of living in the “Not-Yet,” its vision of an East–West community on the margins appeals to a fanciful sense of timeless existence. The German national longing for retreat into a private world of simple pleasures goes back at least to the years following the political upheaval of the Napoleonic Wars (the Biedermeier Era, 1815–1848) and has exerted its influence on every subsequent period of German history. The myth that best correlates to the nostalgic social vision of Good Bye, Lenin! might be one that was popular at that time. This is the dreamy German legend of Schlaraffenland, the exaggerated land of milk and honey where roasted geese fly directly into one’s mouth and cakes rain down from the skies. Or, to put it another way, through a sleight of nostalgia Good Bye, Lenin! has stirred an unconscious yearning in western Germans for a socialist welfare state that they had always disparaged as long as it actually existed in the “other Germany.”

Notes 1. For a more extensive account of how the GDR was represented in films of this period, see Cooke (2005: 103–10). 2. Both reviews attribute this phrase to a Berlin review following the premiere there. 3. In interviews in In the Shadow of the Moon (2006), a documentary film about the Apollo space flights to the moon, the American astronauts who had been on those flights offer a remarkably similar perspective. Several of them muse on the ambitions and goals of the space program from a more reflective, questioning point of view, one clearly shaped by the uniquely distanced vantage point they had experienced while in space. 4. This was a common term for life in the highly competitive West German capitalist society. 5. Cooke examines certain similarities between the Wende and the model of European colonization, and in particular that “the language of colonization pervaded discussions of German unification and the place of East Germans within this new society in the 1990s” (2005: 2). 6. In his discussion of Good Bye, Lenin!, Cooke also reads this funeral scene as a laying to rest of the utopian ideals of the GDR (2005: 134–36). He too claims that the film recuperates them in a way that allows links between the socialist vision of the GDR and the vision of western Germans in the Berlin Republic. While he sees more a connection to a continued project of left-wing intellectuals, my reading stresses that the eulogy for divided Germany feeds into a broader German desire for withdrawal from conflict in an expanding public sphere.

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7. In a discussion of Westalgie in post-Wende German prose texts, Andrew Plowman notes that Illies stands out among other writers who focus on consumer brands and products because he emphasizes the “Distanzlosigkeit zur Scheinwelt der Werbung” (“a lack of distance to the illusions created by advertising”) (2004: 258).

References Ahrends, Martin (1991), “The great waiting, or the freedom of the East: an obituary for life in Sleeping Beauty’s castle,” New German Critique, 52: 41–49. Appeared originally as “Das große Warten, oder die Freiheit des Ostens: Ein Nachruf aufs Leben im Dornröschenschloß,” Die Zeit, November 17, 1989. Berdahl, Daphne (1999), “‘(N)Ostalgie’ for the present: memory, longing, and East German things,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 64 (1): 192–211. Betts, Paul (2003), “Remembrance of things past: nostalgia in West and East Germany, 1980–2000,” in Paul Betts and Greg Eghigian (eds), Pain and Prosperity: Reconsidering Twentieth-Century German History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 178–207. Buch, Hans Christoph (1999), “Schönen Gruß von Charlie Chaplin,” Tagesspiegel, November 9. Cafferty, Helen (2001), “Sonnenallee: taking comedy seriously in unified Germany,” in Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Rachel J. Halverson and Kristie A. Foell (eds), Textual Responses to German Unification: Processing Historical and Social Change in Literature and Film. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 253–71. Cooke, Paul (2005), Representing East Germany Since Unification: From Colonization to Nostalgia. Oxford and New York: Berg. “‘Goodbye, Lenin!’ charms US audiences too,” Interview with Wolfgang Becker (n.d.). http://germany.info/relaunch/culture/new/cul_goodbye_ lenin_interview.htm Göttler, Fritz (2003), “Der Renner; Auferstanden aus Ruinen—Kinokult um Good Bye, Lenin!” Süddeutsche Zeitung, Filmseite, February 27: 12. Illies, Florian (2000), Generation Golf. Eine Inspektion. Berlin: Argon. Klein, Naomi (2000), No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. New York: Picador. Mommert, Wilfried and Michael Kerkmann (2003), “Deutschland, wie es lacht und weint. Das Erfolgs-Phänomen Good Bye, Lenin!,” GeneralAnzeiger (Bonn), February 28.

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Plowman, Andrew (2004), “Westalgie? Nostalgia for the ‘old’ Federal Republic in recent German prose,” Seminar, 40 (3): 249–61.

Filmography Go Trabi Go (1991), Dir. Peter Timm. Bavaria Film. Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), Dir. Wolfgang Becker. X-Filme Creative Pool. Grill Point (Halbe Treppe) (2002), Dir. Andreas Dresen. Peter Rommel Filmproduktion. In the Shadow of the Moon (2006), Dir. David Sington. THINKFilm and Velocity Films. Lost Landscape (Verlorene Landschaft) (1992), Dir. Andreas Kleinert. Von Vietinghoff Filmproduktions. Night Shapes (Nachtgestalten) (1999), Dir. Andreas Dresen. Peter Rommel Filmproduktion. No More Mr. Nice Guy (Wir können auch anders) (1993), Dir. Detlev Buck. Boje Buck Produktion. Nowhere in Africa (Nirgendwo in Afrika) (2001), Dir. Caroline Link. Bavaria Filmverleih und Produktions and Constantin Film Produktion. Paths in the Night (Wege in die Nacht) (1999), Dir. Andreas Kleinert. Ö-Filmproduktion Löprich and Schlösser. Run Lola Run (Lola rennt) (1998), Dir. Tom Tykwer. X-Filme Creative Pool. Sun Alley (Sonnenallee) (1999), Dir. Leander Hausmann. Boje Buck Produktion. That Was the Wild East (Das war der wilde Osten) (1992), Dir. Wolfgang Büld and Reinhard Klooss. Bavaria Film. Three Stars Red (Drei Stern Rot) (2001), Dir. Olaf Kaiser. Hoferichter and Jacobs Filmproduktion.

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6 The Temporal/Spatial Logic of Japanese Nationalism: The Narrative Structure of Film and Memory Michael Sugimoto

History is only possible when it guarantees for itself the tuning of a mechanism, namely that of memory, which necessarily requires that the relation to the past is constituted as both a conservation and a loss: in the in-between of obsessive recollection and total forgetting—in the in-between of two abstract negations, as Hegel would say. (Malabou 2001: 17) In his groundbreaking work Imagined Communities (1983), Benedict Anderson historicizes the formation of the modern nation-state as a work of the imagination, produced through print and realized in the minds of national subjects. Bridging material and nonmaterial realms in the tradition of Georg Hegel and Ernest Renan, the nation is the secular embodiment of a restless principle—the national community emerging from a commodifying process of languages and traditions. If we recast the material/nonmaterial dimension in terms of space and time, national identity can also be analyzed as a memory work linked to a specific narrative function. Just as the nation-state stabilizes the fragmentary nature of modern society in the wake of massive urbanization and the loss of more organic practices of community, national narratives serve to coalesce the subjective terms of loss through memory practices such as film, museum exhibitions, and educational curriculum. 88

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This chapter focuses on the problematization and contestation of history, specifically war memory—collective and nationalist—in Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), in which nationalism signifies a spatializing of time. Hiroshima Mon Amour represents a refusal of memory’s spatializing logic, openly stating to the female protagonist and self-proclaimed witness to the atomic holocaust: “You were not there.” In Rashomon, the nonlinear temporality of the film abnegates memory from objectifying the film into a substance or “thing.” Both films highlight an ongoing concern regarding acknowledgment of Japanese war responsibility and are exemplary of an unresolved epistemological crisis in modernity. In different ways, they represent the impossible prospect of remembering the unimaginable. What happens when the unimaginable occurs? It is within this framework that I analyze contemporary examples of the tension between history and memory regarding the remembering of catastrophic events. I offer this as one explanation of the continuing problem of memory and amnesia over the Pacific War: Hiroshima was the traumatic event that forged a horrific national imaginary for the Japanese people. As Lisa Yoneyama has persuasively argued in Hiroshima Traces (1999), the transformation of Hiroshima as a global symbol of pacifism necessitated the forgetting of the Japanese wartime past. This concurrent symbolizing and forgetting process also represents the removal of time in memory work as the putative object of memory becomes a living fossil.

The Spatial/Temporal Logic of Nationalism and Memory: Postwar Japan In conventional theories of secularization, the nation-state becomes the imagined space that heals the disjointedness of modern society in its transition from the religious to secular and from the rural to urban. Typically, through symbolic terms of unity such as community, cultural tradition, or “brotherhood” (as in militaristic discourses), the nation stands in feminine terms as the all-embracing mother country. Countering the claim that we now inhabit a postnational, global world, the experience of post-9/11 nationalism in the United States and elsewhere suggests that the symbolic function of the nation remains the primary mediator of modern life. For example, religious and ethnic tolerance was often eloquently advocated in various calls for multiculturalism by heads of state in the United States and the United Kingdom (such as President George W. Bush’s speech on September 20, 2001), but on the proviso that religious and ethnic identities be subsumed under the hierarchy of the national community. In other

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words, diverse religious communities are understood in terms of relative value to the national community that mediates their difference. In the United States, although various houses of worship became open sanctuaries for prayer in the days immediately after 9/11, the spontaneous singing in public places of the national anthem or “God Bless America” suggests that the ultimate source for comfort remained the nation-state. In an innovative, interdisciplinary reading of cartography, Thongchai Winichakul offers a critique of nationalism as marking a transition from religious to secular ideologies through an emphasis on spatial dimensions. Winichakul argues that the space of the modern nation of Thailand owes much of its existence to the evolving technology of mapmaking. Modern maps reflect the quantitative, spatial concerns of modern times, in which land and sea are transformed into territory for expansion and habitation. Rather than accept the idea that premodern maps are “inaccurate,” Winichakul posits that they operated a different kind of knowledge; spatial dimensions were mediated by a spiritual hierarchy, not the scientific demands of later mathematical models. Eschewing the idea of the scientific renderings of space as neutral, Winichakul continues that new forms of power mediate new technologies for describing the Earth’s surface, this time conveying the “truth-value” not of Buddhist cosmography but of modern science. Although these modern maps have become second nature to us, they contain an embedded desire for expansion in which mapping was no longer: a conceptual tool for spatial representation. It became a lethal instrument to concretize the projected desire on the earth’s surface . . . In the history of the geo-body, this relationship was reversed. A map anticipated a spatial reality, not vice versa. In other words, a map was a model for, rather than a model of, what it purported to represent. (Winichakul 1994: 129–30) According to Winichakul, maps make the world along a distinct spatial dimension corresponding to the development of the modern nation-state in its specific purpose to acquire and defend territory.1 In a related argument, Susan Buck-Morss, in Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (2000), argues that the major difference between liberalism and Marxian notions of statecraft and theories of governance is: the nature and positioning of the enemy and the terrain on which war is waged. For nation-states, that dimension is SPACE; for class

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warfare, the dimension is TIME. To be a nation is to possess territory (in contrast to Bolshevik theory, which in 1917 recognized nationalities both with and without territories). Thus, as Hannah Arendt observed, the Israeli state became a necessity in the twentieth century, in a Western world where only states have sovereignty and only national citizens have rights. Thus also, Palestinian nationalism has become synonymous with the sovereign claim to a land-based area. Within the territorial system of nation-states, all politics is geopolitics. (2000: 22–23) Unlike premodern, theologically mediated notions of divinely ordered statecraft where borders were ambiguous, the modern nation-state is predicated on territory and, thus, necessarily spatial. In contrast, Marxism, because of its utopic, historical philosophy, pushes beyond the state and theorizes the dialectic’s temporality and constant unrest. In such a worldview, events such as civil wars that threaten the stability of the nation-state are welcome catalysts that drive the wheels of history forward when all the forms of political institutions wither away in a secular paradise. At the opposite end, fascism represents the limit case of nationalism in which geographic borders and territory are conflated with notions of culture. In other words, the fascist state grounds its authority in terms of the collective, the “people.” Its unity is expressed through the spatial materiality of race and land. Extending this discussion, I use the term “spatial” to signify the attempt at mimetic representation, both visually and in terms of physical realization, of the imaginary construction of the Japanese people. As in the staging of the German masses in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), the people are props in a production and at the same time constitute the historical event; the actor and the historical person become fused. Yoneyama argues that this kind of collectivist staging of memory, regarding the atomic holocaust, is witnessed in the design of Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park, commemorating while obscuring historical memory (1999: 2). These problematic renderings of history date to the early period of EuroAmerican imperialism, when Asian peoples were not considered a part of nineteenth-century humanist discourse. For example, sexual assaults committed against Dutch women were investigated at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, whereas the treatment of Asian and Pacific Islander “comfort women” (sex slaves) was ignored. These contradictions exacerbate Japan’s (in)ability to accept responsibility in remembering and compensating victims of its own wartime brutality, as Japan routinely shifts its subject-position from

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being an Asian nation to being the representative of the West and the bearer of modernity to Asia. Part of the forgotten past is the history of the basic architectural arrangement of Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park. The park was completed in 1954, after being designated in 1949 to turn the former commercial district at the heart of Hiroshima into a large memorial complex, consisting principally of the Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall, Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, and Memorial Cenotaph. The various elements of the park work to authenticate the symbolic presence of the Japanese state as an incarnate presence in which the political entity and the human subjects converge. Celebrated architect Kenzo Tange designed the park to be a monument dedicated to Japan’s imperial power. It was to accommodate the mass movements of people who would travel up a middle column, approaching a common center: [Tange’s] ground plan envisioned four blocks of buildings that would be laid out within an isosceles triangle. At the center of the triangle’s bottom side was the main facility, which would serve metaphorically as an entrance gateway to the commemorative space . . . A central axis . . . served as a “worshipping line,” which was to function, as in similar commemorative spaces built under European fascist regimes, to pull the attention of crowds and their movements toward the central monument . . . [This] was . . . realized in 1954, albeit at muchreduced scale, with the completion of Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park. (Yoneyama 1999: 2) In contrast, Tange’s Peace Park design collects the mass as a spectacle of itself, while literally immortalizing the famous gutted Dome building in a state of perpetually preserved decay.2 What may be called the “politics” of the Peace Park and the memorialization of the atomic devastation is worthy of commentary. In large part, memorializing Hiroshima is fraught with difficulty because the symbolism of the nuclear holocaust has been collapsed onto the Japanese nation itself. As scholars such as Yoneyama have written, the universal discourse of global pacifism has become particularized onto a national identity. As a result, the suffering of those outside the particular, such as Hiroshima’s Korean population who were brought over as slaves, has been effectively silenced in promoting a faceless, universal trope of humanity. For example, the Cenotaph to Korean Victims (some 20,000 individuals) of the bomb was placed outside of Peace Park until 1999.

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Unknowable History: Hiroshima Mon Amour In his article “The modernist event,” Hayden White argues that the organization of modern knowledge into the separate categories of reason, ethics, and aesthetics may no longer hold (1996: 20). As devastating events in modern history—atomic bombs, total war, the Holocaust—may have exceeded the parameters of fact/value, reality/fantasy, and science/religion, this also may have pushed and exceeded the categories of knowing even historical events. In other words, modernity itself may have a memory problem that is brought to the fore when the unimaginable occurs. The memorial architecture of the Peace Park resolves this by representing the Japanese nation as a transparently mediated spatial unity. It is a material form that embodies a culture’s spiritual content. In contrast, the 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour, by presenting the atomic holocaust as allegorical and opaque to memory, calls into question the authenticating of nation as a spatially realized site of memory. To recall a famous phrase of Roland Barthes, notions of realism achieved in modern narratives of history, literature, or cinema suppress the ability of language to create “the effect of the real” (1984: 146–48). To promote language as an instrumental carrier of information—the irreducible, mechanical function—its opacity is ideologically displaced to avoid mistaking fantasy for reality. This is echoed in Hiroshima Mon Amour as the protagonist is an actress who has traveled to Hiroshima to act in an antiwar public service announcement. The “real” historical Hiroshima is in counterpoint to devices of staging in the filming of demonstrations. It is impossible to know whether they are staged or real, and their status as art or truth is not defined until we see the “actors” (demonstrators) resting on a break, their placards (props) off to the side. In a sense, Hiroshima cannot be realized (spatialized) and remains at arm’s length, available only allegorically where time becomes a wedge between self and other. As a filmic response to the spatialized project of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, Hiroshima Mon Amour begins with a conversation between a man (a Japanese architect fluent in French) and a woman (a Parisian actress) about the bombing of Hiroshima. In the film, Elle (Emmanuelle Riva) recounts unsettling images of bomb casualties while her lover, Lui (Eiji Okada), denies her claims by insisting that she cannot know Hiroshima. She replies repeatedly that she has seen the museums, dramatizations, and newsreels, only to hear Lui repeat, “You saw nothing.” A complex layering of historical textures permeates Hiroshima Mon Amour, as Elle creates a film within a film, blurring the stable boundaries of the documentary

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genre. An extended opening sequence takes the viewer into the museum exhibition of artifacts, including photographs. Elle’s attempt to vicariously “relive” Hiroshima overlaps with her own romantic and sexual involvement with a Japanese man, thus highlighting the corporeal and spiritual element of sexual and psychic knowing in order to access the historical event. Intercut with the images of the artifacts and photographs of Hiroshima, we see presumably the same man and woman as nude bodies intertwined in sexual embrace. As a result of the cropped framing, their bodies are viewed in extreme close-up shots; they are covered with an ash-like substance, and their identities are indistinguishable. Director Alain Resnais establishes an asynchronous, asymmetric narrative rhythm to accentuate the theme of otherness and displacement. That is, the actual space/time context of the story—the shooting of a film about Hiroshima at Hiroshima—becomes increasingly secondary and is overturned in the narrative by the rising significance of Elle’s past. Years before, Elle had fallen in love with a captured German soldier soon to die. Elle’s brief affair with Lui reawakens a traumatic memory as Lui becomes that which she literally “cannot know.” Lui and Hiroshima itself as a historical event remain obscure as the subterranean world of Elle’s memory shifts the focus, questioning whether the historical can be experienced as real, as the European terms of conflict (France versus Germany) moves to the foreground. The proposed spatiality of Hiroshima is thereby permeated with time. On multiple levels, then, Elle cannot directly grasp her desired object, whether lover or historical event, except in a metonymic relationship. Something always stands for something else removed from thought and experience. Her initial claim to know Hiroshima is offset by the realization that she cannot even know her Japanese lover as she is mentally bound and haunted by the earlier lover who, as a German, marks a serious transgression: the enemy and death. From this standpoint, the highly cropped images of the two lovers signify not only that the film viewer cannot know what is being screened but also that Elle remains trapped in her own subjectivity. In this way, the film juxtaposes the historical, irretrievable Hiroshima (that is, the Hiroshima marked by traumatic death) with the Hiroshima of Elle’s most immediate, tactile existence, consisting of her sexual, material nature. The past that is Hiroshima is cast in a problematic light at the most sensual moment of its grasping, illustrated through Elle and Lui in a physical embrace signifying the impossibility of love. The continual intercutting of images (hospital corridors and the museum exhibitions with the lovers

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embracing) highlights the circuitous nature of memory—in other words, a memory that goes nowhere because the object of memory is only knowable by its traces. These traces—the condition of almost but not quite touching—are most painfully realized when the images of a young child’s deformed fingers intercut with the fingers of a lover stroking a shoulder; erotic desire and historical longing are trapped in a parallel but staggered universe. As Wolfgang Luchting has noted, the archival footage, intercut with the lovemaking sequence, diminishes in successive scene length as Elle’s past weighs in more heavily as the interpretive framework by which her experiences in Japan are understood (1963: 309). In other words, Elle’s past acts as an unprocessed, subjective lever, tipping her reading of the historical record, as well as her experience of love. These conundrums over knowledge are marked by the prominence of the corporeal. The processing of knowledge (of Lui, Hiroshima, and Elle’s past lover) is triggered by the physical and sensual. Thus, the camera’s focus on the twitching movement of Lui’s fingers metonymically signals a memory of a similar movement of Elle’s German lover. Although the actress’ betrayal may be interpreted as treachery against her country and former lover, it can be argued that it represents a betrayal characteristic of modernity. That is, despite the claims of universal reason,

The burden of memory: Elle with her lover, Lui, in Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). The Kobal Collection, Getty Images.

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the categories of modernity no longer “contain” their intended objects. As previously mentioned, modern catastrophes have destabilized the categorical terms by which we know “things” or “events.” Unlike postmodern relativism, the notion of what is knowable—those thoughts that can be thought—has been exceeded in an admission of a philosophic otherness.3 Although Hiroshima Mon Amour explores this quandary in terms of an East/West binary, the failure to acknowledge otherness is ultimately connected to a deeper loss anchored in each individual whose desire is stymied and mediated by the other. True mourning is blocked as the grieving subject remains in a perpetual melancholic state in which loss is continually relived and reaffirmed. This predicament is indicated by the very terms of failure experienced at the film’s conception. Resnais’ initial project was to create a documentary about Hiroshima, but he decided against this on philosophic grounds, instead favoring a feature film. Like the director of Shoah (1985), Claude Lanzmann, Resnais resists direct appropriation or visualization of his object and suggests that the memory of Hiroshima may be best served through a fictional work that highlights the role fantasy must play in imagining the historical. Hiroshima Mon Amour is not realist fiction that pretends to appropriate the real by reproducing an identical, analog world as a “slice of life.” Resnais’ film is necessarily allegorical, stressing the distance from the action and the event. The film presents Hiroshima through the use of artifacts, staging, and props, as you cannot know Hiroshima.

The Never-Ending Past: Memory and Melancholia in Rashomon In 2001, a junior high history textbook written by a group of right-wing nationalists was approved by Japan’s Ministry of Education against the objections of historians and educators.4 The textbook legitimizes the colonization of Korea in terms of the need to protect Japanese security interests, while providing little discussion of Japan’s colonial exploits in East Asia. The 1930s invasion of China specifically is described as an “advance,” censoring out the term for “aggression.” While detailing war atrocities committed by the Allied forces and Nazi Germany, it strongly suggests that the war was aimed at liberating Asian nations from Western colonization. It virtually disregards the massacre of the Chinese population in Singapore, casting “points of doubt” regarding the Nanjing Massacre, and completely ignores the enslavement of “comfort women” for the Japanese military.

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In addition to this textbook, we have the example of the continual gaffes made by high-ranking members of the government. On April 9, 2000, the Governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, stated, “Atrocious crimes have been committed again and again by sangokujin and other foreigners . . . We can expect them to riot in the event of a disastrous earthquake” (French 2000: 3). The term sangokujin, literally meaning “third-country person,” was coined during the American Occupation to refer to those in Japan who were not Japanese or of the Allied Forces. It later became an insult used by xenophobic Japanese and, in this case, was used in reference to immigrants. A month later, then Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori called Japan “a divine nation with the emperor at its center” (Efron 2000: 4). Both these statements are shocking, although not entirely unusual, because they demonstrate the tenacity of beliefs characteristic of prewar ultranationalism. The first example resurrects pernicious lies regarding Koreans in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which leveled Tokyo. Rumors that Koreans had poisoned well water and had set fires incited vigilante groups to lynch thousands of innocent Koreans living in Japan. When Governor Ishihara used the term he infused a contemporary anxiety with a prewar fabrication, thereby continuing the legacy of imperial domination of East Asia, although this time determined from the position of postwar economic success and the political alliance with the United States. Prime Minister Mori’s affirmation of the emperor system underscores prewar ideology. More recently, on October 17, 2005, in the annual ceremony commemorating the end of the war, then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo—a shrine that honors the war dead, including fourteen Class A war criminals, as gods. The controversial and recently reopened Yasukuni Shrine War Museum reaffirms the militarism of the Japanese past.5 These examples raise concerns about the persistent nature of certain prewar social structures that are complicit with those beliefs in the period bracketed as the “postwar.” The statements by professional politicians seriously undermine the notion that the injustices of the past have been overcome. Whereas official political and social commentary perpetuate a blindspot in history and recollections, cultural media becomes a source of critique and reassessment of the past. Hiroshima Mon Amour, as well as Rashomon, offers an inquiry into the question of memory—specifically: why has defeated Japan been unable to work through the legacy of colonialism and the Pacific War during the postwar period? In a sense, Japan remains caught, like Elle, in unprocessed memories of the past, even as the country

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experiences the modernist social and economic victories typically signified by the high-growth period, catapulted onto the world stage as its second largest economy. Unless we directly confront the past, there is a danger of merely repeating history—of being trapped in cycles. As Eric Santner has provocatively argued in Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (1990), postwar Germany has not yet faced, and thus not yet worked through, its traumatic loss. In a Freudian framework, loss is distinguished by two experiences labeled as “mourning” and “melancholy.” “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself ” (Freud 1917: 254). Although these experiences are regarded as extreme ends of the same continuum and therefore not mutually exclusive, the key difference is that in mourning there is an awareness of separation between the individual and the lost object, whereas in melancholy separation was never sufficiently established. The melancholic subject primarily experiences the loss of his or her own control, which Freud characterizes as a kind of narcissism. The individual continues to imagine a unity with the lost object, which never really existed as a separate object entity to begin with, resulting in an unresolved state. In contrast, the subject in mourning, having come to terms with genuine loss and separation (for example, the reality of death), can potentially process the traumatic loss to a state of health. Although it focuses on postwar Germany, Santner’s psychoanalytic reading has application in discussions of Japan’s rendering of war events and culpability. Of course, the remembering of war-related events such as the Japanese-American internment or atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers in Korea is not limited to Japan or Germany, but the marked absence of public recognition suggests that the colonial past eludes the country’s historical present, thus also remaining unprocessed as a tragic history for both victim and victimizer. In the endeavor to form a national memory, every act of remembering is concomitantly an act of forgetting. In terms of the history of modern Japan, this battle over national memory is, perhaps, best evidenced in the bitter contest over history textbooks in the national curriculum (see Nozaki and Inokuchi 2000). An allegorical reading of Rashomon—produced during the American Occupation of Japan—problematizes remembering and forgetting as symptoms of extreme trauma in the aftermath of Hiroshima and the Japanese defeat in the Pacific War. Guilt, confession, and human responsibility on the individual level are framed by larger matters pertaining to the social memory of catastrophic events. Rashomon is set during a time of war and famine in the late Heian period of the twelfth century. The narrative takes place at the ruins of the

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Rashomon gate in the present, where a few individuals have gathered for shelter from the constant rain. They refer elliptically to a murder and robbery that they cannot reconcile with having taken place. As the woodcutter states, “I can’t believe such a thing could happen. I don’t understand how it could’ve happened.” With these words, the film proceeds to hear various accounts from the individuals explaining the crime, illustrated with a flashback sequence of each story. It is left unclear throughout the film who actually is the perpetrator, although there is a strong suspicion that it was the woodcutter. Although the film presents a murder-mystery narrative as its central preoccupation, a more considered reading of the film requires that it be seen in light of the social context of the time—for instance, the defeat of the Japanese imperial nation in its campaigns in Asia and its status as a territory occupied by the Western Allies. The inability to remember, or anxiety, surrounding the crime can be seen as an allegorical description of the condition of the Japanese nation. From this perspective, the issue of a defeated nation coming to terms (or not) with culpability for criminal acts committed against its Asian neighbors is linked to a greater problem concerning memory and the possibility of accurately knowing the past. The continual self-questioning by the monk and the woodcutter (“How could such a thing have happened?”) surrounding the conflicting testimonies and the crime itself signifies a great problem in the initial days of the Occupation, following Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the sudden eclipse of imperial authority and Japanese autonomy by foreign occupation. The immediate moral question (“Who committed the murder?”) points to a deeper skepticism concerning even acquisition of such knowledge. In other words, does the magnitude of the recent past exceed the individual’s ability to ascribe moral agency? How does one remember an atomic holocaust? Do such events of the twentieth century call into question not only moral action but reason and experience itself? The immense difficulties relating to knowledge and historical memory are interwoven into Rashomon’s complex narrative structure. At a glance, the film seems to work on a single plane; incompatible testimonies are presented consecutively to the viewer, who is in the position of the magistrate. However, the various accounts do not share the same narrative space; they are often embedded in each other, producing a “doubling” effect. For example, on the principle of hearsay, the wife’s testimony is told via the monk through a flashback. She is never present at the court proceeding. In a further curious move, the statement of the dead husband is conveyed via a shamaness. This underscores the many layers of mediation and suspicion: even the dead cannot be trusted. In a thickly wooded forest or grove in which all the events occur, the foliage and shadows obscure visibility by

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definition to highlight the theme of voyeurism or scopic aspects of truth. For instance, the periodic shots of the wife spreading her fingers across her face form a parallel with branches that cut across one’s vision. There is also the repeated motif of various characters staring straight into the sun, the first time such a shot is thought to have been used. The sun becomes a key trope for truth or objectivity (God’s eye) in stark contrast to the murky condition of human knowledge in the grove below, where the crimes were committed. For this reason, the scenes at the magistrate’s court are largely cloudless and sunny in contrast to the rainy condition of the film’s present when the major players—woodcutter, bandit, monk—meet to discuss the horror and meaning of the event. The flashbacks in Rashomon are presented in a manner now common in crime shows, such as the popular television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, that visually represent viable scenarios. Directly challenging held conventions of the veracity of pictorial truth (“seeing is believing”), the film visually depicts false scenarios. Whereas Hiroshima Mon Amour challenges the notion that pictorially represented truth (photographs of the atomic aftermath) can be transparently believed in as though immediate at hand, Rashomon delivers all images—openly conflicting with each other— transparently to the viewing eye. The distinction between reality and fantasy cannot be apprehended on the level of image; it requires a philosophic turn. The various accounts, hopelessly embedded within one another, conclude with a retelling of the woodcutter’s story. This character presents himself as a detached observer of the crimes, thus underscoring the moral problem while questioning his credibility. The bandit-listener, stealing the blanket from the newly found orphaned baby, dashes off at the close of all the stories, thereby recalling in shabby appearance and behavior the arrested thief and alleged murderer, Tajomaru; some things never change. In the end, a repentant thief and father of six, a cynical bandit, an orphaned baby, and a restored Buddhist priest close the film with the lifting of the relentless rain in an unresolved scenario for occupied Japan. It is an accurate forecasting of the ambivalent role the country would occupy in postwar, global history.

Conclusion Why could it be said that it is perhaps only in film that the ambivalence characteristic of modernity—a demand for a brand-new beginning that is at the same time an intense look back to the past—becomes fully materialized? (Chow 1991: 41)

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Expounding on the ideas of Alice Kaplan, Rey Chow contends that subjectivity is altered through film. As a multiperspectival art form, film is able to reproduce the conditions of modern nostalgia—both contradictions and sublation. What Chow describes as a “coeval, co-temporal structure of representation at moments of cultural crisis” (1991: 42) applies equally to the memory work of Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park, which also attempts to suppress the breakdown and fissure of historical time with the representation of spatialized unities: of nation, of universal humanism. In Peace Park, the memories of tragedies and pain inflicted on the peoples of East Asia—in particular, the Koreans who were brought over to Japan and were also consumed by the atomic blast—were erased in order to erect the edifice of national and global pacifism. This is a peculiar function of nostalgia in the modern, that is, the ability to experience two things at once such as past and present. At its heart, modernity is already two things simultaneously. This is evident in film, and specifically Hiroshima Mon Amour and Rashomon. Filmic narratives are used to create a sense of unity—typically performed in a narrative loop—in the attempt to stabilize and close meaning. I would further suggest that this narrative operation happens to reflect the modern social formation of the nation-state, whose purpose by various institutional means is to construct social harmony and a national imaginary out of disparate elements. The difficulty of conventional narrative closure in Hiroshima Mon Amour and Rashomon is indicative, even symptomatic, of a national unease in recalling the past. The fragmented nature of modern epistemology, the split condition of the remembering subject who denies historical time to the lost object, permanently archives its own status, recalling Ernest Renan’s idea that “[f]orgetting, I would even go so far as to say, historical error is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation” (1990: 11).

Notes 1. Even the term “geography,” like “history,” hides the notion of a desired outcome or preferred understanding of world events behind a seeming objectivity. For example, the geography or history of the United States is often equated with the country itself, rather than with their ideological content. 2. A powerful counterexample would be Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, which operates a temporal axis of experience that confounds spatial identification between subject and object by casting a mirrorlike reflection back to the onlooker. The wall is present, yet also empty, potentially highlighting the reality of the viewer’s own death in the mourning process.

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3. Although not the main focus here, self and other in modern philosophy refer to the continuing rift between separate categories of knowledge—reason, ethics, and aesthetics— generally attributed to the Enlightenment epistemology of Immanuel Kant. 4. The best example of this legal battle in the writing of history textbooks remains historian Ienaga Saburo’s ongoing lawsuit with the Ministry of Education for censoring his entries. 5. Yasukuni Jinja—A Message for the Future. Copyright May 1, 2002. www.yasukuni.or. jp/english/.

References Anderson, Benedict (1983), Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Barthes, Roland (1984), “The reality effect,” in Richard Howard (trans.), Roland Barthes: The Rustle of Language. New York: Hill and Wang, 141–48. Buck-Morss, Susan (2000), Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Chow, Rey (1991), Women and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Efron, Sonni (2000), “Japan Premier’s remarks of ‘divine nation’ stir uproar,” Los Angeles Times (May 21): 4. French, Howard (2000), “Tokyo politician’s earthquake drill is a militarist moment,” The New York Times, September 4: 3. Freud, Sigmund (1917), “Mourning and melancholia,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. New York: W. W. Norton, 239–59. Luchting, Wolfgang A. (1963), “Hiroshima, Mon Amour, time, and Proust,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 21 (3): 299–313. Malabou, Catherine (2001), “History and the process of mourning in Hegel and Freud,” Radical Philosophy, 106: 15–20. Nozaki, Yoshiko and Hiromitsu Inokuchi (2000), “Japanese education, nationalism, and Ienaga Saburo’s textbook lawsuits,” in Laura Hein and Mark Selden (eds), Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 96–126. Renan, Ernest (1990), “What is a nation?” in Martin Thoms (trans.) and Homi K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration. New York: Routledge, 8–22.

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Santner, Eric (1990), Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. White, Hayden (1996), “The modernist event,” in Vivian Sobchack (ed.), The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event. New York: Routledge, 17–38. Winichakul, Thongchai (1994), Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Yasukuni Jinja—A Message for the Future. Copyright May 1, 2002. www. yasukuni.or.jp/english/. Yoneyama, Lisa (1999), Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Filmography Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), Dir. Alain Resnais. Argos Films. Rashomon (1950), Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Daiei Motion Picture Co. Shoah (1985), Dir. Claude Lanzmann. Historia. Triumph of the Will (1935), Dir. Leni Riefenstahl. Leni RiefenstahlProduktion.

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7 Remembering a Film and “Ruining” a Film History: On Tian Zhuangzhuang’s “Failure” to Remake Spring in a Small Town Yiman Wang

Before shooting the film, I felt great pressure. If the original film is already perfect, then what is the point of remaking it? What motivated us to remake the classic? Later I came to realize that I could remake it, or rather, I could trace and copy [lin mo] it. The best imitation I am capable of is already fake. I’ve already failed. And I no longer feel the burden. (Tian 2002b: 104) There can be no image that is not about destruction and survival, and this is especially the case in the image of ruin . . . Nevertheless, what makes the image an image is its capacity to bear the traces of what it cannot show, to go on, in the face of this loss and ruin, to suggest and gesture toward its potential for speaking. (Cadava 2001: 35) Spring in a Small Town (2002), the long-awaited remake by Tian Zhuangzhuang, a representative figure of China’s Fifth Generation filmmakers, opens with an homage—“The producers wish to dedicate this film to Chinese film pioneers.” With this, Tian explicitly expresses a noncompetitive, even consanguine, hereditary relationship between the “pioneers” and the deferential later directors (himself included). Nevertheless, the homage becomes cryptic when Tian announces in his interviews that he started the remake knowing that he had already failed.

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On the surface, Tian seems to want us to believe that his predetermined failure is due to the fact that the previous version, the 1948 Spring in a Small Town (henceforth Spring) directed by Fei Mu (1906–1951), is a recognized masterpiece and that any remake in comparison is “already fake.” On closer analysis, however, Tian’s observation remains puzzling for being counterintuitive. Given that the remake is his comeback after he was blacklisted for filming The Blue Kite (1993) and barred from filmmaking for ten years, his observation raises the question of why he would opt to remake a film, and a failed one at that, instead of mounting a comeback with an original work. What is the point of performing the predetermined “failure,” if not to reverse the conventional assumption of a remake’s Oedipal desire to be just like its successful predecessor, yet better (Leitch 2002: 37–62)? What exactly motivated Tian’s remaking project, and what does it (fail to) achieve? One obvious imperative for the project is nostalgia, more specifically Tian’s filmic nostalgia in the form of remaking, predicated on the “son’s” deferential remembrance and re-evocation of the “father’s” masterpiece. Indeed, nostalgia permeates multiple layers of this pair of films, including the narrative, the dominant motif, the cinematic form, and the very act of remaking. Importantly, Tian’s filmic nostalgia is by no means idiosyncratic; it is correlated with and derived from the avalanche of retro-representations in literary and cultural circles in post-1980s mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. A direct reason for the prominence of cinematic retrospection and reprisal in recent years is the extravagant naming and celebration of the first centennial of Chinese cinema (1905–2005), which gave rise to nominations for the top ten films, actors, and directors of the previous hundred years; the publication of photo albums of old movie stars and posters; a proliferation of films set in Republican Shanghai (commonly known as the cradle of early Chinese cinema); films custom-made for the centennial celebration; special topic Internet columns; film festivals; international conferences; scholarly publications; and the building of the national film museum in Beijing in 2006. These multiple efforts to relive and restore the cinematic past manifest a collective compulsion of archivization, which is at once related to and distinct from what Jacques Derrida theorizes as “archive fever,” understood as a malady and a burning passion. Derrida argues that archive fever inscribes two contradictory drives: the death drive and the life drive. Whereas the death drive concerns the past, the finitude and inevitable loss that determine the impossibility of archivization, the life drive concerns the hope and the promise of the future. For Derrida, “the possibility of a forgetfulness”

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(not limited to repression) subtends the archive desire, for “beyond or within this simple limit called finiteness or finitude, there is no archive fever without the threat of this death drive, this aggression and destruction drive” (1996: 19). In comparison, the compulsion of archivization in contemporary China seems to have done away with or repressed the death drive, and it unquestioningly celebrates the life drive by championing the abundance and easy recoverability of the past. If the transformed archive fever provided the raison d’être for Tian’s filmic nostalgia, then we must place the latter in the broad discursive structure of archivization. As John Frow argues, what matters in studying remakes is not simply to identify intertextual sources as retrospectively designated points of origin but to determine a “more general discursive structure” (1990: 46) which Constantine Verevis describes as “the genre of re-viewing labeled ‘remake’” (2006: 19, emphasis added). It is the “general discursive structure” premised on re-viewing and remaking that makes Tian’s remake possible; thus, it is on that structure that I reflect to spell out the rationale for, and implications of, Tian’s “failed” filmic nostalgia. Specifically, I am concerned with the following issues: how Tian positioned his filmic nostalgia vis-à-vis the collective compulsion of archivization in the post-1980s cultural arena; what strategies Tian deploys in remaking Fei’s film; what kind of nostalgia they produce as a theme and distinct affect; and, finally, in what sense Tian’s remake fails, and what the failure implies regarding cinematic reminiscence and the (re)construction of film history. Before I begin the analysis, a short synopsis of the two films is in order. The remake, in the spirit of homage, follows its predecessor closely in narrative and dialogue. The films’ appeal comes from a streamlined, conventional, yet highly malleable narrative concerning a relationship triangle of two men and one woman, and their struggle between sense and sensibility. Set in 1946, immediately after China’s eight-year anti-Japanese war and the beginning of the civil war between the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party, both films nonetheless avoid any direct representation of the historical turmoil. Following a conventional narrative trajectory, they begin with seeming equilibrium: a war-devastated yet relatively well-to-do young couple—a lonely woman and her sick husband—living in a small town with the husband’s high school-age younger sister and an old loyal servant. This equilibrium is then disrupted by the interjection of a third, foreign element: a man coming from a big city to visit his brotherlike friend (the husband). The big-city man is unaware that the wife is his old lover. After a short span of intense struggle between desire and obligation (quasi-brother or lover for the big-city man; lover or husband for the wife; quasi-brother or wife

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for the husband; and, on a less extreme level, lover or sister-in-law for the little sister who develops a crush on the city man/“big brother”), the husband attempts to commit suicide (to withdraw from the triangle), only to be rescued; the city man leaves the small town; the wife stays with her husband; and the little sister matures. Equilibrium, or rather stasis, is restored. Written by Li Tianji (1921–1995), the script was originally entitled Bitter Love or Lost Love. When Fei Mu changed the title to Spring in a Small Town, the emphasis was shifted to two apparently objective and external markers, those of place and of season. Correspondingly, the dominant images in both films are the ruined wall, the small town, and the couple’s house stretching out in the early spring. The image of ruins succinctly implies and subtly critiques the war, without spelling out which war (the anti-Japanese war that had just ended or the civil war that had just started) or encouraging the audience to take sides or action. Instead, Fei Mu stressed kongqi (literally: “air”), or the ambience produced by four means: the inherent capacity of the camera (such as camera angles); the object being filmed and the art design in both exterior and interior spaces; insinuation and oblique depiction; and, finally, the soundtrack (Fei 1998a [1934]: 27–28). Fei’s emphasis on insinuation and ambience leads to an intense melancholy that permeates the abandoned small town, the broken wall frequented by the lonely wife, and the sick husband trying in vain to restore the family wall. Such melancholy and political distance resulted in the “ruining” of the film itself for almost half a century.

“Ruining” and Excavating Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town: Anomaly, Archive, Canon Critics and reviewers in the past half-century have differed greatly in their evaluation of Fei Mu’s film. Its political indifference was immediately criticized by left-leaning reviewers as a form of conservative petit-bourgeois sentiment. At the same time, his distinct cinema language was also instantly acclaimed. A major challenge for the 1940s leftist reviewers was therefore to assess Fei’s aesthetic achievement in relation to his political impassivity, not only in Spring but in Fei’s entire oeuvre. A case in point is a film review by Ling He, a leftist critic. On the one hand, Ling He reiterated the orthodox leftist critique that Fei Mu “did not have the guts to confront reality” and escaped into the easier “life philosophy” instead. On the other, he affirmed that Fei “deftly negotiated with whatever creative space [was] allowed” by the repressive, rightist Kuo Ming Tang government so that he was able to “address issues that were of value for the progressive audience,

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even though they might not challenge the dominant class” (1998 [1936]: 353–54). Commenting on Fei’s 1934 film A Spray of Fragrance (Xiang xuehai), Ling He writes: It is not that Fei could not see reality clearly. Rather, he simply didn’t have the courage to depict it straightforwardly, and had to resort to distortion and insinuation. However, his deft cinematic form often serves to conceal his weakness. (ibid. 356) This observation highlights the dialectic relationship between Fei’s “good form” and “bad content,” the former being necessitated by, and in turn reinforcing, the latter. The same holds true for Spring, which epitomized Fei’s anomaly in the leftist lineage and was therefore excluded from the film history sanctioned by the Communist government for nearly half a century. Paradoxically, it is the aesthetics of melancholy coupled with ideological detachment that has brought the film out of the “ruins” into the spotlight since the early 1980s. It ushered in what many critics call the postsocialist era that was characterized by political apathy, escalating globalization, commercialization, and the aestheticization of sentimentality. Fei’s Spring resonates precisely with some of these shifts. The result is the belated yet worldwide canonization of Fei Mu, especially Spring—his last film shot in mainland China. Hong Kong film critic Wong Ain Ling enthused over the excavation of Fei Mu in the following poetic language: History is full of ironies. Who can say he/she stands outside the flux of history? In 1949, China witnessed sea change. The times temporarily forgot Fei Mu and his films. Over three decades later, Spring in a Small Town walked out of the ruins of history, shrugging off the dust, gracefully pacing into the 1980s. Shrouded in ethereal beauty, it captivated the world. (1998c: 454) Indeed, what had long been repressed now came back with grace and vigor. In 1981, London hosted the Fifty Years’ Chinese Cinema Retrospective, featuring Fei Mu’s Spring. Pordenone, Italy, soon followed suit. In 1983 and 1984, Spring again occupied the center stage of early Chinese cinema retrospectives in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Taiwan. Along with the big-screen revival, critical writings and interviews with Fei’s daughter and colleagues also flourished (Law and Zhang 2004).1 By the time Tian Zhuangzhuang decided to remake Spring at the turn of the new millennium, Fei Mu’s

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eccentricity in his own time (that is, war-torn China) had become so fetishized and sutured into “our” postsocialist China that a mainland cultural critic, Xie Xizhang, declared, “Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town was fated for the 21st-c. audience” (2002: 003). What was deemed conservative is now transvalued into the avant-garde. The archive of “ruins” and repression is rescued as canon of futurity and abundance. Fei Mu’s international acclaim and postsocialist China’s fad of nostalgia invite us to consider the implications of Tian Zhuangzhuang’s “archive fever”—how his filmic nostalgia, which vacillates between the past and the future, simultaneously separates him from and re-sutures him into the postsocialist cultural discourses.

Remaking, Retracing, and the Space of Nostalgia In his interviews, Tian repeatedly articulates a certain telepathic connection between himself and Fei Mu. As the epigraph to this chapter makes clear, Tian regards his remake as an exercise of lin mo, a process through which he literally traces, or copies stroke by stroke, Fei’s now celebrated masterpiece. It is through lin mo that he learns to communicate and exchange with the film pioneer (Tian 2002a). As a traditional method of honing one’s calligraphy and painting skill, lin mo means to follow, trace, and replicate the original model stroke by stroke manually; it is decisively opposed to new technologies of photography and cinema developed in what Walter Benjamin calls the “age of mechanical reproduction” (1995). It posits one way of reviving and reliving an erstwhile expunged lineage of filmmaking through loving manual replication. The flip side of the story is that Tian also stresses his departure from his predecessor. For “if you follow [Fei’s perfect cinematography] too closely, you will end up not knowing how to film it . . . you don’t know how to convey what he conveyed” (Jiang and Tian 2002: 153). By transforming some of Fei Mu’s cinematographic traits, Tian does not simply change the style but also produces an altered sense of space. If we view space and the space– character relationship as a site for registering nostalgia, then we may argue that whereas Fei’s nostalgia is for the prewar home that is now eclipsed by the ruined walls, Tian’s remake seems to direct nostalgia toward the ruins per se. The space of nostalgia is threefold, including the interior of the bedroom, the semi-exterior of the family garden, and the exterior of the city wall. Tian’s modified spatial figuration can be attributed to his decision to remove the wife’s first-person voice-over. As the filmmaker argues, the

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Retracing the past and revisioning history: Yuwen in Tian Zhuangzhuang’s remake of Spring in a Small Town (2002). The Kobal Collection, Getty Images.

first-person narration in Fei’s film provides a subjective frame that approximates what is happening now and here, whereas he wants to shift to an objective perspective that is more distanced from what happened over half a century ago—then and there (ibid. 152). While it is debatable whether the wife’s voice-over is totally subjective and anchored in the now–here,2 Tian’s conception shapes his cinematography and the camera’s navigation through spaces. Both films are slow-paced and privilege long shots and long takes, yet the directors adopt very different camerawork in filming the mise-en-scène. Fei’s camera alternates between stable positioning and panning and tracking, all at a closer range. The audience is privy to medium to close-up shots of the characters’ facial expressions. Tian’s camera, on the contrary, is rarely stationary. It continuously meanders through the broken walls, the trees, the long corridor, the pavilion, the gridded window and door. Framing objects and the interior décor (lamps, beds, tables, candle holders, and potted plants) constantly occupy the foreground, blocking the characters in the far background. In this way, the camera circles around the characters, capturing and holding them from various angles, placing them in a tangible space, yet it always keeps them in the distance as the foreground is

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consistently obstructed. What would have been a voyeuristic camera gaze becomes a roaming yet contemplative visual comprehension in the literal sense of enveloping the objects. The contrast is demonstrated in the parallel sequences showing the wife walking to the room of the city man (her old lover) at night. In Fei’s film, these sequences are composed of tracking, close-up shots of the wife’s feet walking on the garden trail with different rhythms depending on her feelings.3 As a result of the tight framing, the audience is cued to focus on the nearly mannerist foot movements and the pavement of the garden track while missing the garden as a setting. In Tian’s counterpart sequences, the effect is opposite. Long-range tracking shots follow the wife threading her way through the long corridor that runs along the family house, passing her sick husband’s room (indicated by his offscreen coughing), and eventually arriving at the study where her former lover is housed. With the camera positioned outside the gridded enclosure of the corridor, her moving figure is constantly blocked or dimmed. The long, uninterrupted tracking shots trace how she embodies the space by physically navigating the meandering passageway. The focus is shifted from the wife’s feelings (as expressed by the rhythm of her walking) to her existential situation, that is, her relationship with the domestic sphere she is married into, which is filled with various semi-partitions and enclosures momentarily opened up by her former lover. Tian’s roaming visual comprehension of material space within which the characters are embedded contrasts with Fei’s aesthetics of subtraction and abstraction. The external physical space, including the conspicuous ruins, exists more as the objective correlative of the female protagonist’s psychic solitude inscribed in her monologue voice-over. The difference between the two directors’ conceptions of space is further manifested in their divergent treatments of the city wall. In Fei’s film, the postwar ruins are not simply visualized in the image of the broken wall. They are also verbalized in the wife’s voice-over as a figure of melancholy and solitude. Hence, the visual existence of the ruins is not always essential; indeed, it is completely removed in some recurring shots. In the sequences that show the wife and her former lover standing next to each other on the city wall, the camera mostly frames them in medium to medium close-up shots from a low angle, so that the city wall is completely excluded and the two characters are the only positive images set against the background of the abstract, empty sky. In Tian’s remake, the double shots of the two characters on the wall are captured either from a slightly high angle or from an extreme long-range low angle. As a result, the audience sees not only the wall but also its surroundings and the expansive green field beyond.

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The varying treatments of space ultimately translate into two opposite understandings of the ruins. Filming of the wall in Fei’s version took place in an already existing deserted site in Song Jiang Town (now part of Shanghai) that was discovered by Fei. As Wei Wei and Zhang Hongmei (the two actresses playing the wife and the younger sister) both recall, the broken wall, covered with wild grass, littered with some traditional-style cottages, provided the ideal desolate location for the film (Zhang 1998: 211; Wong 1998b: 201). The ruins thus form an “organic” part of the movie (in Wei Wei’s words). What happens outside the film (the war damage) matches seamlessly with the imagery of ruins and desolation within the diegesis. In Tian’s remake, the ruins of the small town were meticulously constructed for filming purposes. The spectacle of ruins was built in Wu Zhen Town, Zhejiang Province (south of Shanghai), at a cost of RMB170,000 (approximately US$24,000) and one month’s labor. It was used for only two days. During the shooting, the local committees and public security bureaus were mobilized to keep the townspeople out so that the ruins would present a semblance of abandonment.4 The expensive ruins are featured twice in Tian’s film: first when the wife’s former lover comes to visit her husband, and second when the wife returns home after grocery shopping. In both sequences, the depth of space is underscored through camera movement. As the camera slowly tracks across the colossal, ruined vertical walls that occupy the foreground, the wife and her former lover respectively walk up toward frame right. As the direction of the wall parallels the characters’ movement, but is perpendicular with the camera’s lateral tracking, the figures are constantly blocked out. The cinematography foregrounds the convoluted space into which the figures are inserted and interwoven in a manner similar to the sequences where the wife navigates the long corridor in the family garden. To recall Tian’s description of his remake as lin mo, how then should we make sense of his drastically different spatial configuration, especially of the ruins? As mentioned previously, Tian explains that he wanted to shoot his remake from a detached, objective, and contemporary perspective. One may summarize Fei and Tian’s divergent techniques in spatial configuration thus: Fei does it from within (in medium to medium close-up shots), whereas Tian does it from without (in roaming long shots). Yet we still need to figure out the causes and implications of Tian’s detached perspective and the kind of nostalgic affect it produces. In the following section, I examine a key word that recurs in critical and popular discourses surrounding Tian’s remake, that is, tuifei (decadence). The privileging of tuifei in contemporary discourses suggests a postsocialist commercial logic that

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Tian’s filmic nostalgia both partakes of and critiques. Such ambivalence provides a key to his cryptic observation on the predetermined “failure.”

From Tuibai Qiliang (Desolation and Melancholy) to Tuifei (Decadence): Transcoding Nostalgia In contrast to Song Jiang Town, used in Fei’s version, which is described as naturally “desolate and melancholic” (tuibai qiliang), Tian’s meticulously constructed ruins and his entire film are characterized in terms of tuifei by the scriptwriter and cultural critics alike (Wong 1998b: 201). Xie Xizhang explains, “‘Tui fei’ in Chinese is predicated on materialist and cultural accumulation. Such materialist and cultural deposit nourishes super sensitivity, which eventually leads to ‘decadent inertia’ (da fei bu qi)—delicate beyond words” (2002: 003). If China did not have the materialist and cultural deposit/luxury to enjoy “decadence” in Fei Mu’s time, has it accumulated enough base for such delicacy half a century later? Perhaps not. However, Xie says, the past half-century has at least fomented a mood and a desire to consume decadence, and Tian’s remake responds to such a desire (ibid.). This notion is further elaborated and regionalized by the scriptwriter of the remake, Ah Cheng, one of the best-known contemporary Chinese writers, whose writings have been adapted into several Fifth Generation films. According to Ah Cheng, the essence of Fei Mu’s Spring is a decadence that is intimately connected with small-town settings in southeast China and is only truly appreciated by southerners “since they have witnessed the collapsing of thousand year old mansions, the decline of the noblest music and the demise of flesh and blood” (2002: 12). The unique southeast decadence as manifested in literature and calligraphy is compared to the jade tint lining the shell from the Tai Lake—a thrilling, albeit dead, glitter (ibid.). The discursive exuberance over fin-de-siècle splendor and the related self-abandonment makes one wonder what has caused the collective aestheticization of the macabre. Why localize it in southeast China, and what kind of futurity can be born from such splendid decadence? Xie Xizhang’s observations offer a clue to answering these questions. Linked with “restoration of the complexity of human nature,” which is crushed by long-term pan-politicization, decadence and the capacity for being decadent indicate the transcendence of politics and isms (Xie 2002: 003). Decadence liberates Spring from being the time’s mouthpiece and allows it to tap directly into “the thrilling moments in [the characters’ lives]” (ibid.). The notion of decadence is mobilized to assert intellectual freedom and

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to justify the filmmakers’ and critics’ humanism. Importantly, such emancipation would not exist without “materialist and cultural accumulation” (ibid., emphasis added). That is, apolitical as the film tries to be, it is by no means free from commercial culture which is closely affiliated with new politics specific to the postsocialist era. In this light, it is not surprising that Ah Cheng privileges southeast China as the proper site of decadence. Historically, the region has spearheaded commercial activities both with interior China and with foreign forces. Its economic wealth made possible its relative political independence vis-à-vis the central Chinese government located in the north. This situation was reinforced by a paradoxical twist of modern Chinese history, namely the cession of Shanghai (along with several other cities) to the West as a treaty port in 1842 following the Qing Dynasty’s defeat by the British forces. The treaty port phenomenon transformed China into what was later called a “semicolonial” society. Meanwhile, it also triggered the development of commercial culture on a deeper level. Shanghai and other treaty ports acquired greater independence from the Chinese government even while they were subjected to Western jurisdiction. The linkage between decadence and commercial culture becomes an important component of popular imagination partially as a result of early twentiethcentury experiences of semicolonialism and modernity.5 With the formation of the postsocialist “structure of feeling” in the late twentieth century, consumption came to be vigorously promoted by the government as a strategy for boosting the national economy and distracting the population from political investment. Consequently, decadence as a close coordinate of consumerism was revived and has acquired a distinctly positive value. It is important to note that the cultural and intellectual enthusiasm for decadence is projected back into Fei’s film as a characteristic of his film poetics, even though Fei worked under drastically different conditions that led to desolation and melancholy, not decadence. In other words, the transposed context and perspective of the remake entail surreptitious transcoding of Fei’s postwar melancholy (figured in the ruined wall of Song Jiang Town) into a postsocialist spectacle of decadence (figured in the expensive fabricated ruins). This subtle transcoding becomes apparent when we compare Ah Cheng and Xie Xizhang’s decadence discourse with Li Tianji’s account of writing the script right after the anti-Japanese war. Trained as a theater actor and actively involved in theater work in southwest China during the war, Li returned after the war to Shanghai—the recovered city— only to find himself jobless owing to the disintegration of a large number of theater troupes. Financially strapped and intellectually stranded, Li,

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along with several colleagues, was forced into film scriptwriting in the hope of earning a living at a time when unemployment was rampant and inflation was imminent. After being ignored by various postwar studios, Li’s script was finally taken up by Fei Mu who intuited a mood of melancholy evocative of a Song Dynasty lyric poem, “Die lian hua,” by Su Dongpo, which Li admitted to be precisely what he had in mind while writing the script. Set in late spring, the last two lines of the poem read: “The laughter gradually fades away along with all voices; the sentimental person is left to face the indifferent world” (Xiao jian buwen sheng jian xiao, duoqing que bei wuqing nao). The entire poem is set up as if written from the perspective of a pensive, bored woman confined by the walls of her boudoir, which corresponds perfectly with the situation of the secluded wife in Fei’s film. More important, the female melancholy caused by a missed opportunity and unrealized relationship resonates with the male scriptwriter’s anxiety about his own helpless situation. When asked whether he was writing about love, Li felt puzzled. Then he realized it was actually “my own kumen” (literally: “bitterness” and “inability to act”), derived from his existential dilemma and mental paralysis (Li 1996: 334–36). In her study of the formation of early twentieth-century Chinese nationalism through literary writing, Jing Tsu points out that the notion of kumen, usually expressed in agony, depression, melancholy, inertia, and ennui, referred to a form of cultural suffering that became progressively more important for literary writers and critics in the 1920s and 1930s. Originally used to describe an individual writer’s psychic condition (oftentimes associated with sexual frustration), the term was then increasingly harnessed for addressing China’s political crisis (Tsu 2005: 195–221). I would like to emphasize that the experience of political crisis and the kumen response were from the intellectuals’ perspective, and hence oftentimes alienated from direct political engagement or easy social prescriptions. As Li explained to Fei, “I don’t want to force a way out, or to cry out my kumen in those explicit words. No spelling out, only a mood ” (ibid. 336, emphasis added). It is not the politicization of the psychic but the intersection, even contention, between the two that motivated Li Tianji’s writing of the script. The intellectual’s political melancholy and angst, redoubled by postwar economic stress, is carefully retained in Fei’s film adaptation to the extent that the filmmaker refused to settle for a clear-cut sociopolitical remedy. Responding to leftist criticism that Spring lacked a social message, Fei stated, “I agreed with the scriptwriter that we would not deliver a rally call or fake a solution. However, I realize that doing that would have been easier and more powerful” (2002 [1948]: 374). In selecting the road less traveled,

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Fei not only demonstrates his resistance to easy slogan-chanting but also exposes the fallacy of realism, seeing the compulsion to confront reality as a crucial weakness of Chinese cinema: The progressive ideology has spawned much trouble. Many colleagues intended to execute realism only to slip into subjective realism. To pin hope on the future, they privilege the young generation. All hopes that have survived the harsh social conditions are transferred to the young generation, whereas everything else has been sublated. The entire film is therefore infused with romanticism, which contrasts sharply with the professed aim of relentless social exposé. This has led to significant conflict between the film’s content and form, and discrepancies in the film’s overall style. The conflict [between romanticism and realism] reflects the intellectual “kumen” [angst and melancholy] in our era. It also damages the artist’s perfect art. (1998b [1948]: 94, emphasis added) The formal awkwardness of vacillating between realism and romanticism is seen as a symptom of that symptom (of kumen). With this understanding, Fei Mu deliberately and consistently veered away from the realist compulsion and instead emphasized devices such as kongqi (mood and ambience) and narratage. Yet his apparent depoliticization was itself derived from melancholic politics, experienced as paralysis during a chaotic era that teeters between one war and another. Compared with the material conditions that gave rise to Fei’s Spring and related expressions of melancholy, Tian’s transcoding into “decadence” is indicative of a significant shift in economic, cultural, and political circumstances at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This leads to Tian’s reconceptualization and refiguration of nostalgia. In Fei’s film, nostalgia is mainly embodied by the sick husband who tries in vain to restore the fallen (and metaphorically “sick”) wall of his family house. As the wife says in her voice-over, he simply cannot forget the grandeur of the past and has no courage to live in the present. To highlight the immediacy of the loss of splendor that the characters are still working through in different manners, the camerawork is lingering but direct, laying bare the collective psychic paralysis at a close range that excludes the external, background space. The audiovisual focus on the characters’ voices (the wife’s voice-over in particular) and mental activities produces a contractive effect that is directed toward the past and the internal, as if the postwar ruins exist more as an objective correlative of their melancholy than as a fact that causes

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melancholy. It is within this interiorized space that the camera gaze lingers; it is implicated with the past. In Tian’s remake, the camerawork is not just lingering but also furtive, with its painstakingly slow, long-distance panning and tracking. The shots follow, circle, and survey the characters like a connoisseur’s telescopic lens that seeks to visually comprehend past objects through contemplative examination. If Fei’s film delivers a highly contractive physical and psychic domain that congeals and resists the external gaze, then Tian’s camerawork endeavors to slowly dissolve and dilute it by tracing, surveying, poaching, and circling it. As a result, the space expands and acquires depth, and the characters acquire voices that go beyond the wife’s reverberating voice-over and her echo chamber-like psyche. A clear indication is that the husband’s role is much more fleshed out in Tian’s remake than a mere embodiment of the idea of an “old-fashioned sick man” in Fei’s film. Relating Tian’s long-distance contemplative, roaming look with nostalgia, we may argue that his nostalgia takes the form of retrospective fascination. It envelops the past without touching it or identifying with it, for it originates from present-day connoisseurship. Nostalgia, as registered in the backward look, may mean two things. The first is that it helps to heal the fractured, ruined space and time by “making it whole” again (to borrow Walter Benjamin’s term), just as the sick husband tries to repair the ruins. This is a look that seeks to reconstruct the prewar splendor from the postwar ruins. Contrary to this, Tian’s filmic nostalgia seems to indulge visually in the splendor of ruins per se. That is, the retrospective look does not “make whole” what is violated but rather aestheticizes the image of violation itself. By meticulously constructing and aestheticizing the “decadent” ruins, Tian implicitly partakes in the postsocialist discourses that privilege consumption and disavow politics.

The Logic of “Failure” and Postsocialist Nostalgia At this point, we can return to the puzzle that I started out with, namely Tian’s statement that he decided to remake the film knowing that he had already failed. This can be easily attributed to the fact that he decided to remake a commonly recognized unsurpassable masterpiece. My analysis suggests, however, that the rhetoric of the predetermined failure might conceal Tian’s “failure” on another level that also has to do with the choices he made in the remaking process. To understand this point, let us continue to examine the implications of Tian’s refiguration of desolate ruins into decadent ruins.

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In Fei’s Spring, the desolate ruins were regarded by left-leaning critics as indicative of Fei’s indulgence in petit-bourgeois sentimentality and depression and of his inability to confront political reality. From Fei’s perspective, the ruins signal the wartime intellectual’s kumen as well as his aesthetic and ideological resistance of realism. The filmmaker deliberately made his “wrong” choice, which he knew would lead to failure in his time.6 Can we say that Tian similarly made a “wrong” choice deliberately by choosing to remake Spring, hence his repetition of Fei’s failure? The answer is both yes and no. To the extent that Tian uses unhurried, detached camerawork that resists melodrama and the audience’s desire for character identification, and thus knowingly jeopardizes his box office potential, we may say that Tian knowingly chose to fail. However, if we take into consideration his investment in the reconstructed ruins (which can be understood as a metaphor for Fei’s previously “ruined” yet now canonized film), then we might argue that despite failing at the box office, Tian successfully gains cultural capital. The remake attracted intense domestic media attention and won the 2002 San Marco Prize at the Venice Film Festival. Tian’s reconstructed ruins are no longer Fei Mu’s postwar ruins. He has replaced desolation with decadence. Contrary to Derrida’s “archive fever” predicated on the death drive, Tian’s filmic nostalgia allows the death drive, or the impossibility of archivization, to be eclipsed by the promise of the future. As Fei Mu’s ideological conservatism half a century ago is now recoded as futurity, Tian’s remake, by bringing Fei’s prophetic power out of the past, stakes its own position in the present/future cultural system. So, how do we understand the politics of the ruins? Here I turn to Teshome H. Gabriel’s rhetorical question, “Do we not, in restoring ruins, always engage in the erasure of history, of our cultural memory?” To avoid this, he emphasizes the significance of figuratively living “amidst invisible ruins” (1993: 214, emphasis added). According to Gabriel, the distinction between ruins and their preservation is that the former constitute what bell hooks calls “a space of radical openness,” which can be shared, “gotten into” despite their marginalization, whereas preservation of ruins closes them off, fixes history, and destroys their nomadic essence (ibid. 214–15, 217). Similarly, Svetlana Boym posits two kinds of nostalgia: the restorative and the reflective. Restorative nostalgia, related to intentional monument, recuperates a historical moment for present appropriation. It lays claim to “immortality and eternal youth, not to the past” (Boym 2001: 78–79). Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, is related to unintentional monument, dwelling on mortality and undermining attempts at “selective and embellished reconstructions of history” (ibid.). It seeks to

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reveal the multilayered and marginalized historical strata. Both Gabriel and Boym highlight the significance of keeping ruins as ruins, safeguarding their mortality so that they can remain a deposit of heterogeneous, marginalized traces and memories. To live in ruins means to resist reified history, which would ruin the logic of ruins. From a philosophical angle, Søren Kierkegaard describes the difference between living the ruins or unintentional monumentalization, on the one hand, and preserving the ruins or intentional monumentalization, on the other, as the difference between repetition and remembrance (quoted in Žižek 1992: 79). Slavoj Žižek argues that remembrance revisits the past from “an external, neutral gaze,” whereas repetition makes the past open up “in its possibility, only to those whose present situation is threatened by the same abyss, who are caught in the same deadlock” (ibid.). Repetition of the past, like Gabriel’s nomadic ruins and Boym’s reflective nostalgia, allows us to “undermine this image of history qua the linear process of the unfolding of an underlying necessity and unearth its process of becoming” (ibid.). In this light, the repetition of failed revolutionary attempts disrupts historicism (which assumes a teleological history) and “retroactively realizes their [the failed attempts’] potentials which were crushed in the victorious course of ‘official’ history” (ibid. 80). Tian’s remake of Fei’s long-repressed Spring, on the surface, constitutes precisely the retroactive reactivation of a failed attempt. Being courageous enough to fail and to repeat the failure, to make the “wrong” choice once and again, both Fei and Tian adopt a heroic dissident stance of being the lonely loser who highlights his and his work’s mortality—for the time being at least. The repeated failure, says Žižek, allows us to experience “‘simultaneousness’ with the past of catastrophic failures and humiliations” (ibid.). Now the question is: how long can the dissident remain dissident; to what extent does Tian stick to the logic of failure (apart from deploying the rhetoric of failure), and when does his repetition of failure become remembrance from an external gaze? If, as Fei’s reversal of fortune suggests, what was once repressed and disavowed is now recuperated and canonized—the death drive now overcome by the life drive—and the radical openness of mortality is replaced by the plenitude of futurity and immortality, does that spell the end of marginalized ruins? How can we imagine or image (if this is still possible) a site of ruins and a politics of nostalgia that exceeds the ever expanding domination of the commercial logic endemic to postsocialism in particular and globalization in general? Tian’s failure to re-present ruins and repression (now converted into decadence and canon) triggers all these questions without providing clear

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answers. What is significant is that his success is as paradoxical as his failure to adhere to the logic of ruins. Among the many possible strategies for hitching a ride with the global cultural economy (including producing Chinese versions of blockbusters and using transnational all-star casts, as his former classmates Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige have done), Tian chooses the road less traveled, as Fei did over half a century earlier. He clings to the intellectual high moral ground and insists on making films for “the audience of the next century.”7 He echoes Fei Mu’s anomaly with the common result of impossible realization, even while his aestheticization of ruins intersects with commercial logic. Yet even there, his spectacle of decadence drastically differs from Zhang Yimou’s and Chen Kaige’s spectacles of motion and commotion. His slow camerawork and lack of close-ups continue his trademark style and deliberately decrease the film’s entertainment value. He exchanges immediate box office payback for cultural capital, even though both are predicated on global commercialization and depoliticization, which render Tian’s filmic nostalgia simultaneously oppositional and compromising. Tian’s remake ultimately symptomizes the limitation and corruptive power of the postsocialist logic. It succeeds because it fails to repeat Fei’s lifelong failure/resistance to make the “right” choice. And it fails for the same reason. What remains instructive is his aspiration to a futurity that exceeds current fixed historicism. Perhaps it is such futurity that makes Tian’s filmic nostalgia (and any other memory film) historically and politically significant.

Notes 1. Regarding the process of excavating Spring, see Law Kar’s interview with Zhang Rui, a journalist with Beijing News (August 13, 2004). 2. The fact that the wife’s voice-over randomly mixes omniscience and limited knowledge suggests multiple temporalities she (imaginarily) occupies. In a different version of this chapter, I analyzed how the idiosyncratic voice-over is related to two devices. The first is the Peking Opera convention (especially that of “aside”), which Fei tried to incorporate into his film aesthetics. The second is “narratage,” which Fei started exploring in A Spray of Fragrance (1934). Narratage, combining narration and montage, was first used in the biographical flashback in The Power and the Glory (1933), according to Maureen Turim. By synchronizing the voice-over with images of the speaker performing the speech acts, narratage serves to “remind the viewer of the presence of the narrator, as do the frequent returns to the present scene of narration” (Turim 1989: 110). In these terms, the wife’s firstperson voice-over, inflected by the Peking Opera convention of aside and the film device of narratage, is by no means confined to a limited perspective on the here–now, but rather

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interweaves flashback and flash-forward, producing mixed temporalities and tension between the image and the soundtracks. 3. According to the actress Wei Wei, who played the wife, the way she moved her feet was deliberately modeled upon the walking style of the noble young lady character (huadan) in Peking Opera. “He [Fei Mu] didn’t mean for us to learn Peking Opera. However, he wanted us to convey the sense of beauty inherent in the opera” (Wong 1998a: 200, emphasis added). 4. See executive producer Li Xiaowan’s production notes in Spring in a Small Town: The Script (2002: 129, 131). 5. Leo Ou-fan Lee (1999) also discusses the thematization of decadence (tui jia dang) by New Sensationist writers such as Shao Xunmei. 6. In a longer version of this chapter, I elaborated on Fei’s recurring comments on how much he tried to make his choices work yet inevitably encountered failure, which proved that he had to learn from other people. Fei’s rhetorical humility can be read less as a gesture of yielding to critical reviews than as a strategy of fending them off so as to continue his idiosyncratic and apparently formalist explorations. It would be interesting to compare Fei’s and Tian’s rhetorics of failure and examine what they suggest in terms of an artist’s self-positioning vis-à-vis sociohistorical conditions and discourses. 7. In response to the harsh criticism of his film The Horse Thief (1986) for being cryptic and baffling, Tian observed that his films were made for the audiences of the next century.

References Ah Cheng (2002), “A film is directed” (“Dianying shi daoyan de”), in Spring in a Small Town: The Script, 6–14. Benjamin, Walter (1995), Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Boym, Svetlana (2001), The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Cadava, Eduardo (2001), “Lapsus imaginis: the image in ruins,” October, 96: 35–60. Derrida, Jacques (1996), Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fei, Mu (1998a), “A brief discussion on the ‘Air’” (“Luetan ‘kongqi’”), originally published in Contemporary Cinema (Shidai dianying), 6 (November 1934). Reprinted in Wong (1998a), 27–28. — (1998b), “Whither the indigenous cinema” (“Guochan pian de chulu wenti”), originally published in Dagong Bao (February 15, 1948). Reprinted in Wong (1998a), 88–98. — (2002), “The director, the scriptwriter—to Yang Ji” (“Daoyan, juzuo zhe— Xiegei Yang Ji”), originally published in Dagong Bao (October 9, 1948).

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Reprinted in Ding Yaping (ed.), Selected Classic Essays on Chinese Cinema during the Past Century (Bainian zhongguo dianying lilun jindian), Vol. 1. Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 373–75. Frow, John (1990), “Intertextuality and ontology,” in Michael Worton and Judith Still (eds), Intertextuality: Theories and Practices. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 45–55. Gabriel, Teshome H. (1993), “Ruin and the other: towards a language of memory,” in Hamid Naficy and Teshome H. Gabriel (eds), Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged. Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 211–20. Jiang, Wen and Tian Zhuangzhuang (2002), “Tian Zhuangzhuang: cinema can step into the same spring twice” (“Tian Zhuangzhuang: dianying keyi liangci daru gong yige chuntian”), in Spring in a Small Town: The Script, 138–53. Law, Kar and Zhang Rui (2004), “The 1948 acme of the poet director Fei Mu” (“1948 nian: shiren daoyan Fei Mu de dianfeng zhi zuo”), Beijing News (Xin jingbao), August 13. www.southcn.com/ent/zhuanti2/ film100/history/200509200485.htm Lee, Leo Ou-fan (1999), Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Leitch, Thomas (2002), “Twice-told tales: disavowal and the rhetoric of the remake,” in Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos (eds), Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice. Albany: State University of New York Press, 37–62. Li, Tianji (1996), “Resorting to film to make a living” (“Wei le fanwan gan shang gemin”), in Li Tianji, Selections of Li Tianji’s Film Scripts (Li Tianji juzuo xuan). Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 327–39. Li, Xiaowan (2002), “Backstage notes” (“Muhou biji”), in Spring in a Small Town: The Script, 110–35. Ling He (1998 [1936]), “On Fei Mu” (“Fei Mu lun”), originally published in China Pictorial (Zhonghua tuhua zazhi), 44. Reprinted in Wong (1998a), 349–58. Spring in a Small Town: The Script (Xiaocheng zhi chun) (2002). Taipei: Shibao wenhua chunban qiye gufen youxian gongsi. Tian, Zhuangzhuang (2002a), “The genesis of remaking Spring in a Small Town” (“Chongpai Xiaocheng zhi chun yuanqi”), in Spring in a Small Town: The Script, 4–5.

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— (2002b), “We cannot chat about a film; however, we can chat about the experience of making a film” (“Dianying shi buneng liao de, pai dianying de jinli shi keyi liao de”), in Spring in a Small Town: The Script, 98–107. Tsu, Jing (2005), Failure, Nationalism, and Literature: The Making of Modern Chinese Identity, 1895–1937. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Turim, Maureen (1989), Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History. New York: Routledge. Verevis, Constantine (2006), Film Remakes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wong, Ain Ling (ed.) (1998a), The Poet Director Fei Mu (Shiren daoyan Fei Mu). Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Critics Society. — (1998b), “Interview with Wei Wei” (“Fang Wei Wei”), in Wong (1998a), 194–208. — (1998c), “The editor’s postscript”(“Bianzhe houji”), in Wong (1998a), 453–56. Xie, Xizhang (2002), no title, in Spring in a Small Town: The Script, 003. Zhang, Hongmei (1998), “Fei Mu asked me to forget it” (“Fei Mu jiao wo wangdiao ta”), in Wong (1998a), 209–12. Žižek, Slavoj (1992), Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge.

Filmography Blue Kite, The (1993), Dir. Tian Zhuangzhuang. Beijing Film Studio/Longwick Film. Horse Thief, The (1986), Dir. Tian Zhuangzhuang. Xi’an Film Studio. Spray of Fragrance, A (Xiang xuehai) (1934), Dir. Fei Mu. Shanghai Lianhua Yingye Gongsi. Spring in a Small Town (Xiaocheng zhi chun) (1948), Dir. Fei Mu. Shanghai Wenhua Film Studio. Spring in a Small Town (Xiaocheng zhi chun) (2002), Dir. Tian Zhuangzhuang. Beijing Film Studio.

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8 “We’ll Always Have Hong Kong”: Uncanny Spaces and Disappearing Memories in the Films of Wong Kar Wai Christina Lee

He remembers those vanished years As though looking through a dusty window pane The past is something he could see, but not touch And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct. (Narrator in In the Mood for Love) Somehow everything comes with an expiry date. Swordfish expires. Meat sauce expires. Even cling-film expires. Is there anything in the world which doesn’t? (Cop 223 in Chungking Express) I have a recurring dream where I am visiting the house of my childhood. It is a semi-permanent structure with a rusted garage attached—corrugated iron sheeting propped up with four poles. On the front lawn, there is the trunk of a tree chopped to waist height. A nail embedded in the center of the trunk is surrounded by concentric rings traced over in purple ink, the handiwork of a child. The driveway, with its loose rocks stained by the red dust, leads out onto Coongan Street. This street stretches from one end of town, the old caravan park, to the other, an iron ore pit sunk into the ground like a giant footprint. In these dreams, I am always returning home to a place that is familiar and vivid yet strange and terrifying. Because at

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some inevitable point, the landscape will metamorphose before my eyes and I am powerless to stop it. At this precise point, I wake up. We often return to physical sites to relive something—the house where we once lived, the kindergarten we attended, the city of our birth. What happens when these sites no longer exist, or when they are so transformed beyond recognition that not even a mental mapping is possible? The house I grew up in has long since been removed. Coongan Street has disappeared. In fact, the entire mining town of Goldsworthy, which was located in the heart of the Pilbara region in Western Australia, is gone. But it is not a ghost town, a place without people. When the mine’s supply of iron ore was depleted, the citizens slowly relocated to neighboring towns over the span of a decade. When the last of the residents had left in 1992, all the buildings were removed, the streets were torn up, trees and foliage were replanted, and the place where Goldsworthy once stood was restored to its natural habitat of bushland. From friends and relatives, I have learned that you would not know there had been a community and thriving town there were it not for the old railway crossing sign that marked the end of the inhospitable outback and the start of civilization. What now has become of my home? This personal anecdote signifies more than a requiem for a past that cannot be recovered. It highlights the importance of spatial memories to identity. Even a gravestone provides a visible symbol and site at which to lament and commemorate, but above all to continue an ongoing relationship with what is essentially dead and buried. Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar Wai once said: there is a need in all of us to have a place to hide or store certain memories, thoughts, impulses, hopes, and dreams. These are part of our lives that we can’t resolve or best not act upon but at the same time we are afraid to jettison them. For some, this is a physical place; for others, it is a mental space, and for a few it is neither. (quoted in Brunette 2005: 105) Wong’s statement illustrates the peculiarities and fickleness of the human condition as rooted in, and influenced by, physical entities (places, people, objects, and so on) and mental renderings of experience, whether manifested in the mind or articulated in more concrete forms such as cinema. When memories are neatly aligned with the material signs, the past seductively appears translucent and history unproblematic. There is comfort in

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knowing that a location has remained relatively unaltered over time rather than being bulldozed and replaced by a sprawling parking lot or gaudy entertainment complex. In other words, the closer the match between the mental and physical blueprint, the less traumatic the journey to the past. This chapter focuses on the works of director Wong Kar Wai, whose films convey an intense anxiety concerning (nationalist) identity and culture. Through narrative structure and cinematic aesthetics, Wong’s oeuvre explores the politics and problematics of disappearing memories and histories. The films provide a visually stunning portrait of the ephemerality of human contact. They are set mostly within Hong Kong or locales that carry an uncanny resemblance to this metropolis. Smoky hawker stalls, jostling streets, Byzantine corridors of apartment buildings, and darkened passageways provide both backdrop for the narratives and a tangible reminder of events for the characters. The cityscape serves as a type of metaphoric photo album collecting and bearing witness to moments. However, this photo album is in a state of transition and therefore threatens to destabilize memories associated with its physical spaces. The gravity of spatial displacement becomes even more significant in light of the disjunction between time, space, and experience that results in déjà vu. I loosely use the Freudian description of “the uncanny” as that which is frightening because it is simultaneously unknown but uncomfortably familiar and which elicits an inner “compulsion to repeat,” which is an apt metaphor for dreams (Freud 1985: 340, 361). Inherent in Sigmund Freud’s discussion is the uncanny as a mechanism of the return of the repressed, or that which has been forgotten. For the characters in Wong’s films, this process of the uncanny evokes an incomplete recollection. It is a case of “Haven’t we met before?” and, for the audience, “Haven’t we been here before?” Specifically, I look at the disconnection between time and space in memory and experience, focusing on In the Mood for Love (2000) and 2046 (2006) with reference to several of Wong’s previous films.

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: Disappearing Spaces, Memories, and Histories Wong Kar Wai’s films revolve thematically around loss, yearning, and attempts to recapture the past. All are experienced through the prism of nostalgia that is attached to and invested in space, whether the story is set in feudal times (as in the 1994 Ashes of Time), the 1960s, or the future of 2046. Time, or rather time-keeping, is evident from the motif of clocks and wristwatches. In the opening scene of Days of Being Wild (1991), the camera fixates on a clock on the wall of a stadium entrance that reads 9 o’clock.

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The reckless player York (Leslie Cheung) approaches Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), asks for her name, and informs her that she will see him in her dreams. As he departs, we cut to the timepiece again. It is now 4 o’clock. When he calls in a second time, York tells Li-zhen to look at his watch. There is a cut to the mounted clock, which reads almost 3 o’clock, as the sound of its rhythmic ticking comes to the fore. Li-zhen: York: Li-zhen: York:

Time’s up. What now? What’s today’s date? The 16th. The 16th. April 16th, 1960, one minute before 3 o’clock. We were here together. I’ll always remember that minute because of you. From now on, we’re one-minute friends. It’s a fact. You can’t deny it. It’s already happened. I’ll be back tomorrow.

This theme of time is reiterated throughout the film, with individuals asking for and telling the time and trying to recall past encounters. Various shots conspicuously place clocks within the center of the frame at the expense of dislodging characters. In one scene, in which Li-zhen confides in a policeman (Andy Lau) after York has rejected her, the positioning of the camera at ground level reveals only Li-zhen’s lower torso and feet. This visual fragmenting of the body brings to attention a large clock that is in the background, serving as a reminder that the exigency and consequences of time are ineludible. When Li-zhen says to the policeman that one minute can “take forever,” it is an homage to Wong’s insistence that time is not an unbroken flow but must be understood in terms of disjunctures, dislocations, and discrepancies (Dissanayake and Wong 2003: 100). This description lends itself to a rendering of the temporal as spatial. Within their social context, Wong’s films can be read as symptomatic of wider concerns over the major social and political shifts in Asia over the past century. In more recent times, the escalating apprehension surrounding Hong Kong’s transfer of sovereignty to the People’s Republic of China in 1997 resulted in a rush for palpable artifacts of a local history. Writing in 2001, Rey Chow noted that: Any visit to Hong Kong in recent years tells one that strong feelings of nostalgia are at work in the general consumer culture . . . Furniture, music, clothes, shoes, and cosmetics of the past decades are being revived, and it has become fashionable to collect “antiques”

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such as pocket and mechanical watches, records, old newspapers, old magazines, old photographs, old comic strips, and so forth, in addition to the more traditional collector’s items such as coins, stamps, snuff bottles, utensils, paintings, calligraphy, and carpets. (2001: 209) The nostalgic upsurge in commodity culture fetishizes the 1930s, 1950s, and 1960s in particular. These decades are commonly featured as the background in contemporary Hong Kong cinema, such as in the films of Stanley Kwan, Ann Hui, and Wong Kar Wai. This obvious blast from the past signifies more than a desperate reaction to China’s takeover of Hong Kong (pre-1997) or mourning (post-1997). It is also indicative of a more complex history of self-narrativizing amid colonization and globalization where the past is idealized and commodified as pastiche (Chow 2001: 209–10). Ackbar Abbas argues that Hong Kong is experiencing a culture of disappearance—a misrecognition rather than perceptible absence, lack, or nonappearance—that is encapsulated in the déjà disparu, “the feeling that what is new and unique about the situation is always already gone, and we are left holding a handful of clichés, or a cluster of memories of what has never been” (1997: 7, 25). The effect is a state of limbo and historical elusiveness. History, then, becomes inscribed not only through consumer items but also through space and the specificities of architectonics. Abbas places emphasis on architecture because “it is always assumed to be somewhere, [and] is the first visual evidence of a city’s putative identity” (ibid. 64). The renovation and restoration of built spaces such as Repulse Bay Hotel, Flagstaff House, Tsang Tai Uk in Shatin, and the Western Market in Hong Kong testify to recent efforts to preserve and fix an identity, history, and memory for the city and its citizens. This virtual embalming of the past has become even more imperative in light of redevelopment and the burgeoning of what Abbas refers to as the Placeless and Anonymous, that is, those nondescript and universal structures that provide little spatial history or point for local identification (ibid. 82). Within Wong’s films, there is an urgency to capture the ephemerality of time and therefore the past. The aesthetic trademarks of cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s roaming camera, slow-motion cinematography, and the perpetual movement of the characters create a state of flux that never comes to rest, thereby denying what Frances Pine terms a “stillness of place” (2007: 104). In relation to Chungking Express (1996), Janice Tong states that: images of mutability depict conditions of lostness in the characters— loss of identity, failure of communication, impossibility of reconciliation and the inability to hold on to time. These are conditions that, in turn,

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infuse Wong’s images of Hong Kong with a sense of nostalgia, a kind of sentimental yearning for a history that has disappeared too quickly. (2003: 53) Wong seeks to capture time through spatializing the temporal in the same way film can be utilized to capture aspects of memory.1 Time becomes something and somewhere to be (re)visited. The transient nature of moments and relationships in the films requires place and space to function as the repository of memories and experiences of the past, the present, and even the future. The obsessively fine attention to details of place—that is, to props and setting—is so excessive that locus becomes just as significant as the time when an event occurred. In Chungking Express, Cop 663 (Tony Leung) and Cop 223, He Qiwu (Takeshi Kaneshiro), routinely return to a local lunch counter where they relive unrequited love. The encounters become infused with the fluorescent lighting of the setting, the whirring of a fan cooling sweaty bodies, and the ubiquitous soundtrack of The Mamas and The Papas’ “California Dreamin” that plays on the tape recorder. Space is not simply the site of action but the witness to events. Even the title of this film brings together two incompatible concepts of time and space, and each becomes invested in and incumbent on the other. Stephen Teo writes: Space in the film is an external world symbolised by the claustrophobic setting of Chungking Mansion, while there is an external near-abstract world represented by clocks but actualised by the expiry dates on food cans and mock boarding passes drawn on serviettes. (2005: 52) Memory, nostalgia, and time become transmuted into space, becoming almost lived and corporeal entities. Borrowing from the writings of Alan Lightman, Wong’s films present time as a visible dimension in which individuals suffer from their fear of “traveling far from a comfortable moment. They remain close to one temporal location” (1993: 133–34). This presents a conundrum as characters, unwilling to relinquish their past, do so at the expense of psychological stasis. This is a theme that is intricately explored in the film In the Mood for Love.

Have We Met Before? Disjunctures in the Space–Time Continuum In the Mood for Love is set in Hong Kong in 1962. Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) and Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) move into adjacent apartments

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on the same day. Li-zhen is a Shanghainese immigrant who works as a secretary for a shipping company, and Mo-wan is a Hong Kong native who is employed as a journalist. Both are married. A mix-up in their belongings results in their first meeting. From that moment onward, their encounters become more frequent and intense when suspicions that their spouses are having an affair are confirmed. Mo-wan and Li-zhen engage in a role-play where each adopts the persona of the other’s partner, re-enacting how they might have met and carried out their illicit liaisons. At no point do we witness Mo-wan or Li-zhen emotionally erupt at their lecherous spouses. In fact, at no point do we even see the faces of Mrs. Chow or Mr. Chan. Cinematographically, they are framed in such a way as to conceal their faces behind walls, furniture, or shadows, relying on their voices offscreen to signal their presence. In the few instances where we are privy to a shot of their backs, the image becomes enigmatic and obscured by figures moving in the foreground or decorative ornaments and wall hangings. For instance, the first scene with Mrs. Chow shows her hastily running upstairs and passing by Li-zhen, who is traveling in the opposite direction. We see her only from the rear, as with a following scene when she enters a crowded room and takes her place at the table beside Li-zhen’s husband. It is a case of “formidable absent presences . . . inserted front and center, yet invisibly, in the film” (Brunette 2005: 89). This echoes Elizabeth Bronfen’s description of the uncanny as characterized by mobility, a “situation of undecidability . . . the uncanny in some sense always involves the question of visibility/invisibility, presence to/absence from sight” (1992: 114). The simultaneous absence of the spouses is one of the reasons for Mo-wan and Li-zhen’s initial suspicions and works as a mechanism for filmmaker Wong Kar Wai to explore this space–time asynchronicity. When Mo-wan should be with his wife and Li-zhen with her husband, instead they find themselves in an ersatz marriage to one another. In an early scene at a diner, the couple take turns to order for the other the favorite dish of their partner. The conversation is aloof and matter-of-fact, tinged with resentment that they are in the right place with the wrong person at the wrong time, or rather with the right person at the right place at the wrong time. The materiality of the bistro—with its retro red booths, iconic emerald chinaware, and green lighting scheme—is a crucial link for the characters as they locate and recreate situations that are not only gone but perhaps never even occurred (after all, it is their imagined version of their spouses’ affair). Rather than being incidental, the ambience of the

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space enables them to fill a void in their private memories and histories. This becomes literalized at various points in the narrative. For instance, in a conversation with his friend Ah Ping (Ping Lam Siu) in a smoky hawker market in Singapore, Mo-wan muses: In the old days, if someone had a secret they didn’t want to share, you know what they did? . . . They went up a mountain, found a tree, carved a hole in it, and whispered the secret into the hole. Then they covered it up with mud, and left the secret there forever. At the film’s conclusion, Mo-wan travels to Cambodia to visit Angkor Wat after having accepted the lost love of Li-zhen. Instead of a tree, he finds a hole in a stone wall into which he whispers his secrets. Watched by a young monk, Mo-wan conceals the cavity with mud and grass and then departs. The final image is a slow tracking shot across the temple grounds and the ancient ruins. The now invisible footsteps of previous visitors linger on, as well as the secrets and sorrows they brought with them. The grounds still carry a history and deeply etched memories of, and over, time. The depiction of time and space in a state of disjunction is not restricted to In the Mood for Love. It pervades all of Wong Kar Wai’s films, producing ambiguity and a sense of out-of-time-ness.2 Characters are not so much trapped in the past as operating according to individual timelines. Time is not uniform and linear but stretched, sped up, slowed down, looped, and fragmented. This is conveyed aesthetically through visual compositions that dislocate characters from their immediate surroundings. Although they occupy the same space, they clearly do not occupy the same time frame. In two scenes in Chungking Express, Cop 663 is shown in slow motion and out of synchronicity with the rest of the world, which rushes past him.3 Later on, he philosophizes that a woman he has fallen in love with, Faye the counter hand at the Midnight Express lunch bar (played by Faye Wong), exists in another time zone. As he waits for her in the California Restaurant in Hong Kong, she is in California in the United States. Separated by fifteen hours across the international date line, it is a case of same “place” but different time. In In the Mood for Love, space further works to separate the two protagonists and to induce a sensation of being out of place and out of time. During their encounter at the night market, which is shot in slow motion, Li-zhen enters and then exits left of frame. The camera lingers on the lonely space—a gritty wall with a lamp casting a solitary shadow. Seconds later,

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Mo-wan enters the frame from the same direction. They have missed each other by mere moments. In the following scene, Li-zhen is again leaving the market as Mo-wan arrives. Shot in real time, they share the same frame but yet again their movements are malapropos. This mistiming is accentuated by the unusually angled and composed images littered throughout the film of the cityscape emptied of people and full of lonely objects—the corner of a building, a street lamp, a telephone mounted on a wall, a street flooded with rain water. The emptiness is reminiscent of a vacuous and eerie ghost town. As all are sites that were frequented by Li-zhen and Mo-wan, this intensifies nostalgic longing in the face of inevitable loss (a romance doomed from the beginning and a bygone era). During happier times, Mo-wan and Li-zhen work collaboratively on his latest serial in a secretly rented hotel room with the number 2046. They are away from the gossiping neighbors and able to explore their burgeoning affections for one another. Yet the intimacy of the scene and their seemingly synchronous states of mind are literally disrupted. In Shot 1, Li-zhen’s reflection is observed in a three-paneled dressing-room mirror. As the camera tracks from left to right, Mo-wan’s back obscures this view before the camera comes to rest on his reflection in the opposite panel. The camera then retraces its movement, separating the characters not once but twice through their mediated gazes in the mirror and physical barriers. In Shot 2, Li-zhen and Mo-wan are within the same medium shot but are flanked on all sides and divided by the objects within the frame. In Shot 3, Mo-wan is sitting alone at the dressing-room table working. Li-zhen’s presence is indicated by the shadow cast over him. Shot 4 is similar to Shot 1, with the characters always apart from one another visually. Although they inhabit the same space, they are prevented from being together. The slowmotion cinematography underscores this out-of-time-ness, this sense of always arriving too late or too early, of always being in a state of arrival or departure. As the worlds in Wong Kar Wai’s films are worlds in flux—time, history, and memory perpetually shift—this volatility requires “the solidity of details, such as a candle, a scarf or a pair of shoes . . . details are important and consequential as they contain within themselves the possibility of revealing patterns of meaning in the wider world” (Dissanayake and Wong 2003: 121). The investment in place and its physical elements—the smoke snaking from a cigarette butt, a rotating fan, a room number—imbue the mutating timeline with tangibility. In other words, place fixes the fleeting and acts as insurance that the past will not be forgotten and that someone was there.

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Lost in Time, Lost in Space: Repeating History (and Memory) in 2046 Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 is the most explicit articulation of the disjunction between time and space, and of spatialized time as a means of stalling the disappearance of memories. As the sequel to In the Mood for Love, 2046 indulges in the excessiveness of the past with its lavish set designs and costumes, and generous poaching of images, events, musical score, and references from the director’s previous films. Re-enactment and recapturing of the past in 2046 is sought in spaces that replicate scenes from In the Mood for Love, but not exactly. In the opening sequence, a nameless narrator explains: In the year 2046 every railway network spreads the globe. A mysterious train leaves for 2046 every once in a while. Every passenger who goes to 2046 has the same intention. They want to recapture lost memories because nothing ever changes in 2046. Nobody really knows if that’s true because nobody’s ever come back. Except me. It becomes apparent that this is an extract from a science-fiction serial written by Mo-wan and set in the future. The protagonist/narrator falls in love with an android with delayed response on a train departing 2046. Mo-wan is now the consummate commitment-free playboy, dabbling in pulp fiction for a living. After an encounter with a dancer whom he has met in the past, he follows Lulu (Carina Lau) to her apartment with the number 2046 at the Oriental Hotel. This consequently sparks his recollections of an earlier life. Soon after, Mo-wan seeks out the company of dance-hall girl Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi). Despite the aggressive passion of their relationship, it is devoid of the sincerity and tenderness he felt for Li-zhen, whom he still dreams of. One of the most elegiac of his films, 2046 is also arguably one of Wong Kar Wai’s most overtly political, tying personal concerns to national histories. The year 2046 itself is significant as it marks the end of the fifty-year grace period of Hong Kong’s handover to China, by which time the reintegration of the nation-state is to be completed. The film 2046 departs somewhat from its predecessors in that it is preoccupied both with the past and with a future that will not happen. Different temporal dimensions are overlaid until they collapse in on themselves in a manner similar to the filmmaker’s own recounting of the past. Wong’s fond and vivid memories of his childhood in the 1960s provide the historical context for many of his films, but, more significantly, they underscore the tenuous link to a history

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that threatens to unravel and problematize identity. While Wong looks nostalgically back to the 1960s and 1970s, those decades were characterized by Hong Kong’s charge forward toward modernity, “during which the young devoured the old and Father Time arrived not with a scythe but with a wrecker’s ball” (Cottrell 1993: 4). As history was happening, it was just as swiftly being swept away—like covering one’s tracks on a dusty road—in the feverish race for the future. The past had an automatic expiry date. In Wong’s films, nostalgia is reinvoked many times over. Intertextual references create a sensation of being lost not only in time but also in space. Actors and film settings are reused, even if it is in a completely separate diegetic world, for a Doppelgänger effect. This evokes Nicholas Royle’s observation that the uncanny can be simultaneously terrifying and “something strangely beautiful, bordering on ecstasy (‘too good to be true’), or eerily reminding us of something, like déjà vu” (2003: 2). Maggie Cheung, Faye Wong, Carina Lau, Brigitte Lin, Andy Lau, Tony Leung, Leslie Cheung, and Takeshi Kaneshiro have all appeared in multiple roles in Wong’s oeuvre. In Days of Being Wild, Maggie Cheung appears as the character Su Li-zhen. In In the Mood for Love, her character’s name is also Su Li-zhen, although it is never made clear whether she is the same woman some years

Reinvoking the past and nostalgic longing: Mo-wan and Su Li-zhen in In the Mood for Love (2000). The Kobal Collection, Getty Images.

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later and now married, mature and sophisticated, and well-versed in social proprieties. In the sequel 2046, Su Li-zhen again appears as an apparition in Mo-wan’s hopeless reminiscences. Through cinematography, mise-en-scène, and editing, the films’ various hauntings narrativize desperate and futile pursuits to pull the past into the present. One of the most striking examples is of Mo-wan in a taxi with Bai Ling, who is a pallid substitute for Li-zhen (he subsequently pays her for sex). Mo-wan sits to her right with his head on her shoulder. When he reaches for her hand, she pushes his hand away. It (re)plays like a scene from In the Mood for Love, only this time greatly soured. In the previous film, Li-zhen is seated on Mo-wan’s left with her head resting on his shoulder. This same tableau is used in Happy Together (1997). Skeptical of his lover’s professed fidelity, Yiu-fai (Tony Leung) nevertheless allows Ho Po-wing (Leslie Cheung) to lean his head on his shoulder in the backseat of a taxi. In addition to repetition (almost verbatim), intertextual references are recurrent. In Days of Being Wild, the final scene involves an unnamed character (played by Tony Leung) in a claustrophobic and lowceilinged room. He is the spitting image of the debonair York, as indicated by idiosyncratic mannerisms such as the combing back of his greased hair and the swagger in his gait. The inclusion of this brief scene serves as the connective strand between Days of Being Wild and In the Mood for Love. In 2046, Mo-wan refers to the story of a legless bird that will die once it lands. This echoes the same story told by York in Days of Being Wild. Each of these scenes carries a certain uncanniness and sensory memory of the painfulness of the past within and between films. The stories seep into one another until it becomes indeterminate when one ends and the other commences. It is almost as if by being in the same space, something that was lost in time will be recovered—a case of repeating history and memory. Just as the characters desire a past already in danger of being forgotten, so the audience is left longing for the characters and events of previous narratives. In 2046, people who inhabit Mo-wan’s world are written into his stories as fictional characters. Mo-wan himself assumes the identity of a Japanese time traveler who is based on Tak (Tatsuya Kimura), the boyfriend of his landlord’s elder daughter, Jingwen (Faye Wong). As in Chungking Express, Wong Kar Wai pairs together Faye Wong and Tony Leung. This time, Faye Wong as Jingwen appears as an android with delayed reactions—an actualization of the space–time disconnection—which Mo-wan attributes to her refusal of Tak’s offer to leave the train with him. It eventually dawns on him that it is not a straightforward case of mechanical malfunction but an

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emotional and temporal distance intrinsic to the human psyche and history itself: Mo-wan: Love is all a matter of timing. It’s no good meeting the right person too soon or too late. If I’d lived in another time or place my story might have had a very different ending. The voice-over is bookended by an image of the android gazing out the train window at the scenery rushing by, which is interrupted by the intertitles: “10 hours later,” “100 hours later,” and “1000 hours later.” This is followed by a shot of Mo-wan at his desk unable to write. The latter shot is also interspersed with intertitles: “1 hour later,” “10 hours later,” and “100 hours later.” Both Mo-wan and the android are incapable of moving or reacting, sucked into black holes in time inhabited by phantom doubles. Time literally becomes place in 2046. The title refers not only to a year but also to a place where travelers go to recover memories (and from which the present is absent) and to the all-important apartment with the same number. This results in a doubling and even tripling effect, “a mobile state of rupture where images, space, time, characters and narratives fold in upon each other, weaving a skein of images that threaten to slip from our gaze” (Tong 2003: 54). This doubling of people—and, one might add, place—acts as a safeguard against mortality and frailty in which the soul continues to live long after the decomposition of the corporeal (Bronfen 1992: 113). For instance, Maggie Cheung reappears spectrally in the film as an eroticized and imagined version of her previous character and as one of the androids aboard the mystery train. Mo-wan later meets a Chinese Cambodian whose name is also Su Li-zhen (Gong Li). In 2046, “details multiply and replicate themselves; some are conspicuous, others blurred, but all have shifted slightly from their signifying frameworks” (Abbas 1997: 57). This slight shift is encapsulated in the missed opportunities as a result of timing and proximity between people—1 hour (2046), 1 second (Days of Being Wild), or 0.01 of a centimeter (Chungking Express).4 Time and space have become imprecise, dictated no longer by absolute measurements but by the workings of the heart. The importance of time is illustrated in a casual conversation between Mo-wan and Bai Ling as she enquires about his numerous conquests: Mo-wan: A man like me has nothing much except free time, that’s why I need company. Bai Ling: So people are just time-fillers to you?

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Mo-wan: I wouldn’t say that. Other people can borrow my time too. Bai Ling: And this evening? Are you borrowing me or am I borrowing you? The dialogue makes reference to Hong Kong as a borrowed place living on borrowed time prior to 1997. Now that the date for the handover has expired, a new one for 2046 has been set. In the film, archival footage of the 1966 Hong Kong riot recreates, and furthermore foreshadows, a tumultuous period in the nation’s contemporary history that is fueled by change and apprehension. Wong’s preoccupation with the past is not a straightforward nostalgia. Here, Svetlana Boym’s differentiation between varying types of nostalgia is useful: Restorative nostalgia manifests in total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time . . . Restorative nostalgia takes itself dead seriously. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, can be ironic and humorous. (2001: 41, 49) Restorative nostalgia attempts to recuperate historical truth, whereas reflective nostalgia is concerned with critique of and meditation on the past, human finitude, and the imperfect process of remembering (ibid. 41). Wong’s characters exhibit traces of both restorative and reflective nostalgia. They endeavor to remake the past down to its minutiae, but this inevitably leads to failure and fatality—real and symbolic. Totality of the past, history, and memory is an impossibility. The individuals carry a sensory memory from one film to the next like a barely healed wound that is conveyed through the physicality of sites. In In the Mood for Love, the hotel hallway of apartment 2046 is bathed in red from the lighting and the billowing crimson curtains. In 2046, another apartment bearing the same number is awash with the blood of Lulu (who also featured in Days of Being Wild) after she is brutally stabbed by a jealous boyfriend. Lulu’s first interlude with Mo-wan in 2046, during which they discuss the past, is similarly drenched in red from the lighting and drapes of a local bar. The more elusive this history and collective memory, the less painful it is. Individuals are torn between wanting to recapture the past and facing the certainty of becoming repeat offenders who will re-experience their personal traumas and tragedies several times over with an almost soporific recollection of events.

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The characters mourn for a life, a time, and a Hong Kong that no longer exist.5 This compulsive preoccupation with private histories and memories, or a localized narrative of identity, is discernible even in the production of the films. Christopher Doyle, cinematographer for Happy Together, wrote in his shooting diary: We came to Argentina to “defamiliarise” ourselves by moving away from the spaces—and we hope the preoccupations—of the world we know so well. But we’re out of our space and depth here. We don’t even know the city well. So why do we still tend towards bars, barbershops, fast-food joints and trains? . . . We’re stuck with our own concerns and perceptions. (1997: 53) Wong Kar Wai reiterates Doyle’s sentiment with his remark that “it’s more like I’m remaking Hong Kong in Buenos Aires” (quoted in Feinstein 1997: 40). Although the wide open roads, the long stretches of highway, and the dilapidated housing blocks bear no resemblance to the cityscape of Hong Kong, there is the incessant gravitation toward familiar images—a cramped apartment, a bar full of strangers, a clamorous restaurant kitchen—that is akin to drifting in and out of a dream. Even inside a tango club full of Argentineans or foreigners, Wong’s penchant for Western and Latin music such as Nat King Cole’s “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás” in In the Mood for Love and Days of Being Wild is less a departure than a homecoming of sorts. Wong’s characters may ruminate on ruins, but they are not consigned to remain there for eternity. In Happy Together, Lai Yiu-fai does eventually see Iguazu Falls (without his former lover) and does return to the sprawling metropolis of Hong Kong. On a train in Taiwan, Yiu-fai revels in the prospect of a future rendezvous with Chang (Chen Chang), whom he has befriended in Argentina. A cover version of “Happy Together” plays as he heads toward the future and home, both wiser and optimistic. In Chungking Express, Faye, now an air hostess, goes back to the site of the old lunch bar during a stopover in Hong Kong. The film concludes with the suggestion that she and Cop 663 will reignite their relationship as a Cantonese cover version of The Cranberries’ “Dreams” ushers in the closing credits. In 2046, Mo-wan finally releases his stranglehold on his past. As he leaves the shadow of Su Li-zhen behind—both Maggie Cheung’s and Gong Li’s characters—a genuine smile of serenity spreads across his face, which is followed by an intertitle that reads: “He didn’t look back. It was as if he’d boarded a very long train heading for a drowsy future.” Wong’s wandering souls are not without hope or redemption. There is an irony, and

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even humor, to the endings of these films that is derived from critical reflection as opposed to blind obsession. The past is, however, far from left behind. Just as relocation to another place cannot erase our past, nostalgia and memories color the present with the familiar. The characters of Wong Kar Wai’s worlds will always go back to old haunts, or a proxy, or the site where something once stood. All these places are overtly or vaguely recognizable. Space cannot be bleached of time, history, or memory. It is here that I return full circle to where this chapter began—the recurring uncanny dream of my hometown of Goldsworthy. These dreams function like a celluloid version of another time and another place. Like so many of Wong’s films, there is an ongoing sense of unresolve, loss, and being lost based on fear not of facing the future but of facing the future without a past. But in this final comment I take some comfort, for it seems all roads lead to home.

Notes 1. We need only turn to personal video footage as amateur archives of histories and memories corroborating past events. 2. This out-of-time-ness is epitomized by the slogan “One country, two systems”—one entity hovering at two markedly different stages of development and progress. 3. This sensation of the world rushing by is achieved through the filmmaker’s signature “smudge-motion effect,” which blurs the background while keeping the central character in focus. See Tong (2003). 4. In the exposition of Chungking Express, Cop 223 bumps into a woman (Brigitte Lin) heavily disguised with sunglasses, a blonde wig, and raincoat as he is pursuing a robber. In a voice-over, he laments: “This was the closest we ever got. Just 0.01 of a centimeter between us.” The melancholic nature of this encounter is underscored by the irony of their physical closeness and the impossibility of the relationship (Lin’s character is a criminal) even though fifty-seven hours later he will fall in love with her. When Qiwu crosses paths momentarily with Faye at the Midnight Express lunch bar, again he says: “This was the closest we ever got. Just 0.01 of a centimeter between us. I know nothing about her. But six hours later she fell in love with another man.” 5. This is exemplified by Abbas’ comments on the music in In the Mood for Love. The soundtrack consists of popular music tracks that: predate the sixties, and even when they were played then, they were already out of date. If the visual details locate a time, the soundtrack dissolves it back into prior moments. The result then is a history of the sixties that, like the experience of disappearance itself, is also there and not there at the same time. (1997: 53)

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References Abbas, Ackbar (1997), Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Boym, Svetlana (2001), The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Bronfen, Elizabeth (1992), Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Brunette, Peter (2005), Contemporary Film Directors: Wong Kar Wai. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Chow, Rey (2001), “A souvenir of love,” in Esther C. M. Yau (ed.), At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 209–29. Cottrell, Robert (1993), The End of Hong Kong: The Secret Diplomacy of Imperial Retreat. London: John Murray. Dissanayake, Wimal with Dorothy Wong (2003), Wong Kar Wai’s Ashes of Time. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Doyle, Christopher (1997), Buenos Aires. Tokyo: Prénom H. Feinstein, Howard (1997), “Celluloid takeover: Hong Kong’s miniwave of gay-themed movies,” Out (October): 40. Freud, Sigmund (1985), “The ‘uncanny,’” in Albert Dickson (ed.), Art and Literature: Jensen’s Gravida, Leonardo Da Vinci and Other Works. London: Penguin Books, 339–76. Lightman, Alan (1993), Einstein’s Dreams. New York: Warner Books. Pine, Frances (2007), “Memories of movement and the stillness of place: kinship memory in the Polish highlands,” in Janet Carsten (ed.), Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 104–25. Royle, Nicholas (2003), The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Teo, Stephen (2005), World Directors: Wong Kar Wai. London: BFI Publishing. Tong, Janice (2003), “Chungking Express: time and its displacements,” in Chris Berry (ed.), Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes. London: BFI Publishing, 47–55.

Filmography Ashes of Time (1994), Dir. Wong Kar Wai. Beijing Film Studio. Chungking Express (1996), Dir. Wong Kar Wai. Miramax.

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Days of Being Wild (1991), Dir. Wong Kar Wai. Kino International. Happy Together (1997), Dir. Wong Kar Wai. Kino International. In the Mood for Love (2000), Dir. Wong Kar Wai. Dendy Films. 2046 (2006), Dir. Wong Kar Wai. Sony Pictures.

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9 “No Future for You”: The Sex Pistols and the Politics of Cinematic Reimaginings Adam Trainer

Memory, like the shreds of cultural texts that embody it, moves quickly. Subject to fashion and buffeted by the turbulent winds of consumer taste, specific audiences may absorb disparate concepts of, or approaches toward, a particular text at different times. As both a creative medium and a documenting device, cinema provides a suture for multiple histories through the facility of recall and the structural techniques of reconstruction. Moving with the fluidity and impermanence of fashion, while also sustaining itself as a legitimate forum for the iconization and canonization of specific individuals and movements, cinema, through its representation of key moments in popular music history, therefore renegotiates the terrain between popular culture, the public sphere, personal experience, and (sub)cultural belonging. Focusing on Julien Temple’s two Sex Pistols films (The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle [1980] and The Filth and the Fury [2000]) and Alex Cox’s biopic of Sid Vicious (Sid and Nancy [1986]), I argue that film can be used as a catalyst for historical revisionism and that in the case of the established narratives and iconography of fabled rock ’n’ roll moments, audiences are offered reappropriations through which they can channel their own popular memories. The documentation of rock music onscreen often fluctuates between the fickleness of constant reappraisal and the construction of consistent and repeated grand narratives that become etched with permanent meaning and significance. Film can be used as a vehicle for cinematic revisionism, 142

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as a way to rewrite the past by acknowledging alternate histories or allowing new interpretations to lacquer established narratives of popular music history. As this chapter points out, filmmaker Julien Temple undertook the task of reinterpreting a history he had previously documented in The Filth and the Fury. In this sense, history is allowed to repeat itself, but with different emphases and renewed focus for the purpose of promoting revised popular consciousness surrounding the punk movement in 1970s Britain and specifically the Sex Pistols. This revisionism takes place in both documentary and fiction film forms, but regardless of its stylistic approach, film about rock is always tethered to self-reflexive notions of accuracy and authenticity. Documentary film often presents contesting metanarratives. The rockumentary—a documentary film dealing exclusively with rock music—generally endeavors to dismantle the myths supporting the dominant images and public perceptions surrounding a particular performer. The presence of a camera crew, away from public space, offers the likelihood (and promise) that the subject will present him- or herself through an altered or somewhat mannered persona that is the “true” self. Jonathan Romney points out, however, that what occurs in the backstage space of the rockumentary is not truthful but a construction of star personae and filmmaking rhetoric as manipulated as any scripted drama (1995: 82–92). It is this limbo state—this discomforting manipulation of the backstage space and those who occupy it—that provides the genre with its immediacy. It is in those moments that an audience can truly engage with the rockumentary form as they see their heroes and those involved directly with them in this strange mediation between authenticity and public image. When authenticity is no longer possible, those severed from the root of the subject often miss the point. Some of the most telling and hilarious scenes of The Filth and the Fury are the interviews with middle-class American teenagers who have just attended a concert by “that naughty bunch of counterculture radicals” (as uncredited news footage refers to them). One of the interviewees reveals that he loves the band because “[t]hey moved me. They made me shake more than I ever shook before and that’s what makes them the best.” After a few moments, as he realizes that this admission is far too gushy for the punk veneer he should be brandishing, he spits at his interviewer and yells, “Get out of here . . . Get the fuck out of here!” with the self-indulgent glee of a spoilt child. In the face of a populist charade as opposed to the “genuine article”— whatever that may be—there seems far more room for misinterpretation and exaltation. In the case of popular memory, which layers cultural artifacts

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with disparate meanings and purposes, it is the inauthentic (or certainly that which has been commodified) that turns a cultural movement into a halcyon age. It can be argued that the rockumentary presents a blurred authenticity where reality and truth no more exist than in a promotional music video. It is only after the event has been appropriated by the mainstream and forced to signify some greater level of consciousness or overwhelming understanding that it becomes desirable and takes on the stature of “a history.” In the case of the Sex Pistols this is exemplified by the incessant referral to their only recorded album, Never Mind the Bollocks (1977), as the definitive statement of the punk era because of the band’s (and the album’s) notoriety in the news media of the day, and despite the fact that it was predated (albeit by months) by equally definitive releases by other U.K. punk bands, such as The Clash and The Damned. In documentary filmmaking, the gaze of the camera and the editing process, for example, allow the construction of a recognizable and defined narrative point of view. Although the potential for a multitude of opinions makes overarching statements both impossible to cultivate and unnecessary, documentary form inherently reduces and refines. The genre is problematic in its unavoidable attempt at a representation of a singular historicized narrative. Nevertheless, the rockumentary can be a powerful tool in the representation of a band or artist’s image, in the public absorption of a cultural movement or phenomenon, or in the restructuring of perception about an era, event, or subject of popular scrutiny. The rockumentary is able to construct alternate histories that can bleed into the assumed or accepted narratives surrounding a band or artist, using opinion and bias alongside empirical fact to tint and add depth to what may be seen as black and white. Temple’s two films about the Sex Pistols demonstrate the potential for the rockumentary to redefine, to shift focus and clarify through the expansion and exclusion of fact and opinion. Temple was an art student and filmmaker who, in the mid- to late 1970s, affiliated himself with the Sex Pistols, documenting the anger and belligerence of a band whose quarrelsome attitude and behavior saw the media quickly label them troublemakers. Temple directed a film entitled The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle that was constructed from existing Sex Pistols footage, short vignettes shot with members of the band, and cartoon reenactments that served to progress the film’s narrative. The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, however, was the brainchild of Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren. After original director Russ Meyer walked out on the production, Temple (who had been filming the band since their formation) was hired. He has referred to the film as a “vandalized documentary” that tried to “show the imagebuilding and hype that goes into the creation of a successful rock group”

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(Wise 2002: 86). As a document of the creation of the band, The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle is McLaren’s film. Thematically it deals with his marketing of the Sex Pistols and construction of their image, but more important is its use of McLaren as its central figure. The film is an excuse for him to explain his motives and to emphasize his dominance within the narrative of the Sex Pistols as the puppet master, whose manipulation of the four young men involved allowed him to gain profit and infamy. In a voice-over from the film, McLaren explains that his strategy revolved around: four kids. Make sure they hate each other. Make sure they can’t play . . . I called them the Sex Pistols. With the line-up complete we immediately set about putting our plan into effect: to swindle our way to the top of the rock ’n’ roll industry. It was a plan that, within two years, was to bring us close to a million pounds. It brought only McLaren close to that amount. Pistols singer John Lydon has attested that he never saw any of the money promised in his contract. The power lay with McLaren. His film was financed, and his version of events made it into popular consciousness. The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle reduces the band to caricatures—selfmocking versions of themselves—given no chance to present their perspective and definitely no dignity. They remind the viewer more of monkeys jumping through hoops than of the passionate, aggressive young men they had been as the Sex Pistols. Steve Jones pretends to act, Paul Cook drives around in a convertible, Sid Vicious slashes himself up with a broken bottle, and Lydon, who had quit the band by that point, is conspicuously absent. Through the film, a narrative that privileges McLaren’s perspective on the integral elements of the Sex Pistols’ career became “evidence” for the popular history of the time. Temple’s collage-like approach to his subject matter ensures that an honest representation of events is impossible and irrelevant. The live-action vignettes provide comedic respite from the narrative, serving only to clutter and confuse the dominant imagery of the band. The most (in)famous scene in the film depicts this confusion: bass player and token junkie Sid Vicious’ thrash-cabaret rendition of the song “My Way” (1953), popularized by Frank Sinatra, during which Vicious pulls a pistol from his tuxedo and opens fire on his audience. The appropriation of Sinatra’s song and its message is important in understanding the ways in which popular culture is able to speak to itself; to double back on itself in another context by using its past to articulate its contemporary preoccupations. Sinatra represents a distant era in the history of popular song and musical politics. His comments on rock music, in particular the Beatles,

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provide an insight into the kind of political paradigm that he and his generation represented: I rued the day the Beatles were unfortunately born into this world. They are, in my mind, responsible for most of the degeneration that has happened, not only musically, but in the sense of youth orientation politically, too. They are the people who first made it publicly acceptable to spit in the eye of authority. (quoted in Woodward 2000: 2) For many of Sinatra’s generation who were subject to and took active roles in the reconstruction of the West after World War II, the shifts in cultural consciousness that rock ’n’ roll was a part of were an abomination, a degenerative process that cheapened and shamed pop. The Sex Pistols and others around them exploited this paradigm for their own purposes. The punk ethic was tied politically to an antagonism and outrage directed toward authority, toward the sources of power that had served only to alienate and repress.1 It was “[p]unk’s gutter snipe rhetoric” and “its obsession with class and relevance . . . expressly designed to undercut the intellectual posturing of the previous generation of rock musicians” that was seen as troubling (Hebdige 1979: 63). The Beatles had preferred a revolution of the mind, but the punk generation had seen this achieve nothing. Thus, a more aggressive and decidedly working-class approach was founded. Faced with mass unemployment, a garbage collection strike, and the bleak social landscape of the welfare state, urban British youth created punk. George Lipsitz argues: People resisting domination can only fight in the arenas open to them; they often find themselves forced to create images of themselves that interrupt, invert or at least answer the ways in which they are defined by those in power. (1994: 20) Punk harnessed the negative perspective of youth culture held by those in power and redirected its aimless and destructive energy toward a vibrant and assertive political rhetoric. It used irony and sarcasm, often proving most powerful when it was reinterpreting or ridiculing other facets of culture. A prime example of this is the stylistic reversal of the glam aesthetic, whereby makeup, glitter, and a willfully playful, if removed, disposition were replaced with pins and dog collars, nihilism, and an attitude of downright snottiness. Vicious’ cover of “My Way” captured the antagonism that the constituents of punk felt toward authority. Those who had resisted

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before had failed, and it was this failure and the recession of resistance into middle-class mediocrity that sparked punk’s violent narcissism. All of those slaughtered by Sid are middle-aged, middle-class sophisticates dressed for an evening of cabaret. The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle was Malcolm McLaren’s ultimate Sex Pistols fantasy: a declaration of punk as the definitive capitalist farce, a story about getting away with ripping off the system. As such, it serves both to exalt the Pistols as a force that was unstoppable because of their sheer energy and to ridicule them as puppets manipulated by McLaren, whose grand scheme was the ultimate indulgence.2 Although it provided the Sex Pistols with a platform of notoriety from which to perform in the public eye, this reputation for exploitation and sleaze quickly became old and was outdated by the time The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle finally emerged. By the time Temple’s film was released, the Sex Pistols were defunct and Sid Vicious was dead. The punk movement was a revelation to many people at a time when the British working class was angry and disillusioned. It is no surprise that it was eventually exploited and absorbed into popular consciousness. An exciting and innovative cultural movement becomes

Sid Vicious in his gutter-punk cabaret performance of “My Way” from The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle (1980). The Kobal Collection, Getty Images.

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visible within mainstream media usually owing to its supposedly resistant politics. It then becomes appropriated by corporate culture and is incessantly commodified until it is no longer resistant, if it ever was. The punk explosion moved effortlessly into the realm of commodity fetishism, and its prime innovators—the Sex Pistols—ended not with a bang but a whimper. The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle served as a bookend to the career of one of the most infamous and beloved innovators in British rock music. Whether it was a fitting final statement remained contested during ensuing years. As an energetic trawl through punk’s aesthetic of appropriation, the film captures the hype surrounding the movement as opposed to distilling its raw energy. It would appear that as financial dictator of the band, McLaren had had the last laugh. However, the Sex Pistols’ story was to be appropriated twice more on celluloid, including once more by Temple. In 2000 Temple directed The Filth and the Fury, a documentary that attempted to present a “definitive” version of the history of the Sex Pistols. Instead of a grandiose swindle, The Filth and the Fury endeavored to piece together a more authoritative Sex Pistols narrative.3 The film includes interviews with the band, and much of the footage used is either stock footage or that shot by Temple himself at the time, some of which also appears in The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle. In addition, various other remnants of popular British culture, from Sir Laurence Olivier to postwar television comics, are mined and meshed together to present an aestheticization of the Pistols’ politics and the atmosphere of England in the late 1970s. The second time around, Temple decided to do without McLaren’s blatant posturing. As a result, The Filth and the Fury is a leaner, self-proclaimingly more accurate appraisal of the Sex Pistols saga. On its release, The Filth and the Fury was seen to be righting a wrong that had been sitting uncomfortably within popular consciousness for two decades. Lydon elaborates: I had my doubts about Julien doing it and that was 98 percent why we had to have him. But, either way, he was there at the time. He actually did film us. You can’t dispute that, and if you’re going to talk about an accurate historical document, why waltz off with anybody else? (quoted in Male 2002: 90) In the sense of an accurate representation of a historical movement, The Filth and the Fury is a film with a purpose and a rougher texture. Temple’s earlier film becomes part of its narrative. Paul Cook makes the point that “[w]e were musicians. We didn’t want to make a film.” Lydon explains, “I knew that it was just trash. Rubbishing the whole point and purpose.”

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Temple’s latter text actually swallows up the former; it absorbs it as a link in the narrative chain of the Sex Pistols. McLaren himself is heard only in voice-over, accompanied visually by images of him wearing an inflatable rubber mask pilfered from The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle. He reiterates the point made in the earlier film by explaining the band as his work of art: I didn’t think if I could be a sculptor I necessarily needed clay. I suddenly thought “You can use people!” And it’s people that I used, like an artist—I manipulated. So, creating something called the Sex Pistols was my painting; my sculpture. This statement is immediately undercut by retorts from the band. Lydon insists, “You don’t create me. I am me. There is a difference.” Steve Jones states, “Everyone on the planet knows Malcolm’s full of shit. He’s convinced people now that he’s full of shit by all the shit he says.” The Filth and the Fury perpetuates a notion of authenticity that is not captured in The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle by allowing both arguments to be expressed. Ultimately, though, McLaren’s opinion is positioned within the narrative as a farce conveyed by his comical appearance onscreen and the way in which his statements are framed. This positioning exemplifies the negation of absolute truth in documentary filmmaking, making any claim to accuracy redundant. Although McLaren is presented onscreen spouting ridiculous statements from behind a latex mask, he is countered only by the opinions of Lydon and Jones, whose statements are offered with resentful spite and emphasized in the film’s editing through the insertion of stock footage that mirrors their arguments. Although authenticity may be difficult to cultivate theoretically, The Filth and the Fury conveys it aesthetically. By locating the Sex Pistols alongside other facets of British screen culture such as Laurence Olivier’s adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1948) and Richard III (1955), Temple is able to draw comparisons between the “character” of Johnny Rotten and more traditional tropes. Lydon is eager to point out the similarities between the persona he presented to the public and those from screen past such as Quasimodo or Olivier’s Richard III, commenting, “I always did view myself as one damn ugly fucker. I certainly weren’t no belle of the ball.” It was this dark sense of humor that united the Pistols politically with the longstanding British tradition of farce and absurdism. Lydon states: What England didn’t realize about the Sex Pistols is that we are Music Hall. There was always a sense of piss-take and fun to it. There’s a

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sense of comedy in the English, that even in your grimmest moment you laugh. This statement is framed within the film by visuals of the band, both static and moving, edited to the Pistols’ rendition of Jonathan Richman’s rock standard “Roadrunner” (1980), which is simultaneously intercut with a vocal sample of Laurence Olivier as Richard III speaking the words “deformed, unfinished” and vocal samples and images of numerous British comedians intercut to the rhythm of the music. With The Filth and the Fury, Temple employed the method of cultural reappropriation that had been integral to punk’s subcultural style and aestheticized it within the context of music video discourse. The film plays like a feature-length music video with its quick editing and medley of visual sources that includes pans over still images, snatches of television programs and commercials, and stock footage of the band of varying quality and format. The only pauses from this assault-like visual style are the interviews with the band members. All are seated in darkened rooms, silhouetted against windows in a way reminiscent of television interviews with victims or perpetrators of crime. This provides continuity by preserving the visages of the band so that we only ever see the Sex Pistols as they were in the late 1970s— as young men. The darkening of their images as older men reinforces the reserved and humble retrospective narration from each. On occasion, the outline of John Lydon’s spiky hair becomes visible as he rocks back and forth in his seat, but only clear, definitive images of the Sex Pistols as they existed and continue to exist within popular memory are presented. For many, 1977 is a vacuum—a space of transformation. In silhouetting the members of the Sex Pistols, Temple has ensured that 1977 remains frozen so that perspective can be added without cluttering the film’s imagery. It is through techniques such as this that film is capable of freezing time, of transporting not only the viewer but the moment being examined back to its crystalline inception, free from the weight of context or hindsight. Not being able to see Lydon as he breaks down and cries in the dark for the death of Sid is moving in its nakedness and simplicity. Stripped back to a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional person, Lydon’s sobs ring true emotionally. This somber moment of grief is The Filth and the Fury’s greatest rhythmic break from the reckless intensity that dominates the rest of the documentary. Temple has created a cinematic aesthetic that flows with the force of the punk politic. In borrowing images and quotes from other cultural texts, The Filth and the Fury incorporates punk’s tendency toward bricolage. Its pace and frenzy mirror the noise and obliteration of punk music itself.

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The film is driven, though, by its remarkable narrative. The rise and fall of the Sex Pistols is one of rock ’n’ roll’s greatest narratives, and it is recounted in The Filth and the Fury with passion, humor, and reverence. The punk explosion as a movement is treated with the veneration afforded any historical recounting of a political revolution. There is a genuine belief among the main protagonists and filmmaker that the Sex Pistols had a profound effect on British culture and the political trajectory of British youth in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The opening moral of the film, spoken by John Lydon, is: What you’ve seen in any documentary about any band before or since is how great and wonderful everything is. It’s not the truth of it: it’s hell, it’s hard—it’s horrible. It’s enjoyable to a small degree. But if you know what you’re doing it for you’ll tolerate all that, because the work at the end of the day is what matters: we managed to offend all the people we were fucking fed up with. It is this position that provides the film with its potency. In creating controversy and allowing themselves to be demonized, the Sex Pistols were able to liberate a generation and introduce the populace to a new mode of thinking and self-expression. Lydon explains, “People that had no selfrespect suddenly started to view themselves as beautiful in not being beautiful.” The Filth and the Fury follows the course of punk’s ascension and decline, from the excitement at something new, through the admonishment of the band and their politics, to the absorption of punk into the mainstream and its eventual death through corporatization and capitalist populism.4 The fact that punk itself became the subject, inspiration, and operational ideology of fashion, film, and popular culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s elucidates the movement of texts and tangible practices into abstract distillations. These impressions collaged by time and history are the products of popular memory. Temple furthermore carries a prevailing attitude that the process of popularization means creative and sociological death for the subcultural movement within which it occurs, as its constituents are no longer able to exist outside of and in resistance to capitalist and populist discourses. The Filth and the Fury exemplifies the dispossession and anger of youth and those involved in youth culture when the cultural movement from which they claim their identity is superseded by corporate interests. Rockumentaries present the “processes through which cultural identities are formed, both at personal and collective levels” by telling the stories that become snapshots, momentarily pausing the flux of identities to

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explore their relation to culture through their engagement with music (Connell and Gibson 2003: 117). The genre forges aesthetic communities through the identification with an individual or group as it is represented on film. The biopic—as a fictional cinematic recreation—also carries this purpose and has been used to recreate or represent an important life or period in the historical narratives that make up the popular musical landscape. The biopic differs in its execution by relying on the methods of traditional narrative fiction filmmaking and removing the subject from the straightforward manner in which the rockumentary can make claims and offer opinions. The biopic is also able to do what rockumentary does, but its aesthetic palette is encumbered by the restrictions of character, plot, and motivation. In The Filth and the Fury it is openly remarked that Sid Vicious was a junkie, but the biopic must convey the junkie lifestyle through dialogue, performance, character motivation, and production design. As Michael Atkinson notes, “Pop music, or more specifically rock ’n’ roll, is both an essentially cinematic beast and the frankest manifestation of life force that modern culture has ever produced—which may amount to the same thing” (1995: 24). The successful biopic is able to reify this life force, fueling the epic and mythic tendencies of rock music and its hypnotic reign over communities of aesthetic judgment as these tendencies exist within and move beyond youth culture. Alex Cox’s film Sid and Nancy, which deals with the doomed relationship between Sid Vicious (Gary Oldman) and Nancy Spungen (Chloe Webb), exemplifies the ambition of the biopic to distill legend and iconize myth. What removes Sid and Nancy from other love stories is the couple’s constant bickering and screaming. Few traditional signifiers of love and romance are utilized to convey the nature of the film’s subjects. If Cox’s film is to be believed, then Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen did not have a romantic relationship, arguably perpetuated by the cultural movement of which they were a part. In one scene during the film’s exposition, as members of the Bromley Contingent5 lie strewn on a nondescript floor, Nancy makes an advance toward Johnny (Andrew Schofield). He responds by berating her: “Fucking Americans—that’s all you ever think about—sex. None of us fuck, see. Sex is ugly. None of your free hippy love shit here.” Rejected, she then turns to Sid who echoes Johnny with “Sex is boring, ugly, hippy shit.” There are occasional moments of tenderness, but they are usually tainted by a stark realism, such as when the pair consummate their relationship after shooting up for the first time or when Sid calls Nancy on tour to tell her that he misses her and she explains to him that he will have

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to find someone else to sleep with. Cox finds in his subjects a tension between the squalid junkie chic that rode the coattails of punk and moments of sublime romanticism and inspiration. Surreal imagery punctuates the dour, oppressive mood in which Sid and Nancy revels. In the film’s exposition, Sid and Johnny vandalize a Rolls Royce among council flats as mounted guards pass them in the street. During riots following the Pistols’ 1977 jubilee performance on the Thames, Sid and Nancy walk arm in arm as police scuffle with rioting youths, impervious to the violence around them. In another scene Nancy flicks a cigarette butt onto the floor and watches, placing Sid’s arm around her, as their hotel room is engulfed in flames. This dreamlike stylization is the film’s aesthetic crutch. Cox has extracted moments from the lives of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen and filled them with a bizarre twisted fantasy, attempting to enhance the romanticism of their relationship, as he has stated that there was nothing romantic about the filth and sickness of their heroin addiction (Collis 2001: 35). During the final act this becomes the dominant thematic motif of the film. As the Sex Pistols self-destruct, Nancy and heroin become Sid’s only concerns. Much of the narrative during the latter part of the film is interspersed with scenes of the pair smacked up and bickering incoherently, falling asleep, or trundling around dirty New York City streets looking for drugs. Sid and Nancy does not explain the career of the Sex Pistols. As a filmic representation of a life, or two lives in this case, there is an emphasis on character development as opposed to the progression of a narrative or even the dissemination of fact. There is almost an assumption that the viewer is aware of the story and will recognize such moments in the film as the band’s infamous appearance on Today with Bill Grundy in 1976, the outbreak of violence at a Pistols concert during their 1978 American tour, and the filming of Sid’s version of “My Way.” These moments as cinematic signposts to a Pistols narrative are treated much like folklore and are appropriated by Cox in a whimsical, lyrical manner. During the sequence where Sid is attacked onstage, instead of continuing the show he is dragged into the crowd, disappearing amidst a sea of screaming, writhing bodies. The next scene has him being beaten by four concert-goers on a railway track. They release him only when McLaren intervenes, clasping his hands together in the shape of a pistol and shooting an imaginary bullet at them. Cox’s film mines not only the history of the band but their popular memory. The collective consciousness of the band’s fans resonates strongly as the emotional currency of fictionalized film. Although the film has been discounted

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by sources close to the band and is regarded with reservation by critics, its championing of style over content, of emotion over truth, provides a striking opposition to The Filth and the Fury’s Rotten-sanctioned sense of authority, however inaccurate it may be. Sid and Nancy’s supposed inaccuracy has dogged the film since its release, and its conclusion has been the source of some contention for Cox. After he is released from police custody for stabbing Nancy to death, Sid walks through an empty city lot. Reflective and resigned, he dances with three youths until a shiny yellow New York cab pulls up alongside them. Opening the door, Nancy invites him in. As an emotive synthesizer riff reverberates, they drive off into the sunset. Cox states: Pay no attention to the bullshit message of this film. The end of Sid and Nancy is a sell out. But we had become enamored of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. We wanted to give them a happy ending. The truth is though, that junkies die in pools of blood and vomit. That’s what they do. (quoted in Collis 2001: 35) In comparison to both The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle and The Filth and the Fury, Cox’s film is an elegiac and moody narrative. The aesthetic discourse of punk is not inherent in the film’s style; it is conjured and imitated in the performances and production design. This aesthetic replication is the fundamental purpose of the biopic: to approximate and recreate as well as inform. Death is a staple of such films.6 This may, as is the case with Sid and Nancy, result in the rejection of the biopic as inaccurate or emotionally biased, but it provides an emotional entry point for both fans and those unfamiliar with the subject. The romantic nature of death is celebrated through popular memory. It is this romanticism that the biopic uses as its primary structural and emotional concern, which itself comments on the volatile nature of attempting to render a history. The lives and untimely demises of popular cultural heroes are played out in much the same manner time and again for our worship and respect. The biopic, despite being steeped in the specificities of an artist, era, or musical genre is a cinematic archetype. The genius of the fragile or exceptional star immortalized through death is the prototypical rock ’n’ roll narrative, which has been used to tell the stories of those who are revered. Rockjournalist-turned-rock-star Marilyn Manson has stated: Jesus was the first rock star. The cross is the biggest, greatest piece of merchandise in history, bigger than any concert T-shirt. And Jesus

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was the first dead rock star. Like Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix, he became immortal by dying . . . It’s not just death that turns you into an icon. It’s how many people are watching when you die, and the way the camera can turn you into a martyr. (2003: 57) They die so that others may live through their brilliance: this is the mantra of the biopic.7 In an age when youth culture often feeds vicariously off the glory of celebrity, it is no surprise that the rock star biopic locates so much of its imagery in quasi-religious iconography and the expression of cultural engagement—the notion of transcendence that fans of rock music can never rid themselves of in spiritual or metaphysical terms. The biopic by its very definition may exist alongside the traditional literary biography as a historically based recreation of a life. Pop music biopics have been able to transcend the limitations of subjectivity foisted on the genre by presenting increasingly convincing recreations of specific eras. In terms of both production design and narrative through the representation of the cultural preoccupations and social fabric of a time, such texts are important cultural artifacts. Although this can lead to excess, often excess is required in retreading the hype and sensationalism of rock stars. Conceited, self-interested, and undoubtedly talented, their only natural state is that of a god, regardless of whether others truly believe. This outward pretension is the ambition of all biopics: to be a history lesson in why a certain cultural figure (such as a popular entertainer) is to be considered significant. The rock biopic celebrates the individual through the discursive language of the community and the cultural realms in which this language is spoken—popular memory. Hype is obligatory. It is expected. Cinematic indulgence in history raises similar issues, irrespective of structural execution. This chapter has reconciled the ways in which the rockumentary and the biopic attempt to rekindle our familiarity and engagement with the popular through indulgence in the grandiosity of rock and subtle and reserved critique of a life or a moment. Authenticity is as much a hurdle to be leapt as a fundamental element of historical discourse to be respected and obeyed. By means of the cinematic apparatus, popular music’s defining moments, its undeniable geniuses, and its mere casualties are told and retold. The future is unwritten because the past is constantly in flux. Whether in reference to Sid Vicious or the Sex Pistols as a band, a group of individuals, or a cultural phenomenon, and regardless of their political inconsistencies or structural disparities, all three Sex Pistols

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films remind us of this. This story, like a recurrent fable, is why we continue to watch.

Notes 1. For further readings on the political motivations for punk, see Jon Savage (2002), England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond, and “The great rock ’n’ roll swindle” (1988). 2. McLaren’s exploitation of other young musicians, and specifically Bow Wow Wow singer Annabella Lwin, is discussed in Sheila Whiteley’s Too Much Too Young: Popular Music, Age and Gender (2005). 3. Although the use of the word “authoritative” is obviously problematic, this is how The Filth and the Fury was marketed and publicized—as an accurate documentation of the band sanctioned by Lydon, Jones, and Cook through their involvement in it. 4. The same account of youth-culture-meets-commercial-culture can be found in Doug Pray’s Hype! (1996), a documentary about the grunge era, and John Dower’s Live Forever (2003), which looks at Britpop in the 1990s. 5. The Bromley Contingent was the name used collectively for the Sex Pistols and their friends and early followers because they came from the London suburb of Bromley. 6. The biopic is analyzed as a film genre by George Custen in Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (1992). Custen studies the form in terms of biographical film production, distribution, and exhibition under the constraints of censorship, libel law, producer proclivities, and casting. 7. For further readings on the relevance of death and the memory of the performer to the ritual of the biopic’s representation of the performer’s life, see Cynthia A. Hanson (1988), “The Hollywood musical biopic and the regressive performer.”

References Atkinson, Michael (1995), “Long black limousine: pop biopics,” in Jonathan Romney and Adrian Wootton (eds), Celluloid Jukebox: Popular Music and the Movies since the 50s. London: BFI Publishing, 20–31. Collis, Clark (2001), “Never mind the bollocks,” Uncut, 47: 34–37. Connell, John and Chris Gibson (2003), Soundtracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place. New York: Routledge. Custen, George F. (1992), Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Hanson, Cynthia A. (1988), “The Hollywood musical biopic and the regressive performer,” Wide Angle, 10 (2): 15–23.

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Hebdige, Dick (1979), Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. Lipsitz, George (1994), “We know what time it is: race, class and youth culture in the nineties,” in Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose (eds), Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture. New York: Routledge, 17–28. Male, John (2002), “Pist off,” Mojo, 103 (June): 88–94. Manson, Marilyn (2003), “Die young stay pretty,” Bang, 4 (July): 56–58. Romney, Jonathan (1995), “Access all areas: the real space of rock documentary,” in Jonathan Romney and Adrian Wootton (eds), Celluloid Jukebox: Popular Music and the Movies since the 50s. London: BFI Publishing, 82–92. Savage, Jon (1988), “The great rock ’n’ roll swindle,” in Paul Taylor (ed.), Impresario: Malcolm McLaren and the British New Wave. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 45–58. — (2002), England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond. London: St. Martin’s Press. Whiteley, Sheila (2005), Too Much Too Young: Popular Music, Age and Gender. London: Routledge. Wise, Damon (2002), “That’s for Bambi. WHAM! Right in the head,” Mojo, 103 (June): 80–86. Woodward, Frank (ed.) (2000), Rolling Stone: The Illustrated Portraits. San Francisco: Rolling Stone Press.

Filmography Filth and the Fury, The (2000), Dir. Julien Temple. Film Four. Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, The (1980), Dir. Julien Temple. Kendon Films. Hamlet (1948), Dir. Laurence Olivier. Two Cities Films Ltd. Hype! (1996), Dir. Doug Pray. Helvey-Pray Productions. Live Forever (2003), Dir. John Dower. Passion Pictures. Richard III (1955), Dir. Laurence Olivier. London Film Productions. Sid and Nancy (1986), Dir. Alex Cox. Initial Pictures. Today. Originally aired 1968. Thames Television.

Discography Anka, Paul, Claude François, Jacques Revaux and Gilles Thibault (1953), “My Way,” Sinatra! CEMA.

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Richman, Jonathan (1980), “Roadrunner,” The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle. Virgin. Sex Pistols, The (1977), Never Mind the Bollocks: Here’s the Sex Pistols. Warner Bros.

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10 The American Family (Film) in Retro: Nostalgia As Mode in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums Daniel Cross Turner

The word genius was whispered into my ear, the first thing I ever heard, while I was still mewling in my crib. So it never occurred to me that I wasn’t until middle age. (Welles quoted in Leaming 1985) The Royal Tenenbaums brings together two of the primary cultural forms for producing nostalgia in contemporary America: family and film. Directed by Wes Anderson and produced by Touchstone through American Empirical Pictures in 2001, The Royal Tenenbaums serves as a deadpan parody of the traditionally nostalgia-laden genre of the family film. Ironic reiteration is the order of the day in Anderson’s film,1 to such an extent that the movie can be read as a self-reflexive investigation of the values and limits of parody as a cultural mode. The film’s explorations of parodic substitutions dovetail neatly with its concern over the apparent depthlessness of both film and family as structuring agents of nostalgia. Under Anderson’s direction, the family appears in danger of becoming, perhaps not unlike the filmic medium itself, a coreless structure of feeling, one that is part and parcel of the current understanding of nostalgia as less an emotional than an economic mode. Anderson’s dark comedy depicts the three adult children of what was once touted as a “family of geniuses” as they return home to escape the

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subsequent failures of their present lives. In going back home to their family of origin, these characters invoke nostalgia in its etymological sense as a form of homesickness (nostos = “return home” and algia = “a painful condition”).2 Yet their longing for a nostalgic repetition of the past is purely pro forma, because the past they seek to relive seems a particularly empty one. Their desire to return appears in excess of the facts: it is a family in theory only, not in practice. It has been marked by dysfunction almost from day one, including an absentee patriarch and incestuous desire between brother and sister—or, at least, adopted sister. By keeping the family structure together in name alone, the film reflects and critiques a contemporary vision of nostalgia as a surface-level construction of the past that no longer bears any necessary relation to a longing for recovery. This view parallels Susan Stewart’s account of nostalgia as “the repetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetition and denies the repetition’s capacity to form identity” (1984: 23). She further elaborates the nature of an increasingly abstract version of nostalgia: Nostalgia is a sadness without an object, a sadness which creates a longing that of necessity is inauthentic because it does not take part in lived experience. Rather, it remains behind and before that experience. Nostalgia, like any form of narrative, is always ideological: the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack. (Stewart 1984: 23) The Royal Tenenbaums’ presentation of souvenirs or fragments of the past shows a similar vision of narrative inefficacy. In an interview, Anderson reveals the film’s undercutting of the traditional momentum of narrative causality, noting that “[n]ot until the end of the first reel is there an event in the story, there’s just setup” (quoted in Smith and Jones 2001: 29). Yet the film goes beyond a deconstructive paean to narrative nontranscendence to take on aspects of Stewart’s understanding of nostalgia as a “social disease” (1984: 23). Its disavowal of the Romantic/modernist ethos that defines “genius” as a category of transcendence is cloaked—quite literally in the throwback costumes of its primary characters—in economic terms. The artist as seer of ultimate reality is exhausted of meaning, and “genius” is exposed as relational, not innate, a socially prescribed value. The Tenenbaum children, whose genius label is conferred by, of all people, their own mother in her book Family of Geniuses, seem to be nostalgic for the process of nostalgia itself—a metanostalgic movement that parallels yet parodies consumer

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capitalism’s increasing abstraction of value. Indeed, the film shows a coy awareness of the postfordist traffic in inauthentic mementos of false and ephemeral histories. It is the past as pastiche. The Royal Tenenbaums therefore speaks tellingly to the current theorization of nostalgia as a commodified style. Following Fredric Jameson’s sense that a vacuous nostalgia marks the contemporary American sellscape, Paul Grainge argues that “the loss of temporality in our present has . . . caused new attachments to instant impact over continuity. There is a fixation on images and appearance as temporal depth is replaced by spatial surface” (2002: 31). Grainge draws a distinction between “mood” nostalgia and “mode” nostalgia. Whereas nostalgia as mood is centered on longing for a deep-structured past, a grounding response to forms of cultural discontinuity, nostalgia as mode converts the past into a consumable image, one that flattens out memory into a random sequence of metonymic adjacencies. Under the sign of mode nostalgia, the past becomes hollow at its core; it merely evokes a sleek and fashionable “pastness” for public consumption. In Grainge’s somewhat hyperbolic terms, it reflects a “world of media image, temporal breakdown, and cultural amnesia,” and our “conception of the past becomes spatial, instant, depthless” (ibid. 27, 31). For nostalgia as mode: the central issue is not how the past is made to relate to the present. Rather, the nostalgia mode questions the ability to apprehend the past at all in a postmodern culture distinguished by the profound waning of history . . . When authenticity and time have themselves become victims of postmodern speed, space, and simulacra, forms of stylized nostalgia have been framed in relation to an incumbent memory crisis. (ibid. 21)3 This vision of nostalgia is thematized in the retro clothing worn by each of the primary characters as these fashionable repetitions revel in glossy images of a vintage pastness. Each of the adult children of the Tenenbaum family dresses in the uniform of the time of his or her greatest success. Walking fashion-plates of dead styles, they wear their nostalgia for 1980s Americana plainly on their sleeves: Margot Tenenbaum (Gwyneth Paltrow) in her brightly colored, striped Lacoste dresses and loafers; Richie Tenenbaum (Luke Wilson) in his Bjorn Borg-like tennis outfit with matching headband; and Chas Tenenbaum (Ben Stiller) in his red Adidas work-out suit. Although they were once filled with all the promise that the genius tag can bring—Margot was a child prodigy playwright, Richie an international

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tennis star, and Chas a “preternatural” businessman—they have suffered a series of reversals, the first coming with the news that Royal, the family patriarch (Gene Hackman), “maybe . . . wasn’t as true to [his wife Etheline (Anjelica Huston)] as [he] could’ve been.” The couple will live in a state of legal separation for the next twenty-two years. The children undergo a further set of physical and emotional traumas. Chas still carries the BB gun pellet lodged in his hand where his father shot him—on purpose—years before while playing war at the family’s summer house on Eagle Island, even though they were on the same team. Margot is adopted, a fact that Royal is always careful to point out when introducing her, and makes a trip to reconnect with her biological family, a quasi-Amish-looking bunch of farmers who live somewhere in the Heartland. In a bizarre wood-chopping accident, she loses the tip of one of her fingers. Richie is deeply in love with his adopted sister. As a boy, he is a fledgling painter, but his work never progresses because, in a send-up of Freudian obsessive-compulsive repetition, young Margot is the subject for each and every one of his portraits. The day after Margot’s wedding to a well-known experimental neurologist named Dr. Raleigh St. Clair (Bill Murray), Richie experiences a center-court meltdown in the finals of the U.S. Nationals. The incest motif warns against adopting an ingrown relation to the past, thereby satirizing the sentimental excesses of mood nostalgia, especially by keeping it all in the family. Once stripped of erotic implications, Margot and Richie’s relationship becomes a perfect figure for the potential incestuousness of the nostalgic drive. From the nostalgic view, incest is not unnatural as family members are those to whom we are most attached, and our intrafamilial relationships, typically in terms of both time and intensity, are the ones most “naturalized.” When Richie later confesses his love for Margot to his father, Royal replies with a momentarily sincere concern, saying that it is “probably illegal” or at the very least “still frowned upon.” Moments later, however, he gives his blessing to the love affair because Margot is “a great-looking girl, and she’s smart as a whip” and, more significantly, “Maybe it works. Why not? Hell, you love each other, and nobody knows what’s going to happen, so—.” Nobody knows what is going to happen because, under the film’s mode-nostalgic vision, nobody knows what has happened. The amnesiac past can be reinvented in an endless cycle of revisionist family history, and lies as open as the future. Even as the mock traumas of the Tenenbaum children are playfully converted into a brief montage of glossy, deadpanned vignettes, the deeper meaning of the film is to unveil the void on which our illusions of past and

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Commodifying nostalgia: The ensemble cast/family of The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). The Kobal Collection, Getty Images.

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identity rest. The movie plays on the broken edges of the family, generating a sequence of non sequiturs, tautological blanks, and false paradoxes on levels of both narrative and dialogue. These jumbled redundancies speak to a cultural condition of amnesia: the characters seem to be empty shells, idiots savants, walking models of mode nostalgia. No character illustrates this more fully than Royal Tenenbaum himself. When he finds out that Henry Sherman (Danny Glover), Etheline’s accountant, has proposed marriage to her, he decides, after more than two decades of absence and neglect, to reinvoke his patriarchal privilege and start giving a damn about his family. He has a considerable amount riding on it, as he puts it, both “financially and personally.” Royal has run out of money and has been evicted from his residence in a luxury suite at the Lindbergh Palace Hotel. He concocts a false history, convincing his family to let him move back into the homeplace on Archer Avenue because he is dying of stomach cancer. After six days back with his family, he is exposed as a fraud—once again— and is forced to leave the home. He gives a vintage Gene Hackman set speech: “Look. I know I’m the bad guy on this one, but I just want to say that the last six days have been the best six days of, probably, my whole life.” As the narrative voice-over informs us, it is only after making this statement that “Royal realized that it was true.” Drained of temporality, his depthless nostalgia comes all out of sequence. Anderson wanted Hackman for the role because he “plays every scene absolutely realistic and tries to make it as genuine as can be” (2001). Hackman’s role as Royal Tenenbaum showcases what Grainge calls “random intensities,” disconnected spectacles of feeling, the haphazard and ephemeral quality of which turns moments of apparent authenticity into self-parodies (2002: 31). When Etheline asks Royal point-blank, “What was the point?” he responds with a cliché of nostalgic conservatism: “I thought maybe I could win you back. Or, anyway, I thought I could get rid of Henry and keep things status quo.” When she reminds him that they “hadn’t spoken in seven years,” he admits a financial motive: “I know. Plus, I was broke, and I got kicked out of my hotel.” The personal is supplanted by the financial as mode nostalgia overtakes mood nostalgia. The only genuine sentiment is the desire for nostalgic desire itself, the hollow longing to keep things status quo, and this comes as an afterthought. Not unlike Dudley, who suffers from Heinsbergen’s syndrome and is the subject of Raleigh St. Clair’s current study, Royal seems equally unable to “tell time.” The Royal Tenenbaums poses the underlying question: if nostalgia as a restorative cultural ethos is no longer operative, is parody of the nostalgic past enough to sustain us?

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Are the signs of genuineness compelling enough to be experienced as if they were real, even if we know they are not? In his review for The New York Times, A. O. Scott (2001) makes several excellent points about the film, yet he misses the point. He notes that the principal characters share a “melancholy oddness” and then gives an apt description of the picture’s “ensemble” vision of narrative and character: Mr. Anderson presents each of these characters—and several more— with the fastidious care of a collector arranging prize specimens on a shelf. He likes to shoot them alone in the middle of his wide, meticulously composed frames as if they were sitting for formal portraits. But his obsessive regard for their individuality, the care he takes to make sure we see their uniqueness, isolates them from each other. The Tenenbaum ensemble never achieves the adhesiveness and density—the buzzing, asymmetrical feeling of relatedness—that defines family life. This gallery of portraits, this array of handmade figurines lovingly placed in shoe box dioramas fails to coalesce into anything resembling drama. This leaves the actors, nearly all of whom do some splendid work, in a quandary . . . The actors are asked to convey real and complex human emotions, but the characters are paper dolls. (2001)4 Where Scott applies a faith in psychologically realistic characterization to critique The Royal Tenenbaums’ value, I contend that one of the film’s primary achievements lies in its very lack of achieving “the adhesiveness and density . . . that defines family life.” In the world within Anderson’s film—and arguably the world without as well—family is only an ensemble, a pastiche, abuzz with a lack of density and a depthlessness. Yet these characteristics are precisely what generate the film’s pathos. There is no effort at cohesion or believability, no attempt to appease the dictates of realist character that (presumably) would mimetically represent deep feelings. Instead, the film portrays “real and complex human emotions” only through “paper dolls,” exposing the contemporary dread that love and memory and family are indeed paper-thin, little more than the ephemeral modes of a whirring simulacrum culture where all that once was solid melts into air. The film even contains a wry metacommentary on this very idea. After viewing one of Margot’s childhood plays that stars the three children wearing jungle animal costumes, Royal, playing the critic’s part, declares, “It didn’t seem believable to me.” When Chas then asks his father’s opinion of the

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characters, the patriarch retorts, “What characters? It was just a bunch of little kids dressed in animal costumes.” It is worth noting, moreover, that cinema effectively converts human beings into the mechanically projected equivalent of Scott’s “paper dolls.” In cinema, people become reified as objects flattened out on the screen, performing the same actions over and over again no matter how many times we run the film. The Royal Tenenbaums seems highly and perhaps even painfully aware of this cinematic double-bind, questioning whether the illusion of depth, if reiterated persistently enough, can engender something like an essential core of feeling. Can mechanically reproduced sounds and visions produce living feelings, and can a miscellany of disconnected yet sequenced images effect an epiphany?5 In the created world of The Royal Tenenbaums, impressions of nostalgia come ex post facto. Anderson himself notes his technique of shifting focus just when emotions appear to be deepening: “I’ve had people tell me that I’m always cutting away right when it all hits” (quoted in Smith and Jones 2001: 29). Peter Travers aptly describes this process in his review for Rolling Stone: “That it works is due to director Wes Anderson, who has made something eccentric and hilarious that can suddenly—or maybe not for hours or even days later—choke you up with emotion” (2002). The mixed tone of the film might be summed up in Travers’ apropos oxymoronic praise for “the complex comic gravity of [Hackman’s] performance” and in his final assessment that “Anderson offers no phony uplift for the Tenenbaums or for audiences. But he does know how to take a sad song and make it better. In these troubled times, that’s a gift” (ibid.). At the core of Anderson’s film is the corelessness of both family and film itself. The obsessive artifice betrays the fictions under which our “normal” reality operates. In his interview with Film Comment, Anderson translates for the unconverted: With our movies, there’s been a pitch that they operate at, tonally— what is and is not acceptable as real. And it’s a tone that is not always immediately apparent. Some people get it immediately, and others don’t find it. It’s a conscious choice to make a reality for the characters to live in; the excitement is in building this whole world for them. (quoted in Smith and Jones 2001: 29) The question that The Royal Tenenbaums frames in all but words is: is there any there there? This pervasive ambiguity between the real and unreal is expressed in the film’s overriding sense of history-lessness, encapsulated not only in the

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amnesia-like condition of the primary characters but also in the setting. The film is careful to erase evidence of the monumentalist history of New York: familiar buildings and landmarks are renamed (the Public Library becomes the Public Archives; the Waldorf Astoria becomes the Lindbergh Palace Hotel) or blotted out altogether (in one scene, Pagoda [Kumar Pallana], the family servant, blocks the Statue of Liberty from the camera’s view, concealing perhaps the prime example of New York City iconography). The exchange of monumentalism for placelessness further reinforces the film’s understanding of what Grainge describes as the “profound waning of history” associated with nostalgia as mode (2002: 31). The traditional forms of cultural memory embodied in the New York cityscape have disappeared, or else lie concealed in plain view. Despite the persistent draining of historically dense sites of memory, contemporary history emerges through the family structure, as well as through the structure of the family film. The history in Anderson’s selfdescribed fable is perhaps best seen through a consideration of the function of nostalgia in relation to the film’s understanding of the conditions of film itself. As the contemporary nostalgic is trapped within a simulacrum culture, so the spectator is obliged to read the cinematic surface of screened images as depth. On a technical level, this metanostalgia is reflected in the artificial color timing, which is “extremely warm” with “lots of yellow and a little extra red,” the digitally induced tones of an auratic past (Anderson 2001). Furthermore, the film’s technique reinforces the flux and depthlessness by avoiding the use of a steady cam: the camera is almost constantly rolling or sliding. The subtle yet continuous disorientation produced by the constantly sliding camera is further emphasized by frequent instances of crossing the 180-degree line of action, by an absence of coverage shots, and by the fact that although the film was shot in widescreen, “everything in the film is vertical, so we were constantly having to move the camera up and down” (ibid.). Anderson often shoots a scene with one long sliding shot all the way through so that, as it pans across various characters and objects, it seems to run in sections. We are in the same shot, yet we see a “montage” happening at the same time, giving the impression that the temporal divisions of traditional montage have been flattened out. Throughout almost all of the film, an absent temporality is the state of things. An exception is Richie’s suicide scene which is heavily marked by blue tones, marking a notable departure from the film’s generally warm color grading. After cutting his wrists, Richie undergoes a montage of flashbacks that focus, naturally, on Margot. Anderson describes this sequence as “a kind of electrical thing” that makes a time-honored filmic analogy, from Buñuel to

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Hitchcock, between cinematic and bodily cuts, and is shot from one angle with a frenetic splicing of jump cuts (ibid.). There is at once a steady fixation with the past emblematized by the single camera angle and also a sense of mode nostalgia’s scattered, jump-cut time frame. The ethos of mode nostalgia apparent in Anderson’s cinematic technique is echoed by the film’s use of nondiegetic music. It presents an interrelated cultural formation for producing nostalgia on the mass scale and offers a brilliant parody within a parody. Scott’s review again finds fault with The Royal Tenenbaums for its uninventive treatment of background music: “One of the pleasures of [Anderson’s previous movie Rushmore] was its deft, relentless use of pop music. Here, the tracks by Nico, the Rolling Stones and other artists old and new place quotation marks around emotions rather than underlining them” (2001). Scott reads this as a weakness, yet he is looking for metaphoric meanings, not metonymic adjacencies, and so connects the music to the overly transparent world the film has made: “Like the songs and the reiterated portrait-style shots, the witty costumes and gorgeous interiors become suffocating, and the whole enterprise begins to feel more arch than artful, a gilded lily that spoils its perfection by insisting on it” (ibid.). In a way, Anderson concedes Scott’s point but suggests that artifice is one of the film’s primary themes, calling attention to the movie’s musical quotedness: “There’s a lot of artifice. The way the people dress, the way the rooms look, all that stuff. And there’s music and there are so many layers that are put on top of everything” (2001). The film purposely constructs a world of artifice, but one that is connected by “some of the things that were being drawn on”—that is, by those things that “we” (white, middleclass, and coming of age in the 1980s) shared growing up (ibid.). The music, as a “jukebox of bedsit melancholia” that arranges “glum little epiphanies,” does indeed put quotation marks around our emotions and memories, alluding to our social unconscious, the almost unrecognized strands of our collective nostalgic past (Romney 2002: 14). The soundtrack includes avant-garde yet corporately produced and distributed music by the likes of the Velvet Underground, Nico, The Clash, the Ramones, and Elliott Smith. Several of the songs, most notably the flat tones of Nico’s off-kilter cover of Jackson Browne’s wistful “These Days,” offer self-reflexive commentary on the very modes of nostalgia in which the film itself is trafficking, thus embodying metanostalgic structures of feeling. The point is that much of our existence is expressed between quotation marks; the film shows us how our memories are often already clichéd. The Royal Tenenbaums does not conceal the fact that any pangs of nostalgic

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longing generated by the film’s musical quotations are largely the result of common corporate training—conditioned habits of consumption and shared structures of purchasing, therefore owning, therefore experiencing, therefore remembering. The nondiegetic music functions under the auspices of mode nostalgia, exposing the linked cultural forms of buying and feeling, of attachment to patterns of production and exchange larger than the individual self yet subtly binding. The musical references evoke a vintage feel and symbolize another level of things we recognize as retro in the film, including the fashions, the old Sony Trinitron television set, the early 1980s U.S. Open tennis match, the rotary phones, the board games tucked away in the closet, even the Gypsy Cabs that appear throughout the film and that have been given a corporate brand to become more recognizable emblems of collective New York City nostalgia.6 The things taken as imitations, as commercialized fragments that can be used up and gotten rid of, in fact seem inextricable from our lives and our memories. Parody can invoke genuine emotion, and corporate production is a part of the individual’s experience and memory. The film itself, given a late December release date by Touchstone to help boost ticket sales and, equally important for an “auteurish” corporate film, to catch the eyes of Academy voters, testifies to the constructive, not simply constrictive, force of corporate branding. Although the movie’s box office haul was modest, it has received a respectable degree of critical acclaim; Anderson and Owen Wilson’s screenplay was nominated for an Oscar and the work garnered film of the year honors from Film Comment. On a further parodic and metacinematic level, the film hollows out belief in a commanding auteur director at the center of the project. The modernist conception of genius that so captivated film critics from the 1950s on is effectively a dead subject. To return to Grainge: Now that the modernist period of individual expression and originality has arguably passed, marking the death of the (creating) subject, superficial ensembles of past style have become a primary mode of cultural production. The nostalgia film exemplifies this. Using pastiche, nostalgia films imitate the spirit, style, dash, and design of previous times, crafting a product that, when it treats the past, offers little more than simulation and “fashion-plate image.” (2002: 31–32) In his “Introduction” to the screenplay for The Royal Tenenbaums, Peter Bogdanovich buys into the auteur vision wholesale, calling Anderson

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“a born picture-maker” whose “particular style . . . lies in the personality of the picture-maker” (2001: viii): When I once asked Howard Hawks which directors over the years he had liked best, he replied: “I liked almost anybody that made you realize who in the devil was making the picture . . . Because the director’s the storyteller and should have his own method of telling it.” With a Wes Anderson film, you know who in the devil made it, yet his style is as difficult to describe as only the best styles are, because they’re subtle. (ibid. ix) The film itself suggests otherwise. Anderson’s play within the dead spaces of auteur theory is suggested by the proliferation of authors—literal auteurs—in the film, as several of the main characters can claim at least one book to their credit. This multiplicity of authors betrays the diminishment of their status as creating subjects. Instead, they appear as salaried employees of the publishing industry. Indeed, Eli Cash (Owen Wilson), a childhood friend of the Tenenbaum siblings who is now a famous author as well as Margot’s lover, is a kind of fourth-rate Cormac McCarthy. A native New Yorker, Eli dresses absurdly in a cowboy hat and fringed leather Western wear and produces work that trades on nostalgia for the lost American frontier, which seems as shallow as it is profitable. He embodies the movie’s most obvious example of bad (albeit popular) authorship as his latest novel, Old Custer, concludes with a McCarthy-esque lyrical flourish, but Eli’s prose has been bruised a deep shade of purple: “The crickets and the rustbeetles scuttled among the nettles of the sagethicket. Vamanos, amigos, he whispered, and threw the busted leather flintcraw over the loose weave of the saddlecock. And they rode on in the friscalating dusklight.” The film even provides a shot of a “bona fide” auteur–director in the brief vision of Franklin Benedict, listed as one of Etheline’s illustrious suitors. Benedict is pictured on the sound stage of a big-budget, futuristic alien movie, and the cliché comes complete with monocle, megaphone, and safari jacket. Our glimpse of Benedict offers a knowing imitation of the spirit, style, dash, and design of previous times, ironically exposing this vision of the auteur as little more than simulation and fashion-plate image. This is nothing to believe in. Alongside this parodic pastiche of Benedict as the simulated model of the auteur, The Royal Tenenbaums incorporates a number of allusions to the styles of various “genius” directors (including Orson Welles, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Luis Buñuel, Louis Malle, and Jean-Pierre

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Melville), most of whom are associated with avant-garde filmmaking. Yet these visual reiterations of past styles are scattered, disjunct. In postmodern fashion, the film reflects an elusive allusiveness, for the references to received forms do not cohere into any overarching system of meaning. They represent associative shifts rather than more anchored correspondences because they merely come and go, emerge and disappear, marking the film as itself a knowing pastiche of past techniques. This idea is encapsulated not only in quoted pieces of visual style from past auteurist films (for example, the narrative voice-over and book chapter framing drawn from Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons [1942] or the film’s opening sequence, based on Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes [1948]) but also in actual quotes drawn almost at random from other films. As Royal watches Eli descend furtively from Margot’s bedroom window early one morning, he exclaims, “I know you, asshole!” This line alludes to Peter Weir’s Witness (1985), in which Harrison Ford’s character yells this phrase at a fleeing Danny Glover, who has just shot him. The fact that the quote is taken fully out of context is perfectly consonant with the overall sense of disjunction fostered by Anderson’s movie. This reference contains a further metonymic connection, as Danny Glover appears in both of these films, though there seems to be no deeper meaning beyond this surface-level, six-degrees-of-separation link. In a more jarring moment of borrowed dialogue, just before slitting his wrists, Richie quietly proclaims, “I’m going to kill myself tomorrow,” a line drawn from Malle’s Le Feu follet (1963). It is a line that manifests the film’s concern with non sequiturs, for this literally does not follow: Richie attempts suicide within seconds of this utterance. In its seeming misplacement and temporal discontinuity and its affront to cohesive narrative chronology, this snippet of dialogue signals that, in the world of Anderson’s film, time is out of joint. The film’s pattern of random allusions applies further turns of the screw to auteurist accounts of filmmaking—that the author’s creative genius produces the film’s spirit of meaning in a clear one-to-one correspondence—by suggesting that in place of a commanding director tightly controlling the method and the meaning of his masterpiece, what we get are empty repetitions of past styles, cut-and-pasted together in nearly haphazard fashion. The film betrays the suspicion that most expressions, visual and verbal, are already clichéd, used-up; striking rearrangement is now key. Nostalgia becomes the impulse to recognize glimpses of the past so that they may be identified, and then identified with. In an additional critique of the auteurist model of picture making, Anderson’s film allegorizes the means of its own production. Royal Tenenbaum,

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the man whose name serves as brand for this family firm of geniuses, fills the role of the bad auteur–director whose ego is his paramount concern and who elicits emotiveness from his supporting cast of talent in unpredictable spurts. At times he runs through scenes, betraying a sense of disproportionate and only momentarily directed action. His wardrobe, featuring a range of colorful ascots, often seems to have been borrowed from Franklin Benedict’s closet. He even tries to rescript his life’s narrative in his tombstone epitaph, which reads “Royal O’Reilly Tenenbaum (1932–2001) / Died tragically rescuing his family from the wreckage of a destroyed sinking battleship,” an ironic replication of another gravesite in Maddox Hill Cemetery, which reads: “Nicholas Lundy / Born August 24, 1889 / Died August 15, 1949 / Veteran of Two Wars / Father of Nine Children / Drowned in the Caspian Sea.” As Royal and Richie stand before Lundy’s marker in the earlier cemetery scene, Royal, with his trademark (seemingly) deep conviction, remarks: “Hell of a damn grave. I wish it were mine.” This previous moment of apparent monumentalist history—of a past that, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s terms, is always more epic and meaningful than the shabby and inarticulate experience of the present7—sets us up for the explicitly faux grandeur of Royal’s own headstone, which can only be read in a parodic light. If nostalgia results from the final funeral sequence, monumentalist history will not be the way. Nostalgic feeling comes, instead, only through the aftermath of the dark parody of what life could have been. Anything resembling genuine nostalgia is produced through an ironic reflection on missing memories, the sorrow of an unfulfilled life that nevertheless brings a fullness in view because everyone is there, even as Van Morrison’s “Everyone” plays in the background. This puts another set of quotation marks around the typical pathos suggested by a closing funeral scene. As Mark Twain quipped, proximity breeds contempt . . . and children. At the close of Anderson’s film, the children are here—that much can be said. The film’s finale offers the nostalgic hope that adjacency might bring about something less than contempt and something more than indifference, suggesting to us that nostalgia is bred, if at all, somewhere in between. In the end, Royal’s self-consciously inauthentic effort to create a nostalgic monument to the fallen modernist hero—the vividly creating subject brimming with individual expression and originality—falls flat. The funeral is an exercise in parody, and the film seems more inclined to mock than to mourn the inauthenticity of nostalgic repetitions, recording the death of the modernist genius auteur. This parody of auteurism is also suggested in the bizarre paintings by contemporary Mexican artist Miguel Calderón that adorn two of the walls

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of Eli’s home. “Bad Route” (1998), which Anderson himself owns, depicts five men sitting on small dirt bikes in a clearing dotted with pine trees. Shirtless and wearing blue jeans, with their faces covered in tribal masks and spiky-haired wigs on their heads, the men raise their arms in absurd yet menacing scary-monster poses. “Attack” (1998) shows four of the same weird gang members holding down a shirtless, blue-jean-wearing male victim, pulling one of his legs, grabbing his hair, and seemingly prepared to tickle him. Anderson notes that the paintings are “really funny, but there’s this really strange violence in them” (2001). Indeed, the source of the paintings creates an even darker turn. Calderón was inspired by watching a Mexican television program that reenacted mysterious and violent crimes, including the story of five brothers who would attack bike-riders in the woods, tying up the husband and putting a plastic bag over his head while they assaulted the wife. Calderón found the story so disturbing that he could not sleep for several nights and finally decided to convert the experience into art. He initially staged the scenes with the help of some friends and photographed them, but he felt that the works were too realistic and consequently too funny in photographic form; they needed to be less mimetic and more artful to portray the brutality embedded in the situations’ absurdity. Calderón felt his own painterly style was too distinguished, and so he contracted some commercial painters to complete the works. Like Anderson’s own film, the paintings contain an odd intermixing of highbrow and pop art, as “the people [Calderón] had paint the pictures are the kind of guys who paint on black velvet. They’re like Elvis painters. They’re not Vermeers” (ibid.). The history of real violence lurking behind the scenes blackens the campness of the paintings, suturing together the comic and the grotesque in a way that parallels the series of mock traumas that mar the pasts of the Tenenbaum children. The paintings further undermine an auteurist idea of the genius artist, making aesthetic generation an explicitly collective affair. Calderón himself noted in response to those who find “this ‘handsoff ’ approach to art making somewhat suspect”: “People don’t understand . . . The funny thing is, it’s absolutely like filmmaking” (quoted in Chang 2001: 15). The artist elaborates on the analogous corporate practice of painting and film by arguing that his paintings are, like photographic art, and by extension film, mechanically generated, thus destabilizing clear-cut ontological boundaries between these art forms: “When you take a photo, you don’t have to be aware of the mechanical, photographic process. It’s not about taking the picture. It’s about getting the image. Why should it be any different for a painting?” (ibid.). Like Nico’s parodic re-recordings

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of Browne’s liltingly nostalgic songs, Calderón’s reproduction paintings contain a supramimetic quality and serve as another measure of the film’s mise en abîme of parody within parody. While Calderón’s paintings reiterate the film’s challenge to auratic, auteurist art, ultimately it is Etheline who plays the part of the efficient corporate director who can successfully coordinate a large-scale project. She is the well-adjusted manager who competently directs the talent. The lone character who dresses in up-to-date clothing, she is an archeologist by trade who understands the need for proper division and balance between present and past. Her job is to preserve the past, but from a detached, objective vantage. Through this figure of the corporately responsible, managerial director, The Royal Tenenbaums exhibits the creative—not merely the repressive—power of the corporation as a superseding mode of structuring nostalgia on a mass scale. In effect, it extends André Bazin’s famous advice, given in 1957, that one should acknowledge the most admirable quality of American cinema, “the genius of the system” (1968: 154). If the concept of genius continues to hold any sway in the world of the contemporary nostalgia film, Anderson tells us, it should be considered as a corporate affair, a function of systematic form. This is not selling out but trading up. Like Richie’s pet falcon Mordecai, we too have a homing instinct: we have been conditioned to return to nostalgia films, even if we know we can never go home again.

Notes 1. As I will argue that Anderson’s film critiques the auteurist explanation of filmmaking, it is not accurate to give him sole ownership of the creative impulse of the project. For the sake of convenience, I will invoke “Wes Anderson” as the equivalent of a corporate brand for the movie, thereby institutionalizing the style of the film. Doing so seems consonant with The Royal Tenenbaums’ self-reflexive emphasis on modes of collective memory as well as creation. 2. For more on the historical origins of nostalgia, see Jean Starobinski’s foundational essay “The idea of nostalgia” (1966) and Fred Davis’ exhaustive sociological account Yearning for Yesterday (1979). 3. In his interview with Film Comment, Anderson provides the following explanation for the origins of The Royal Tenenbaums, a description that seems to parallel Grainge’s understanding of contemporary American society as an endless pastiche of haphazard associations, which in Anderson’s case are bound together only by the sensibilities of a white, upper-middle-class aesthete: Owen [Wilson] and I had been talking about doing a western for a while. And then I started coming to New York more and more, and had this idea that I was going to

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do a New York movie with Luke [Wilson]. I was thinking of it in black and white and I knew there would be this Nico song in it, “These Days.” And then I had that Ravel String Quartet in F Major, and a sequence to go with it when we see each of the characters’ names, and they’re all looking into the camera. One of the inspirations was Louis Malle’s Le Feu follet, which features that same Erik Satie music that plays in Owen’s character’s house. And I was going to the U.S. Open a lot and I had this thing with Luke’s meltdown on the tennis court, but I didn’t know where that was going. Another thing was that I wanted to do this family history thing, inspired by The Magnificent Ambersons. And I wrote that, just by itself, not knowing anything was coming next. At first I wrote it with nobody in it, it was just a tour of the house, and then the kids became a part of it and it started to take shape. (quoted in Smith and Jones 2001: 28) 4. In her review for Sight and Sound, Charlotte O’Sullivan similarly complains about what she considers the movie’s failed continuity of character and narrative, criticizing its lack of “a central character” and its splintered storylines (2002: 60). 5. Kent Jones answers this question in the affirmative in his review of The Royal Tenenbaums: “The word epiphany gets thrown around a lot, but it should be reserved for moments like . . . Margot’s slow-motion approach to Richie to the tune of Nico’s evanescent ‘These Days,’” which reveals “both the current of feeling between Margot and Richie and the absurdity of their damaged personae as well” (2001: 27). He concludes his discussion of the film’s broken string of momentary epiphanies with a glowing declaration of the cumulative force of these revelatory flashes of feeling: “I’ve never seen moments like these in any other movie” (ibid.). Jonathan Romney also praises the movie’s “idiosyncratic comic temperament—an acerbic melancholy tinged with nostalgia and a faintly psychedelic zaniness” (2002: 13). 6. Anderson explains that “Gypsy Cabs” is not an official brand name but simply “what everybody calls uptown cabs—we just institutionalize it” (2001). 7. In “On the uses and disadvantages of history for life,” Nietzsche asserts that the safeguarders of monumental history believe “that the great moments in the struggle of the human individual constitute a chain” and “that the summit of such a long-ago moment shall be for me still living, bright and great—that is the fundamental idea of the faith in humanity which finds expression in the demand for a monumental history” (1983 [1874]: 68). The visions of past grandeur create a powerful yet misguided nostalgia for an epic past as against the always diminished present. Yet these epic moments—alas—are hopelessly past, as our present lives are paltry in themselves.

References Anderson, Wes (2001), “Director’s commentary,” The Royal Tenenbaums. Criterion Collection DVD/Touchstone Home Videos. Bazin, André (1968), “La politique des auteurs,” in Peter Graham (ed.), The New Wave: Critical Landmarks. New York: Doubleday, 137–55.

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Bogdanovich, Peter (2001), “Introduction,” in The Royal Tenenbaums: The Screenplay. New York: Faber and Faber, vii–ix. Chang, Chris (2001), “On Miguel Calderón’s Bad Route,” Film Comment, 37 (6): 15. Davis, Fred (1979), Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: The Free Press. Grainge, Paul (2002), Monochrome Memories: Nostalgia and Style in Retro America. Westport, CT: Praeger. Jones, Kent (2001), “Family romance,” Film Comment, 37 (6): 24–27. Leaming, Barbara (1985), Orson Welles: A Biography. New York: Viking. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1983 [1874]), Untimely Meditations. New York: Cambridge University Press. O’Sullivan, Charlotte (2002), “Review of The Royal Tenenbaums,” Sight and Sound, 12 (4): 59–60. Romney, Jonathan (2002), “Family album,” Sight and Sound, 12 (3): 12–15. Scott, A. O. (2001), “Brought up to be prodigies, three siblings share a melancholy oddness,” The New York Times, October 5, E.1:14. http:// query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9504E5DD163CF936A 35753C1A9679C8B63 Smith, Gavin and Kent Jones (2001), “At home with the royal family,” Film Comment, 37 (6): 28–29. Starobinski, Jean (1966), “The idea of nostalgia,” Diogenes, 54: 81–103. Stewart, Susan (1984), On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Travers, Peter (2002), “Review of The Royal Tenenbaums,” Rolling Stone, December 27–January 3, 885/886: 138. http://www.rollingstone.com/ reviews/movie/5947649/review/5947650/the_royal_tenenbaums

Filmography Feu follet, Le (1963), Dir. Louis Malle. Arco Films. Magnificent Ambersons, The (1942), Dir. Orson Welles. Mercury Productions. Red Shoes, The (1948), Dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The Archers. Royal Tenenbaums, The (2001), Dir. Wes Anderson. Touchstone Pictures. Witness (1985), Dir. Peter Weir. Paramount Pictures.

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11 Manifesting a Mutant Past in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Michael Pigott

I put down the cup and examine my own mind. It alone can discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, which it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day. (Proust 2002 [1913]: 52) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) succeeds in doing something that is rare in cinema: it renders memory and dream as concrete pieces of the film world. Few films have so fully, and enthusiastically, woven memory into both their narrative and their visual fabric. Of the many that have attempted to visualize for us the memories that torment and the dreams that betray their subjects, the majority do so in a way that maintains a distance between the past and the present, and the real and unreal. The flashback or dream sequence is almost always secondary and ancillary to the main narrative thread that takes place in the “real world” of the film.1 What happens here is always of the past, always the reason why or the motive for. The possible, what could happen, is inevitably sharpened down to a point, made benign by the fact that even in the world of the film, this is old news that is witnessed. The “flashbacks,” if we can call them such, of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind stand in opposition to the unalterable and distant “visions of

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the past” that we are given in the traditional flashback. The memory erasure operation at the center of the film comprises a narrative device capable both of permitting entry into the unrefined memory of the character Joel (Jim Carrey) and of setting in train a mechanism by which his memory will become the site of the most significant action, in turn making the protagonist’s past, and his relationship with that past, the dramatic core of the film. In the film, Joel discovers that his now-estranged girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet) has paid a company called Lacuna Inc. to have her memories of their relationship removed. Joel seeks out the company and decides also to have the procedure to remove all his memories of Clementine. The majority of the movie takes place within Joel’s mind (though mindscape might be a more appropriate term), as the Lacuna Inc. technicians (whose stories form the subplot of the film) perform the procedure on a sleeping Joel in his own apartment. Critically, the fragments of Joel’s memory are represented as plastic and transformable—Joel’s flight through them renders the memories simultaneously images of the past and present. Director Michel Gondry produces Joel’s psychic world as one that is very much present yet also as a mutable, fantastic world ruled by qualities of the remembered and the imagined that rejects the “rules” of memory as defined by the traditional filmic flashback. In film the most literal representation of memory is the flashback. This device has been in use in literature for hundreds of years,2 and in cinema since the very early stages of its development. D. W. Griffith is often cited as seminally incorporating it into several of his earlier short works, although arguments have been made for its implementation in a far greater number of early films than is commonly acknowledged (Turim 1989: 25). Of specific interest in this chapter is the conception of time coded into the traditional, short flashback that punctuates a film, generally arising from the intrusion of a character’s memory into the present of the film world, rather than films that use the flashback as a framing device in the way that Citizen Kane (1941), for instance, does. The flashback in this case is usually attached to a rememberer (the character whose past we flash back to) who is often also the protagonist and is located within another narrative thread identifiable as the “present.” The objective of this kind of flashback is invariably to provide background information; the flashback plays an integral role in the development of the plot and furnishes the viewer with necessary information about causes, motives, and histories. The flashback assumes and conveys an unchangeable past. The independent flashback, one that is not tied to the memory of a character, has a

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claim to such certainty. The memory-flashback, however, can be allowed no such claim: it relays one character’s interpretation of events and must always be the subject of suspicion. Yet most films offer it as an accurate window on the past, as if people remembered the past in the same way that they perceive the present. There is also the tacit assumption that a person’s memories exist as distant, immutable objects of consciousness, incapable of gaining enough force to impact on the diegetic film world in any other way than through the actions of their subject. Flashbacks remain predominantly “visions of the past,” serving only to explain the actions of the present.

The Structure of Memory Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (hereafter referred to as Eternal Sunshine) does not adhere to a linear chronological order or a simple variation on this structure such as: beginning the film with the story’s end (as in Sunset Boulevard, 1950), or shuffling the sequence of events (as in Reservoir Dogs, 1992, or 21 Grams, 2003), or interpolating several flashback sequences. Many films employ the flashback as a revelatory device, illuminating the path that brought the characters to a point already witnessed or providing a piece of key information at the film’s climax. Eternal Sunshine is structured by memory in two distinct ways, one of which does take the form of a progressive revelation yet at the same time refuses to be reduced to a simple flashback or event-shuffling system of the kind mentioned earlier. It describes the breakdown of the relationship between Joel and Clementine and is told through Joel’s memories as they are deleted from his brain. The motivation is gradually revealed as he travels first through the bad memories (the reason for the erasure process) and then deeper into the good memories, prompting him to change his mind and want to halt the process before all trace of Clem is gone. The introductory sequence of Eternal Sunshine initially appears as the beginning of a story, although we eventually find out that it comes much later in the actual sequence of events, whereas the beginning of a film like Amores Perros (2000) unashamedly presents itself as the aftermath of something dramatic, leaving the audience wondering what could have happened to place the characters in this situation (a question to which a large portion of the remainder of the film is an answer). Eternal Sunshine, however, is not so straightforward. The opening does not present itself explicitly as a question but meets instead the viewer’s expectations of a conventional story beginning. The introductory section is only later revealed to be a question in the mode of the Amores Perros opening.

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Joel wakes in his apartment and then leaves for work. On the trainstation platform he spontaneously decides to skip work and take the train to Montauk instead, where he meets Clementine, apparently for the first time. They behave as strangers as they pass each other on the beach and again on the platform as they wait for the train back. Once on the train again, Clem initiates conversation and an awkward courtship commences. The beginning as experienced by the viewer of Eternal Sunshine is actually the re-beginning of Joel and Clem’s relationship, which only becomes apparent later in the film. The audience is purposely placed in a similar position to that of Joel and Clem—experiencing this train conversation as the first, tentative step of a relationship as two strangers find they are attracted to each other. This sequence points to a specific spectrum of possibility, producing the expectation that the film will tell the tale of the burgeoning love affair. However, those expectations are quickly replaced by confusion. The introductory sequence lasts roughly twenty minutes, following the pair back to Clem’s apartment and on to the following night’s trip to the frozen Charles River. Only then do the opening credits roll over the seemingly unconnected image of an extremely distraught Joel driving in his car. This breaks the action neatly into pre- and post-credits sections, creating a narrative rift that later proves to have also been a temporal rift. This is not immediately clear on first viewing. If anything, the temptation might be to guess at a temporal leap forward in time, to assume that something has gone wrong with the relationship of which we have just witnessed the birth. In fact we have gone back in time, to the night before the introductory sequence. Joel is distraught because he knows that his memories of Clementine will be removed during the night, and that he will awake without any knowledge of their previous relationship. This temporally cyclical connection points to the second way in which the film is structured around memory. The nominal present of the film concerns the memory erasure procedure (from the outside, the point of view of the technicians doing it) and its aftermath, yet it is fragmented by the seamless insertion of the aftermath as the film’s beginning and by a series of repetitions and reflections of events that occur throughout the film. The memory of the audience is directly involved in the process. They are incited to recognize, remember, and assemble along with Joel and Clem.

Pure Memory Henri Bergson portrays the act of remembering as a “stepping into” memory. The past exists as “pure memory,” a great bank of all our past experience

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(Bergson 1991 [1896]: 133). Forgetting is impossible in this realm, for to forget something, in the familiar sense of the term, is merely to lose the ability to draw that memory up from the pool of pure memory. What we believe we have forgotten is still there in potential, just waiting to be actualized, to be heaved into consciousness by some external stimulus, as in the Proustian mémoire involontaire. Walter Benjamin describes this term of Proust’s as an elaboration on, and implicit critique of, the Bergsonian model of memory (1999 [1955]: 154). Bergson believed that pure memory could be delved into by choice, whereas Proust characterizes access to it as something more akin to an involuntary eruption, triggered by some sort of evocative sensory stimulus. Either way, both were referring to a place wherein our past accumulates, which is far beyond an intellectually taxonomized collection of memories (this would be somewhat like a photo album). The exceptional circumstances of Joel’s “stepping into” memory prevent us from saying whether his access was by choice, but the realm into which he forays can be seen to realize this shared conception of pure memory. I would argue that the film takes this concept and fleshes it out, contributing one important augmentation hinted at in the quote from Proust that opened this chapter. In Eternal Sunshine, the stepping into memory occurs in the present, and what is done with and within memory occurs as the production of the new.

Joel and Clem wake to the bleached expanse (and mindscape) of the Montauk Strand in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). Photographer: David Lee, Getty Images.

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According to the Bergsonian model, a common and critical mistake in relation to memory is to confuse a difference in kind with a difference in degree between the perception of the present and the memory of the past. Thinking of memories as recordings of the past contained within our minds implies that the memory is inferior to the original perception—a weakened reflection of that original percept. Bergson suggests that a more accurate understanding conceives this difference as one of quality rather than degree, hence the positing of pure memory and the intermediate space known as the memory-image (1991 [1896]: 139). When we think of something from our past we draw that memory up from the pool of pure memory and into the present. In this way it becomes part memory-image and part perception, but undoubtedly of the present, attaining all the related qualities of dynamism and potentiality. Keith Ansell Pearson summarizes the operation as follows: “[The memory] begets sensations as it materializes, but when it does so it ceases to be a memory and becomes something actually lived by passing into the condition of a present thing” (2002: 178). Undistilled pure memory, on the other hand, though it has a connection with the memory-image, is in no way similar to perception. It is a psychological entity of an entirely different kind. In explaining his assertion that things can never truly be forgotten, Bergson interestingly uses an example that is surprisingly close to the premise of Eternal Sunshine: the only real means of abolishing memory is through an injury to the brain (1991 [1896]: 79). This is much like the operation performed by Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), which he himself describes as a mild form of brain damage. For Bergson, however, brain damage can destroy memory only in the sense of destroying the link between pure memory and the memory-image. The memory of the past, resident potentially in the pure memory, loses the possibility of realization as a memory-image. The differences outlined between memory and perception can be especially helpful in understanding what makes Eternal Sunshine’s treatment of memory so innovative. The most significant feature of the film is its depiction of memory as a mutable substance. Although Eternal Sunshine, like many memory/flashback films, employs visual effects and a surreal mise-en-scène to achieve the sensation of the past and of memory, it goes beyond this to show movement within and between memories and to allow an instrumental relationship between the memory and rememberer. The majority of memory films are, in contrast, films of seeing, with memory remaining predominantly an object of the past to be observed. The rememberer takes on the role of passive observer, with the ability only to sift through events, never to enter into an active internal transaction with them.

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These films present memory as exactly the form of “weakened perception” that Bergson refers to. The past is something that can be returned to and viewed again—a moment that was vital, animated, and brimming with potential when it was the present but that now pertains only to the present as an antecedent cause, an embalmed moment to be mulled over, replayed, and studied. The extensive use of this kind of flashback is indicative of the prevalent understanding of memory in the West. In fact, memory has been likened to the photograph since the earliest emergence of photographic technology. Douwe Draaisma describes the emergence of photography as a metaphor for memory, specifically in the work of J. W. Draper, a prominent physiologist of the nineteenth century: As analogies for visual representations photographs particularly stress the immutability of what is stored as a memory: they suggest a memory that forgets nothing, that contains a perfect, permanent record of our visual experience. Accordingly Draper saw the mind as a “silent gallery,” with “silhouettes of whatever we have done” on the walls. (2000: 121) Draaisma goes on to show how widespread this analogy was. It was a model that seemed to lend itself to the illustration of the theories of memory that were popular at the time, and it has likely influenced modes of thinking about memory ever since. The photograph, and by extension film, embodies a conception of memory as the fixing of a moment into an unchanging image. It suggests the preservation of the past—not the moment itself but an impression of it taken with a sensitized receptor—as an artifact. The entry into Joel’s consciousness (though we could equally well call it his subconscious—he is knocked out after all) occurs approximately half an hour into the film. The Lacuna Inc. technicians have set up their equipment and initiate the operation. We have one final view of Joel’s face, his head surrounded by the vast metallic hemisphere of the memory erasing helmet, before our sudden transportation into his memory. Joel’s hushed voice-over tells us, “This is the last time I saw you.” This is addressed to both (an absent) Clementine and to himself. In Eternal Sunshine, the memory is indeed a vision of the past in the sense of a lesser, recorded perception. The Joel we see sitting on a couch and impatiently reading a book is the Joel of the past. This Joel is locked in a vision of the event as it occurred, compelled to perform the same actions and say the same things again. This most unhappy memory of the final exchange between Joel and Clem plays through as it did originally,

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conforming to the traditional flashback template, allowing us a window into the past and providing us with important information as to why things are the way they are in the present. The first sign that this is memory, and thus subject only to the rules of thought, is when Joel follows Clem into the bathroom, only to find that she is not there. She reappears in the kitchen behind him and storms toward the door. The camera performs a disorienting twirl, placing the door at what should be the other side of the apartment; our sense of cinematic space is thoroughly and purposefully muddled. He chases her out into the hallway, and the transformation from the realistic mise-en-scène of the remembered apartment to the surrealism of dream is cemented by the unnatural blue light and the tight, angled geography of the corridor. The action moves briefly back to the “reality” of the memory erasure process, to Lacuna Inc. technicians Stan (Mark Ruffalo) and Patrick (Elijah Wood) in Joel’s bedroom, then back to a continuation of the first memory. Joel has followed Clem outside and found his car bent around a fire hydrant. He gets in and drives after her. He pulls up alongside as she tramps down the street, the realism of this memory tainted by a car that falls from the sky in the background. This is the turning point—his pleading with her to get into the car is suddenly complicated by the introduction of the voice of present-Joel: Look at it out here, it’s falling apart! I’m erasing you, and I’m happy! You did it to me first! I can’t believe you did this to me, goddamn it. Clem! Can you hear me? By morning you’ll be gone! The perfect ending to this piece-of-shit story! Joel parks the car, gets out, and tries to go after Clem, but the street takes on the attributes of an optical illusion. Clem exits from one end and reappears going the other way, with the street mirrored. The original memory has mutated. The scene skillfully manages to show both what happened in the past and Joel’s feelings about the state of their relationship in the present. He performs a type of metacommentary from within the memory, problematizing the distinction between memories and dreams. Temporal tense becomes more obscure the more Joel interacts with his memories— they are memories of the past that undergo transformations in the present. For a short time, the protagonist continues to move through bitter memories as they are destroyed, reliving them as the Joel bound to the past. This is interrupted by the intrusion of Patrick’s ethereal voice, which stirs Joel’s consciousness out of immobile reverie once more. This occurs in

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a scene in which Clem and Joel are playing the “dining dead” in a restaurant called Kang’s, which marks the final depressing memory of the relationship gone sour. The link between the two worlds is confirmed by the overlapping of sound from one onto the other. The tones of a telephone being dialed precede a cut to the reality of Patrick making his phone call to Clementine. The sound of this conversation leaks into the memory, interrupting the meal at Kang’s. Suddenly Joel notices that the street outside the window has been replaced by the interior of the bookshop where Clem works. Although his face is obscured, we know that it is Patrick leaning into the counter. Joel gets up and walks straight from one memory into the other. This is one of the few scenes in which Joel sees himself, and it most clearly represents the movement from seeing to doing. The Joel who walks in is the potent avatar of present-Joel, whereas the Joel who stands before the counter is the impotent Joel of the past, a fact hinted at by his meekly hurried departure. This is also one of the many repetitions of the film. We have seen this scene before, but from the viewpoint of the other Joel, so it is now our memory also. The departure of past-Joel should really have ended the memory, yet it continues. The presence of our Joel, the one we have accompanied from Kang’s, prolongs this scene into a present beyond the embalmed past of time frozen in memory. He tries to turn Patrick around but cannot manage to reveal his face, having never actually seen it. Gondry’s great contribution to the film is to create a memory-terrain that is quite different from that of real life. This distinction is conveyed not only through the fantastic contents of the memories but perhaps more in the way they blend together: the way the details of what Joel knows and can remember bleed through into the very image before us, and the way those memories can disintegrate, shift, fade, and return. What Bergson expressed in words, Gondry shows onscreen: memories are not dim reflections of the perceptions that begot them, floating individually through the flux of our consciousness like shades through the night. They are of an entirely different quality, a world apart from the physical environment that surrounds. Patrick’s phone conversation catalyzes Joel’s voyage through memory in another way. He calls Clem “Tangerine,” an affectionate pet name Joel had originally called her by, which has its origin in a specific happy memory. This initiates the movement into good memories, the side of the relationship it seems had been forgotten. Ironically, the attempt to jettison all remnants of Clem from his mind has brought to the surface memories that Joel is not prepared to relinquish and that remind him of his love for her. A montage of sound and visuals follows: intimate shots of Joel and Clem in bed, under the covers, as she tells the story of the ugly doll, and Joel’s

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voice repeatedly telling her she is pretty. Then another voice that is closer, also Joel’s, asking Dr. Mierzwiak to let him keep just this one memory. He clambers through the sheets, clawing at the rapidly eroding surface of memory. This is replaced by the familiar image of the couple on the frozen river, though this is a memory of the original version of the event, from the first iteration of their relationship. This is the seed-event that triggers a series of repetitions; we will see this image again when Clementine irrationally decides to take Patrick there to repeat an event she should have no memory of. On the soundtrack, Beck’s version of “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime” (which we have heard earlier) crackles into life, distorted and fragmentary. They lie on the ice and Joel confesses that he has never been happier. This is an iconic memory for both, functioning as a fulcrum around which both the film and the relationship turn. Just at this peak of emotional intensity Clementine is literally snatched away from Joel. The rules that govern standard Hollywood editing are expelled by the unruly quality of dream, and the logical connectivity of intellectual montage is lost in favor of a sometimes associative, sometimes random, logic of affectivity. In a memory of hiking in the woods, Joel explains his predicament to Clem and they talk things over, coming to terms with the way they have acted. Of course, this is just Joel working it out with himself, a kind of therapy through memory. Yet the sincerity of this exchange makes it feel real. The Clementine of Joel’s mind seems somehow to have graduated from being a shadow of memory, an unresponsive automaton destined merely to replay, to being a conscious agent actively involved in the production of change. The resulting present tense of this scene suggests to the viewer that perhaps they could work things out if they just had another chance. This scene is a turning point and leads to Clem suggesting, in another memory, that Joel try to evade the erasure process by hiding her in a memory in which she does not belong. Joel begins to fashion the landscape around him. He draws up a memory from childhood and successfully mixes it with the one he is in. When it starts to rain in the living-room, Joel runs to take cover under a table that now has a corrugated top just like the roof he hides under as a boy. Again this sequence is an example of an affective montage, with music, miseen-scène, and editing creating the sensation of a coalescence of the disparate moments of Joel’s life. His boyhood, manhood, and Clementine all come together as one moving image. From here, Joel’s flight through a crumbling past speeds up a notch. The interior world of Joel’s memory becomes immune to denominations of past or present. Even within this nowheretime, normal temporal rules do not apply—time speeds up, slows down,

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and jumps spontaneously. While it may run parallel to the present of the outside world, we are compelled to assert the qualitative difference of this realm of neither past nor present—a site out of time. Gondry employs forced perspective to place a miniature (yet adult) Joel under another table, this time in his mother’s kitchen, with Clementine playing the role of his mother’s friend. These brutal reconfigurations of memory are both surreal and perfectly logical: they are within Joel’s power. Joel takes Clem deep into his childhood. He relives humiliation and trauma in an attempt to conceal her deep within his psyche. In a sequence based on Joel’s guilty memory of bludgeoning a bird, the pair are figured simultaneously as adults and as children. This takes the film far beyond the innovative presentation of memory extolled so far. It concentrates a great wealth of feeling into a single sublime image, suggesting an almost infantile bond between the lovers, as well as the impossibility of literally sharing one’s past with the significant other one finds in later life. Clementine is being forcefully introduced into Joel’s memories of childhood. The point of this activity is that she does not belong there, so he hopes the process will not find her. This highlights the fact that memories are absolutely personal and cannot be shared, even with those who participated in their construction. It is most obvious, however, in relation to those partners found in adulthood. The only way that we can share our childhood and formative experiences with them is through words and material evidence like photographs. Such physical manifestations of our past participate in the fixing of memories into museum artifacts. Their very objecthood contributes to the conception of memory as a collection of discrete and fixed blocks of information. The sequence in question shows Joel performing what would seem to be his greatest act of memory as creation—inserting Clem into his childhood, making her witness of and participant in that incident that meant so much as a child. The climactic scene in the beach-house, while displaying the qualities of a mutable past, relegates such considerations to the background as the now-accepted fabric through which the deep questions underpinning their relationship are posed. It takes us back to the first day they met, when Joel deserted Clem out of nervousness and fear. It offers him the ability to stay this time, at least long enough to say goodbye. He himself articulates the perceived limits of memory: Clem: What if you stayed this time? Joel: I walked out the door, there’s no memory left. Clem: Come back and make up a goodbye at least.

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Joel does so, only to have the heart-rending farewell made brief by the final searing touch of the erasure. Here Joel has changed the past, though not in a way that operates as a denial or simple exchange. Rather, this scene, and this conversation with Clem, takes the form of a discourse. Joel considers what happened, and through this replaying and reshaping of the memory he is able to talk through this painful episode with Clem. As Joel runs from the house we see the significance of this episode. What is wrong here is perhaps what is at the root of the friction that led to their break-up. By talking about the memory with Clementine within the memory, Joel is able to identify and communicate his regret at not having stayed. Even if she is just the Clementine of memory, being able to tell her this seems to offer a therapeutic fulfillment for Joel. The transformative model of memory elaborated so far allows this particular memory to be re-thought. Joel’s assertion that “there’s no memory left” suggests that this act is also one of addition/creation. Clem calls to him from the stairs, stopping him in his flight. Joel walks back into the house, writing a new ending to both this memory and their relationship. As the memory literally crumbles around them, they embrace and proclaim their love. Her final whispered instruction to “meet me in Montauk” hints at an even greater potentiality. We have already watched as, the very next day, Joel irrationally decides to go to the Montauk Strand, where he will meet Clementine and fall for her again. This one element of the story flirts with the mystical, suggesting a quasi-transcendental connection between the lovers, but it also contributes to the idea that memory can be the site of dynamic thought, decision, and action. This scene is exemplary of the film’s construction of memory as potent substance, an antidote to the conception of it as an immotile and somewhat faded image of the past.

The Object of Memory It is interesting to note the repeated connections that are made between objects and memory in Eternal Sunshine. Dr. Mierzwiak instructs Joel to gather up everything he owns that has some association with Clementine—“photos, clothing, gifts, books she may have bought you, CDs you may have bought together, journal entries”—so that they can use those items to “create a map of Clementine in your brain.” These artifacts have the power to betray the memory erasure process, as in the mysterious missing journal pages (the absence of which physically manifests two years’ worth of Joel’s missing memories), and the confirmation found in the one object Joel forgot to collect and give to Dr. Mierzwiak—a picture of

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Clem that we saw him drawing in an earlier memory flash. Objects also externalize the characters’ internal characteristics. The limited environments that Joel and Clem fashion around themselves radiate information about their personality traits and how they see themselves—Clem’s continuously changing hair color, her quirky potato heads and slightly kitsch apartment; Joel’s surrounding himself with books in an apartment that is, in the words of the character Patrick, “sort of plain, uninspiring.” In Eternal Sunshine the possibility of forgetting depends on two factors: the eradication of the memory internally and the destruction or concealment of all external traces of the memory. The items Joel collects may be disposed of, but beyond this a system of concealment must be enforced. Joel and Clem’s mutual friends must be warned not to mention the relationship. The solipsistic notion that the past can truly be erased depends on the eradication of its traces in both the internal and external spheres. As we have seen, however, neither is even hypothetically possible. The past is communal. Though we may have a personal experience of it, that single subjective viewpoint goes to make up a greater, all-encompassing, ever-increasing Past. The film plays out the implications of treating memories as discrete psychological objects. Dr. Mierzwiak’s science is based on the assumption that they can be isolated and destroyed, but his process is foiled for a while by Joel’s successful attempts to mix memories, to hide Clem deep within the memories of his childhood. The memories that Joel journeys through form one continuous landscape of memory, rather than a series of isolated recollections, depicting memory as inconsistent, alterable, and in constant flux. Joel encounters his memories as renewed territories, places to be discovered and interacted with in the present. We are repeatedly reminded that remembering is something that is accomplished in the present, comprising equal parts memory and imagination. The landscape of memory is depicted as the empty whiteness of the Montauk Strand, the vast frozen plane of the Charles River, and the dark tunnel-like corridors of Mierzwiak’s office, yet also as a plastic substance, capable of forming itself into unique, detailed, and colorful zones peculiar to the memory described. Memory is therefore not tied down to a type. It becomes limitless: a hybrid of thought, memory, and fantasy. More than just a weakened perception, it is the site of many processes, negotiations, and crises, as well as the ultimate basis for our connection with another. Joel’s interior world initially takes the form of a museum of images of the past, but as the film progresses it becomes a realm of limitless, fantastic dialogue, a continually shifting landscape of thought, dream, and memory, all locked in a process of change and

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exchange. Eternal Sunshine demonstrates visually this possibility for slippage, this dormant potential for dynamic and mutable renderings of the past.

Notes 1. Films that use the flashback as a narrative framing device fall somewhere outside of this category. Here the past operates as the effective present of the film world, though often with the same connotations of destiny, fatality, and impotence that can be associated with the interpolated flashback segment. 2. Flashbacks used both as interruptions of the main narrative and as a narrative framing technique can be identified in many novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even as far back as Homer’s Odyssey.

References Ansell Pearson, Keith (2002), Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life. London: Routledge. Benjamin, Walter (1999 [1955]), Illuminations. London: Pimlico. Bergson, Henri (1991 [1896]), Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books. Draaisma, Douwe (2000), Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas about the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Proust, Marcel (2002 [1913]), In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1: Swann’s Way. London: Vintage. Turim, Maureen (1989), Flashbacks in Film. London: Routledge.

Filmography Amores Perros (2000), Dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu. Lions Gate Films. Citizen Kane (1941), Dir. Orson Welles. RKO. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Dir. Michel Gondry. Focus Features. Reservoir Dogs (1992), Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Miramax. Sunset Boulevard (1950), Dir. Billy Wilder. Paramount Pictures. 21 Grams (2003), Dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu. Focus Features.

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12 When People Run in Circles: Structures of Time and Memory in Donnie Darko James Walters

Donnie Darko (2001) is an ambitious work defined to a significant degree by its inventive structuring and realignment of time, history, and processes of nostalgic remembrance. The extraordinary events of Richard Kelly’s fantasy narrative result in various characters experiencing “phantom” memories of a past that never was: memories that, as audience members, we are invited to comprehend and ultimately to invest in emotionally. Building on this account of narrative reconfiguration of memory and time in Donnie Darko, this chapter outlines the extent to which the film features a sustained revisiting of the director’s remembered past, evaluating the nature of that personal recollection and contrasting it with the ideological context of 1980s popular Hollywood cinema. My contention here is that a central conflict exists between the director’s nostalgia for a decade in American history and his desire to reevaluate and problematize its Reaganite cultural ethos, which effectively promoted capitalist greed and social irresponsibility. The uneasy combination of these twin desires in Donnie Darko makes for a film that on the one hand celebrates the achievements of a strong fantasy trend in 1980s Hollywood filmmaking, incorporating appreciative nods toward emblematic directors such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Robert Zemeckis, and on the other hand engages in a self-conscious critique of the era in question.

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Echoes from a Vanished World In the final scene of Donnie Darko two strangers, Gretchen Ross (Jena Malone) and Rose Darko (Mary McDonnell), exchange an enigmatic gaze. Gretchen has pulled up at the Darko residence on her bicycle to find it surrounded by emergency services vehicles and personnel; an articulated truck bearing a huge, damaged aircraft engine passed her as she wheeled toward the house. On the front lawn, among police and government officials, stand the Darko family: a daughter (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a father (Holmes Osborne) holding his younger daughter (Daveigh Chase) in his arms, and, to their right, partially separated from the group by the trunk of a large tree, a mother, Rose. Grief and shock register on the faces of the father and his two daughters; their features dark and contorted as they fight hopelessly to control their ravaged emotions. Rose also mourns, but just as she is divided spatially from the group so is her demeanor distinct from theirs. She does not weep as they do and instead carries an expression of resignation and defeat, as though she had accepted a terrible truth with dreadful calm. As she leans on the trunk of the tree, she smokes a cigarette. The cause of the family’s anguish is the death of their son, which Gretchen discovers as she asks a young boy at the scene (Scotty Leavenworth) what has happened. When he informs her that his neighbor “got smooshed by a jet engine,” she enquires after the neighbor’s name. Boy: Donnie. Donnie Darko . . . I feel bad for his family. Gretchen: Yeah. Throughout their conversation, Gretchen’s gaze remains fixed on a specific point in the direction of the Darko’s family home, broken only once to look briefly at the boy after he has described how Donnie died. Her responses to him are distant and distracted, giving the impression that her mind is focused elsewhere. Initially, we take it that she simply surveys the general scene of awful pain and disruption, especially as the boy to her right stares out in a similar fashion. Yet, once she has delivered the line “Yeah,” a medium close-up of Rose looking back across the lawn proposes the older woman to be the subject of Gretchen’s gaze, and vice versa. A reverse medium close-up of Gretchen reaffirms the relationship between the characters, confirming that they are held in each other’s line of sight. This shot of Gretchen is sustained for ten seconds, in which time the boy asks her whether she knew Donnie. She replies simply “no,” her eyes never

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moving from Rose. As the seconds accumulate in the duration of the shot, so the significance of Gretchen’s gaze mounts. Her look becomes unusual for its length and rigidity of focus. The slight frown that has formed on her features evolves from being an expression of natural sympathy for another’s grief to a sign of Gretchen’s disquiet at a sensation she struggles to understand. In a reverse shot, Rose tilts her head to one side and then is still, surveying Gretchen as though she too were trying to comprehend the nature of their uncanny connection. Cutting back to the image of Gretchen, we notice her expression develop subtly from perplexity to incorporate an element of profound remorse. Gretchen raises her hand in a gesture of greeting; her fixed stare makes the action look detached and involuntary, as though Gretchen were acting under the force of a mysterious instinct. Back at the tree, Rose reciprocates the gesture. As she tugs her hand out of her coat pocket and waves back, her eyes also never move from Gretchen.1 The characters do not understand the strength of their bond in this scene, but the audience is significantly better placed to speculate on its meaning. These two have been related to each other through Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal), but in a different reality. In that vanished reality, Gretchen was Donnie’s girlfriend, and his mother had grown increasingly worried by her son’s bizarre behavior and frustrated in her attempts to reach him. In that parallel world, both characters died: Gretchen run over by a man wearing a homemade giant bunny Halloween costume, and Rose as the plane carrying her and her youngest daughter lost one of its engines and plummeted to earth. In contrast, in that reality Donnie survived a jet engine crashing through his bedroom because he was sleepwalking on a golf course. However, Donnie has magically reversed time to erase that reality and replace it with a world in which he does not survive the falling jet engine, and therefore the chain of events leading to the deaths of Gretchen and Rose is never begun.2 As Donnie travels back through time to the point at which the jet engine falls through his bedroom, the film dissolves one potential world, in which he survives, and replaces it with another world, in which he dies.3 Donnie’s existence in the potential world held ramifications that profoundly affected the shape of that reality. As he removes himself from the world, it is bound to form in new, divergent patterns of progression. The film includes an inexplicable echo from the potential world that rejects the laws of time and space to create a moment of poignancy between the characters. We recognize their bond to be centered on their relationship to Donnie, yet Rose no longer has the experience of her son from that potential world, and Gretchen, of course, has never known him at all in this reality. As we

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appreciate the nature of their union, we share in a connection that the characters feel “numbly compelled to make,” but with a heightened perspective granted through our knowledge of the parallel world in which Donnie evaded death (Felperin 2002: 34). The moment between Rose and Gretchen is part of the film’s uncanny logic surrounding character memory, observable elsewhere in the narrative’s concluding scene. For example, Frank, Gretchen’s killer (James Duval), is shot in the eye by Donnie in the other potential world. Once time is reversed, we see him alive again on the night of Donnie’s death with his newly designed bunny costume. He stares eerily, unblinking, into space. As the camera pans away from him, Frank reaches up and touches his eye as though somehow experiencing an echo of his fatal injury incurred in the potential future. These echoes at the end of the film acknowledge that a different, parallel world existed. Such moments achieve a subtle poignancy as three characters, dead in that other world but alive again now, recall phantom memories based on their association with Donnie, who was alive there but is now dead. The characters’ “ghost” memories are inscrutable to them, but the audience is invited to reflect on and revisit moments from earlier in the film through their impossible recollections of a vanished world. Events such as the exchange between Rose and Gretchen, as well as Frank’s unsettling gestured reference to his gunshot wound, encourage us to recollect Donnie’s place within the narrative and reinforce his association to the characters who “remember.” The film succeeds in creating a mournful tone that is further expressed stylistically as the film moves, in its final moments, to a series of slow transition shots and ponderous long shots that linger predominantly on the faces of individual characters. In addition, Gary Jules’ elegiac cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World” is incorporated, playing over the montage of shots in which Frank raises his hand to his eye and underscoring the closing scene depicting the Darko family’s grief as they stand outside their wrecked home. The sense of loss that the film evokes relies on our emotional response to the fictional history it constructs. In the case of Donnie Darko, this historical time frame is complicated as we look back in remembrance across events that would actually have taken place within a parallel future of potential circumstances, now made impossible through the ending of Donnie’s life. This process of remembering is thus convoluted further as the Donnie we know and potentially mourn will never exist in the film’s diegetic world. The film seeks to elicit a particularly nostalgic reaction from the audience as it prompts us to reflect on Donnie’s absence through the

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peculiar emotions experienced by certain characters in those concluding moments.

Hearing the Past It is apt that Kelly’s film should conclude with a series of pivotal sequences that elicit sensations associated with nostalgia and historical remembrance. On a broader scale, Donnie Darko features a return to the director’s own recollected past; it is set in 1988 (Kelly was twenty-six when it was released in 2001) and deploys a range of audiovisual compositional strategies that serve to evoke a sense of that period. This pattern includes the placement of iconic consumer products such as Old Spice aftershave, contemporaneous literature such as Stephen King’s novels It and The Tommy Knockers, and, perhaps most prominently throughout the film, a soundtrack comprising the work of 1980s groups such as Tears for Fears and Duran Duran— a feature that highlights the crucial role of music in conveying the style and tone of historical periods in film (Drake 2003: 193). The practice of including iconic period references is certainly not unique to Donnie Darko. It can be found in many preceding films, including The Wedding Singer (1998), a romantic comedy set in 1985 and similarly featuring a run of audiovisual citations ranging from the inclusion of storylines from popular television shows such as Dallas and films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), to consumer products such as “New” Coke and the Rubik’s Cube, to a general recreation of the excesses of 1980s styling. Historical fashions also figure within Donnie Darko but to a more limited extent, so period costume is for the most part subdued within the mise-en-scène of Kelly’s film. Although occasional references to 1980s style are made in slight details, such as one character’s period-specific “God Is Awesome” T-shirt, this is kept as merely an incidental feature within the narrative that in fact goes unmentioned. In contrast, The Wedding Singer dramatically foregrounds such aspects in comedic fashion throughout the course of its narrative. No reference goes unnoticed or unexploited: when a chef advises a central character to “relax,” he points to his “Frankie Says Relax” T-shirt. Similarly, when another character appears wearing a Michael Jackson-inspired black-trimmed red jacket and accompanying single sequined glove, he is asked, “Where’s your brother Tito?” This relationship of fashion to pop iconography in The Wedding Singer accentuates a central strategy of Frank Coraci’s film whereby the 1980s is nostalgically recalled through the repeated foregrounding of popular musical references. This extends to the use of actual music within The Wedding

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Singer, such as those occasions when the film’s titular character Robbie (Adam Sandler) performs renditions of a collection of songs from bands such as Dead or Alive, The J. Geils Band and even a cover of Madonna’s “Holiday.” These performances take their place within a saturation of period music occurring in almost every scene. The work of popular artists from the 1980s is ever present either as a part of the diegetic world of the film (David Bowie’s “China Girl” played in a nightclub) or as an extradiegetic soundtrack to that world’s events (The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now” laid over a scene transition, for example). Throughout Coraci’s film, music becomes a crucial signifier of the period. Furthermore, playful reference is made consistently to pop and rock icons from the era: a flight-desk attendant sporting a Flock of Seagulls-inspired bouffant, a band-member modeling his entire look and behavior on Boy George, and even Billy Idol appearing as himself in the film’s climactic plane sequence. These examples emphasize The Wedding Singer’s attitude to the era replicated onscreen. The evocation of the era’s music and fashion constitutes a celebration, rather than a mockery, of 1980s popular culture, which is fondly remembered and sentimentally revived within the film’s narrative. In many cases, these are straightforward signifiers that reward an audience’s potential remembrance or knowledge of the decade’s stylings and icons, creating a shared past that is both affectionate and uncritical. The film’s humor is sympathetic to the era’s prevailing attitudes and tastes, with any jokes made in commemoration of the 1980s rather than at the decade’s expense. The nostalgic reminiscence inherent in The Wedding Singer is not replicated in the tonal handling of equivalent references in Donnie Darko. In fact, Kelly’s use of period music occurs as part of an effort to make the era of the 1980s strange and unstable for the viewer. This process derives from the marrying of the soundtrack to the film’s distinct visual style, in which temporal and spatial relationships are corrupted and made malleable—an aesthetic strategy that complements the central narrative themes of time reversal and realignment of reality—and where everyday events are made portentous due to the manner in which they are represented onscreen. This audiovisual patterning is observable even in the film’s earliest scene when, having woken up inexplicably dressed in his pajamas on the edge of a hillside track, Donnie cycles back down into town and to his home. The music underscoring this sequence is Echo & The Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon,” which in itself represents a darker selection from a potential catalog of 1980s songs, ensuring that Donnie’s bicycle journey through his suburban

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environment is set to a minor key. In addition, during this sequence Kelly slows down the motion of Donnie’s family as they perform activities while Donnie rides past them, such as his father blowing leaves from the front lawn and his sister bouncing on a trampoline. This effect distorts the continuity of the scene but also adds unexpected and, on first viewing, ambiguous weight to the images. It elevates them from the context of everyday routine and privileges them as moments captured and partially suspended in time. With the benefit of hindsight provided through repeat viewings of the film, such images represent the Darko family at their happiest and most contented before events lead them toward that final scene of public grief as they lament Donnie’s bizarre death. In this respect, the minor tone of the soundtrack that accompanies these opening scenes pre-empts that anguished conclusion and, in turn, establishes the film’s ominous mood from the outset.4 Interestingly, Mark Olsen makes sense of this scene’s tone in relation to the work of two directors, both of whom rose to prominence during the 1980s, suggesting that Donnie: rides home through a dreamily idyllic neighborhood, full of leaf blowers, power-walkers and double-sided refrigerators. However, there is a creeping sense that something is amiss, as if the skewed, offkilter sensibility of David Lynch had moved in across the street from John Hughes’ well-adjusted sensitivity. (2001: 16) The fusion of directorial styles that Olsen describes in relation to Donnie’s bicycle journey through the suburbs effectively and crucially highlights the unease that Kelly’s unusual visual style and choice of audio track creates. Certainly, the use of period music in the opening scene does not promote the kind of immediate nostalgic recollection achieved in equivalent scenes from The Wedding Singer. Instead, it involves a complicating of the film’s fictional world to the extent that the soundtrack becomes a constituent feature of a 1980s landscape disclosing unsettling distortions and resonances. This process is furthered within an audacious sequence, occurring later in the film once Donnie has crossed over into the parallel world, in which he and his peers arrive at school. In many respects, this scene functions as an introduction to all of the film’s main players within that social environment, taking in figures such as Principal Cole (David Moreland), his staff, the school bully (Alex Greenwald), and Gretchen Ross who will eventually be Donnie’s girlfriend in this parallel realm. However, these tentative introductions take place within an erratic temporal structure as

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the motions of characters are elongated and expedited through the slowing down and speeding up of the visual track, revisiting the visual style established in the opening scene. During this later school sequence the camera displays an unfettered fluidity of movement as it whirls around the spaces of the building and grounds, pulling in sharply to characters’ faces before withdrawing again to capture wider patterns of movement. This alternating pace and penetrating mobility combine to create a disorientating effect set in motion in the first shot of the sequence: the camera is tilted on its side as it frames the backdoor of the yellow bus that Donnie jumps out of, before rotating upright and arcing backwards to frame him walking up the school steps. The visual style recalls the “off-kilter” tone that Olsen described in relation to the opening scene and, again, retro 1980s music becomes synonymous with this strangeness as Tears for Fears’ “Head Over Heels” underscores the tour through the school environment. Once more, the potential nostalgic remembrance inherent in the use of the song is compromised as the textured layering of the track—a rich electronic aesthetic that typifies the era—contributes to and becomes synonymous with the sequence’s disturbed spatial and temporal logic, distancing the viewer from the scene when it might have elicited feelings of familiarity and belonging. The rupturing of time and space relationships in Donnie Darko is wholly appropriate given that the film’s narrative is concerned with temporal loops and parallel worlds that result in the final moment of poignant recognition between Gretchen and Rose described earlier. However, it is also the case that the film’s utilization of music from the 1980s as a crucial layer within this structure of disorientation underscores its distinct attitude toward the period it recreates. Whereas films like The Wedding Singer might be said to revisit a past era in straightforward, sentimental terms, Donnie Darko appears to problematize those processes of remembrance and nostalgia, restricting the extent to which emotional reminiscence might begin to foster. The film’s stylistic reframing lays the foundations for a more critical appraisal of the era in question rather than an endorsement of certain attitudes and ideologies through a purely nostalgic restaging.

Contested Histories In setting up the notion that Donnie Darko adopts a somewhat critical stance in relation to aspects of 1980s culture, it is also worth acknowledging that Kelly drew inspiration for his film from a number of contemporary Hollywood directors who have nostalgically re-evoked aspects of their

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earlier lives and have returned to their pasts in different ways. In the years leading up to 1988, when Kelly sets his film, filmmakers such as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg engaged in processes of remembrance involving a revival of childhood pleasures: Lucas reversions the “B” movie space adventures of his youth again as the Star Wars saga (1977–1983) and along with Spielberg resurrects the narrative structures and themes of the matinee “Boy’s Own” serial adventures in the form of the Indiana Jones films (1981–) (Buckland 2006: 130–53). Directors of this generation are especially pertinent in relation to Donnie Darko given that Kelly specifically and self-consciously cites their body of work, which he remembers fondly from his 1980s youth, with Spielberg constituting a particularly strong guiding influence (Kelly 2003: lii). For example, when the mysterious jet engine is slowly driven away from the scene of the accident at the Darkos’ home, a reference is made to the spectacle of the Ark of the Covenant being wheeled away and stored by shadowy authority figures at the close of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).5 Likewise, and perhaps more overtly, when in an earlier scene from Kelly’s film Donnie and his peers embark on a nighttime bicycle ride, the manner of their grouping and the style of presentation visually recall an iconic scene from E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982).6 The distinction between these directors and Kelly lies in the fact that, unlike Lucas or Spielberg, Kelly does not attempt to recreate the tone and mood of his childhood cinematic memories (McCarthy 1982: 58). Donnie Darko is distinguished from that strand of 1980s cinema as it depicts a dystopian fantasy world in which dark, uncomfortable possibilities are played out and explored, rather than a type of utopian fantasy in which an individual’s dreams and desires can be indulged. This notion persists when we consider the film in the context of another (Spielberg-produced) work, Back to the Future (1985), with which it is frequently compared and thematically related (Felperin 2002: 34; Kelly 2003: xvi). A narrative correlation exists between the films: both feature male teenage characters of approximately the same age who travel back in time to preserve the present. The outcome of Robert Zemeckis’ film, however, is reversed in Donnie Darko. In Back to the Future, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is accidentally transported to 1955 and battles to return to the future, but he also strives to unite his parents, thus securing his own existence in that future. In contrast, Donnie finally returns to the past, guaranteeing his own death to save the lives of others. Marty returns to a changed 1985 world in which his parents confidently enjoy a successful and opulent present, whereas when he left them previously to travel back in time they were only bitter and insignificant. The world that Marty left

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Watch the skies: Donnie glimpses his destiny in the final moments in Donnie Darko (2001). Photographer: Dale Robinette, Getty Images.

has vanished through his actions in 1955 (primarily, giving his father greater self-belief as a teenager), and when he returns it is to a new, more palatable, reality. It follows that the conclusion of Donnie Darko cannot achieve the same emphatically positive tone as the survival of certain characters is necessarily dependent on the death of another. These narrative differences extend to the films’ divergent perspectives on the 1980s cultural landscape. The perfect present that Marty McFly wakes up to at the end of Zemeckis’ film is an affirmation of a set of values associated with twentieth-century capitalism. Marty’s father, George (Crispin Glover), is clearly a wealthy man at the film’s conclusion, whereas before his son’s journey into the past he was perceived to be a weak failure. This success is pronounced in materialistic trappings such as a stylish home, designer clothing, and a BMW parked in the driveway. In the previous 1985 reality, George had labored in servitude to his boss and former high school bully, Biff (Thomas F. Wilson), but in this altered world Biff now is a nervous character who dutifully cleans George’s cars for him, while George reprimands him over the quality of his workmanship. Although Biff was hardly a sympathetic character before, and we might readily feel satisfaction at his demotion, his exchanging positions with George promotes the concept that for one man to succeed another must fail. Within this moral landscape, high success is achieved at the expense of others and parity is not considered to be a viable or even attractive option.

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Within this ideological structure, Biff can be given no opportunity to atone for his mistakes. In stark contrast, George’s cowardice is magically overwritten by his son’s inadvertent act, paving the way for him to become a capitalist hero. To an extent, the tone of this message might be seen to resonate with the political climate of the 1980s, where successive Republican administrations shaped America’s moral consciousness. We may be wary of such claims given the film’s status as fantasy aimed squarely at a “family” audience (Krämer 1998: 294–311). Yet, as Robin Wood contends, treating films from this era only as inconsequential fantasy may in fact serve to conceal a host of questionable ideological strategies, and even examples such as the Star Wars saga, read closely, can be revealed to reinforce negative themes such as colonialism and the suppression of female rights (2003: 149–54). Certainly, Back to the Future expresses no qualms about the political implications of its concluding scenes. Marty—the only character who has any recollection of the world as it once was—shows little regard for Biff ’s downfall and instead becomes lost in the material attraction of a new 4×4 Jeep that his father has bought for him. The film’s overriding message, conveyed through its depiction of the “new” McFly family, is that wealth uncomplicatedly equals happiness, regardless of who is marginalized as a consequence of its pursuit. Thus, when George repeats back to Marty a piece of advice his son had passed on in 1955, “If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything,” the sentiment risks becoming a potent slogan for capitalist desire, a self-belief founded on individualism and the satisfaction of wealth, rather than a comment on his accomplishment in publishing a first novel. Rather than replicate this ethos as part of a nostalgic reference to 1980s film culture, Donnie Darko blurs the lines of success and failure that Back to the Future so efficiently and unself-consciously constructs. Where Zemeckis’ film proposes a binary opposition of good and bad that resolves itself unproblematically, Kelly devises a world in which imagination and freedom of expression are curtailed by the narrow-mindedness of others, and where victories can be claimed that are neither deserved nor justified. These themes are expounded with particular emphasis during a scene in which Donnie’s inspiring but controversial teacher, Ms. Pomeroy (Drew Barrymore), is dismissed by the school’s Principal Cole. In the course of their meeting, she delivers a searing warning: “I don’t think you have a clue what it’s like to really communicate with these kids. We are losing them to apathy . . . to this prescribed nonsense. They are slipping away.” Rather than contemplating her words, Cole responds curtly and patronizingly: “I’m sorry that you have failed. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have another

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appointment. You can finish out the week.” This exchange exemplifies the ways in which the balance of power in Kelly’s film rests not with those who endeavor to promote understanding and tolerance but with those who are shortsighted and dogmatic and who occupy positions of which they are undeserving, such as a principal who is indifferent to the social welfare of his students and evidently lacks support for his colleagues at even a basic level. This encounter is indicative of the film’s representation of aspects of 1980s American culture, contributing to the depiction of an age in which bigotry and ignorance are acceptable or at least dominant facets of society, and in which an unwillingness to comply is read simply as “failure.” That Drew Barrymore should be integral to the aforementioned scene is significant, given that she constitutes an iconic figure of 1980s cinema, having been cast in Spielberg’s E.T. Beyond functioning as a pleasing intertextual reference, Barrymore’s placement within the film furthermore symbolizes the actress returning to an era in which she first found fame and re-evaluating it from a new perspective, a process that mirrors Kelly’s own revisioning of his 1980s past.7 Interestingly, Barrymore’s character, Ms. Pomeroy, possesses a set of liberal, and arguably radical, values that are shown to be out of step with the school’s pervading ethos, lending weight to the notion that the actress herself is standing somewhat apart from the film’s world. It is a position that would correlate strongly with the director’s (and, indeed, Barrymore herself occupies a role off-camera as executive producer). The film in fact creates the antithesis of Ms. Pomeroy’s character in the form of Kitty Farmer (Beth Grant), a fellow teacher who takes exception to the former’s choice of Grahame Greene’s short story The Destructors as a text for English Literature classes at the school and hijacks a PTA meeting to denounce the teaching of “pornography,” as she terms it. It is quite likely that this act contributes ultimately to Ms. Pomeroy’s dismissal from the school, especially given Principal Cole’s uncomfortable demeanor during Kitty’s outburst at the PTA meeting and his accusatory glances directed toward Ms. Pomeroy. Within the 1980s landscape that Kelly recreates, ignorance is shown ultimately to overcome liberalism, and his film makes clear the terms and consequences of this victory through the characters involved in the conflict. In her own lessons, Kitty seeks ostensibly to divide the world into good and bad by means of a “Lifeline” exercise that she performs with Donnie’s class. The line, as she describes it, joins two “polar extremes” of fear in the “negative energy spectrum” and love in the “positive energy spectrum.”

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The easy differentiation that Kitty attempts is out of step with the film’s portrait of ambiguous motivations and moral complexity. Moreover, it emerges throughout the course of the narrative that the author of the Lifeline exercise, Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze), is in possession of a large collection of child pornography that is only discovered once Donnie has burnt down his house (an act that itself proposes a morally perplexing chain of cause and effect). When this fact is revealed, Kitty finds that she is unable to confront the truth about Cunningham and instead sinks into a pattern of denial, refusing any mention of the crimes he is charged with. The character of Jim Cunningham holds further significance because he represents the nearest equivalent to the figure of George McFly as seen at the conclusion of Back to the Future. Until his crimes are uncovered, Cunningham is a celebrated local author—a career trajectory that George is set to embark on—who owns an opulent house and espouses the same brand of feel-good logic that George subscribes to at the end of Zemeckis’ film. Beyond these connections, there are also striking physical similarities between the characters. They share, for example, a taste for clean-cut designer clothing and sport the same neatly styled hair and perfect-white smiles. However, Kelly severely compromises the notions of success that are encapsulated in the character of George McFly by depicting a corresponding figure who is an abhorrent criminal who promotes a series of shallow idioms founded on a deep-lying hypocrisy: Cunningham speaks of his sadness that too many young people “surrender their bodies to the temptations of drugs, alcohol, and premarital sex” while he secretly collects images of child abuse. In the film’s parallel universe Cunningham is arrested for his crimes, an act that is reversed when Donnie collapses that world. But when reality is restored we are offered the fleeting image of Cunningham sitting up at night, sobbing uncontrollably as the camera passes across his face. The implication exists that Cunningham is ruined by his guilt and that although his crimes are as yet unpunished publicly in this reality, his private world is bleak and tortured as a result of them. Interestingly, Kitty Farmer is pictured in a proceeding shot, slowly putting her hand to her mouth in a gesture of shock and realization. The linking of this shot to the image of Cunningham creates a causal relationship between her reaction and his, suggesting that she is aware of, or at least suspects, his crimes but has chosen to suppress her knowledge, reminding us of this character’s own moral hypocrisy. This dismantling of an archetype of 1980s accomplishment in Kelly’s portrait of Jim Cunningham is consistent with the director’s effort to problematize the period revisited through his film. Kelly constructs an ideological

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framework that reacts against the 1980s films of filmmakers such as Spielberg, Lucas, and Zemeckis, a position first articulated critically by Andrew Britton in his essay “Blissing out: the politics of Reaganite entertainment” (1986: 1–42). In this wide-ranging discussion, Britton identifies a solipsist tendency inherent in movies of the period and goes on to suggest that one such example, The Wrath of Khan (1982), can be seen to exemplify “the kind of relation to the richest tradition of American bourgeois culture—a relation at once conservative, parasitic and profoundly uncomprehending—which is characteristic of contemporary Hollywood as a whole” (ibid. 22). Kelly avoids reproducing these traits in his filmmaking precisely by performing a stark re-examination of 1980s society, exploring some of the prejudices, hypocrisies, and inequalities that define a series of attitudes and behaviors exhibited by his characters. Kelly’s dramatic versioning of the period actually corresponds with critiques such as Britton’s, despite the director’s acknowledged nostalgia for the films and filmmakers of that era: “He’s the king. Meeting Spielberg would be pretty amazing. Maybe one day, maybe one day . . .” (Kelly 2003: lii). Donnie Darko marks the director’s progressive re-evaluation of his remembered youth, whereas a filmmaker like Spielberg can be seen to promote a series of regressive ideals in his films, or at least those made during the 1980s. Where Spielberg and his generation resurrected cinematic fantasies from their childhood as a means of providing escapist pleasures for their imagined audiences, Kelly seeks to use fantasy as a way of challenging remembrances of the past and illuminating perceived societal injustices that define that era for him now.

Postscript: The Significance of the Smurfs We might account for Donnie Darko’s uncompromising attitude toward the past if we consider Jeffrey Sconce’s placement of it within the context of what he describes as the new American “smart” film (2002: 349–69). Responding to Kenneth Turan’s description of an onslaught of “pointlessly and simplistically grim films” at the turn of the century, Sconce first calls for caution with respect to such sensational accounts before proposing, “No doubt there is a new sensibility at work in certain corners of North American cinema and culture over the past decade, one that manifests a predilection for irony, black humor, fatalism, relativism and, yes, even nihilism” (ibid. 349, 350). Sconce lists Donnie Darko among the titles that exemplify this trend, and, indeed, we might relate the film’s skeptical outlook to contemporaneous works such as The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

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or The Ice Storm (1997), which similarly can be seen to “accentuate the negative” as they recall, with varying degrees of directness, past historical eras (ibid. 350). Taken in this context, Donnie Darko can be regarded very much as a product of its time, aligned with the tone and ideological stance of similar works observable from the 1990s onwards. Along this line of reasoning, if we were to construct a case for Kelly’s film being a work of “irony,” then the scene in which Donnie and his friends discuss the procreative complexities of the Smurfs, cartoon characters from their childhood, would seem to be a defining moment. In this sequence, while Donnie shoots at cans, his two friends debate the sexual complications of the Smurfs, speculating on which would get to fuck Smurfette and which of the other Smurfs would watch, and so on. After they have explored several scenarios, Donnie turns to his peers and delivers a comprehensive account of the cartoon’s narrative logic, explaining in definite terms why no fucking can take place as all Smurfs are asexual. The structure of this dialogue, apparently bereft of any lasting significance and rooted in popular culture, might strike us as an exemplary use of ironic, post-Tarantino language, placing the film within its 2001 context and reinforcing its correlation with the movement Sconce describes. Indeed, the scene has been viewed in precisely that way (Kelly 2003: xxx), and it seems uncontroversial to speculate that Quentin Tarantino’s cinema may have been influential, even to a slight degree, despite Kelly’s objections. However, I want to suggest that the scene possesses greater resonance if we consider it to encapsulate precisely the ways in which historical recollections can become compromised and contested, and how accounts of the past can vary depending on intellectual perspective and emotional investment. Donnie’s effort to remember the Smurf mythology replicates Kelly’s own aim to commit his 1980s memories to film: both indulge in an act of nostalgic recollection that is tempered by their now-developed sense of logic and reason. As an adult, Kelly systematically critiques a set of prevailing attitudes from the era he wishes to portray, and Donnie asks simply, “What’s the point of living if you don’t even have a dick?” at the conclusion of his speech regarding the Smurf ’s asexuality, a concern he surely would not have harbored when he first viewed the cartoons as a child. Thus, the scene fits the film’s overarching portrayal of history as a concept to be negotiated and refigured, whether by fictional characters, in the case of Rose and Gretchen, who struggle to understand the connection they experience with each other, or by filmmakers like Kelly whose affection for a period is, in adulthood, balanced against a retrospective awareness of its ideological

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shortcomings. Donnie Darko’s lasting achievement, then, may rest in the film’s ability to bring these processes of remembrance together coherently, creating layers of complexity that resonate within the fictional world and beyond.

Notes 1. The film weaves a little humor into this exchange as, in a final shot, the boy next to Gretchen raises his hand and waves, apparently believing that Rose was gesturing to him. 2. Peter Matthews suggests that the film does not necessarily invite a straight moral choice between one reality and the other. In the now-vanished world, Donnie inadvertently reveals the child pornography “dungeon” of one character, Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze). With that reality erased, the truth is never uncovered, and so, as Matthews reasons: the hollowness of the moral interpretation is exposed: it would require us to trade off the lives of Gretchen, Rose, Samantha [Donnie’s younger sister], and Frank [Gretchen’s killer whom Donnie shoots dead] in exchange for Donnie’s—and those of Cunningham’s victims. The viewer is not meant to choose one over the other, but instead to accept their dual existence as variations on a theme. (2005: 46) 3. Director Richard Kelly’s term for this parallel world is “The Tangent Universe,” as explained in a fictional work credited to one of the film’s characters and included in the accompanying book of the film (Kelly 2003: 108). 4. This ominous tone is further continued as Frank’s car passes Donnie in this opening sequence, an incidental detail that foregrounds Donnie’s journey into a parallel dimension and more specifically the death of his girlfriend, Gretchen. 5. The scene at the end of Spielberg’s film is in itself an homage to an earlier landmark of Hollywood cinema, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941). 6. Kelly makes specific reference to these visual allusions in his director’s commentary for the U.K. DVD release of the film. 7. Barrymore’s return to this era is made especially poignant given that her post-E.T. childhood became defined by ruin and lost innocence as she fell into drug and alcohol abuse, something that Kelly makes partial reference to in his DVD commentary.

References Britton, Andrew (1986), “Blissing out: the politics of Reaganite entertainment,” Movie, 31/32 (Winter): 1–42. Buckland, Warren (2006), Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster. New York: Continuum.

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Drake, Philip (2003), “‘Mortgaged to music’: new retro movies in the 1990s Hollywood cinema,” in Paul Grainge (ed.), Memory and Popular Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 183–201. Felperin, Leslie (2002), “Darkness visible,” Sight and Sound, 12: 34–35. Kelly, Richard (2003), The Donnie Darko Book. London: Faber and Faber. Krämer, Peter (1998), “Would you take your child to see this film? The cultural and social work of the family-adventure movie,” in Stephen Neale and Murray Smith (eds), Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. London: Routledge, 294–311. Matthews, Peter (2005), “Spinoza’s stone: the logic of Donnie Darko,” Post Script, 25 (1): 38–48. McCarthy, Todd (1982), “Sand castles,” Film Comment, 28 (3): 53–59. Olsen, Mark (2001), “Richard Kelly,” Film Comment, 37 (September/ October): 16–17. Sconce, Jeffrey (2002), “Irony, nihilism and the new American ‘smart’ film,” Screen, 43 (4): 349–69. Wood, Robin (2003), Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press.

Filmography Back to the Future (1985), Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Universal Studios. Citizen Kane (1941), Dir. Orson Welles. RKO. Donnie Darko (2001), Dir. Richard Kelly. Pandora Cinema/Flower Films. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Dir. Steven Spielberg. Universal Studios. Ice Storm, The (1997), Dir. Ang Lee. Fox Searchlight Pictures. Nightmare on Elm Street, A (1984), Dir. Wes Craven. New Line Cinema. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Dir. Steven Spielberg. Paramount Pictures. Royal Tenenbaums, The (2001), Dir. Wes Anderson. Touchstone Pictures. Star Wars (1977), Dir. George Lucas. Twentieth Century Fox. Wedding Singer, The (1998), Dir. Frank Coraci. New Line Cinema. Wrath of Khan, The (1982), Dir. Nicholas Meyer. Paramount Pictures.

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13 What a Difference a Day Made: Database Narratives and Avatar Subjectivities in the Alternate-Reality Film Chuck Tryon

In a notorious Entertainment Weekly article meant to promote a set of new young directors, Jeff Gordinier (1999) declared that 1999 would be remembered as “the year that changed movies,” pointing to a number of signs of a dawning “revolution” in film production such as the cut-and-paste aesthetic permitted by digital technologies and the influence of video game narratives on classical Hollywood storytelling. Other critics saw this “revolution” less as emancipating film from linear narration and more as presaging its potential decline. With cinema’s centennial coinciding with the end of the millennium, a number of film critics worried that narrative movies would be replaced by new media technologies that emphasized interactivity and active viewing rather than the supposedly passive spectatorship of classical Hollywood cinema. This position is best represented by Godfrey Cheshire’s 1999 essay “The death of film/The decay of cinema,” in which Cheshire argues that digital projection in theaters would lead to movies becoming more like television, with theaters catering to audience desires for “event” broadcasting of concerts or “films” that solicit audience participation, perhaps along the lines of “choose your own adventure” narratives. These rapid shifts in the practices of moviegoing and the expectations of moviegoers prompted a revision of ways of thinking about film spectatorship and cinematic narrative. In this context, Henry Jenkins has 208

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observed that “filmgoers educated on nonlinear media like video games were expecting a different kind of entertainment experience” (2006: 119). As fans became increasingly fluent in the languages of new media, films increasingly built on digital media. The most explicit articulation of this was to be found in a series of alternate-reality films that appeared in the late 1990s. In this chapter, I focus on three variants of the alternate-reality film: the bifurcation in the past, the bifurcation in the present, and spiral or timeloop films, using Me Myself I (1999), Sliding Doors (1998), and Run Lola Run (1998), respectively, as case studies. These nonlinear, time-shifting narratives have implications for our understanding of temporality, virtuality, and subjectivity. In her discussion of “click theory,” Anna Everett describes the “promise of infinite narrative possibilities suggested by linkages in hypertexts” that offer spectators or users a sense of unlimited choice as they follow avatar characters down one pathway and then another (2003: 16). Me Myself I, Sliding Doors, and Run Lola Run share a concern about the role of digital media in shaping subjectivity and project this concern back onto debates about gender roles in the 1990s. Through the alternate-reality structure, they imagine avatar characters who learn to reinvent or transform themselves, learning about their conditions and, therefore, learning to “solve” the game and regain mastery over their experiences. In this sense, it is perhaps no accident that the protagonists in the films are associated with the major urban centers of Sydney, London, and Berlin, which are easily “readable” as a result of their iconic status. In Matters of Gravity, Scott Bukatman, citing Georg Simmel’s assertion that “in the city one can make and remake one’s self at will,” highlights the relationship between urban space and what Bukatman describes as an “American mythology” of remaking one’s identity, one that permeates national borders to the global cities of Berlin, Sydney, and London in this subset of alternate-reality films (2003: 7). In all three films, the opportunities for self-transformation are mapped onto the cities the main characters inhabit, and a new identity or a new situation always seems to be just around the corner. This is literally the case for Lola whose constantly changing paths through Berlin leave her future, and even the fates of others, constantly in flux. The concept of alternate realities was popularized by a number of physicists writing for both scientific and mainstream audiences, including Stephen Hawking and, more recently, Brian Greene, who discussed the concept of the multiverse, the “hypothetical enlargement of the cosmos in which our universe is but one of an enormous number of separate and distinct universes” (1999: 418). Although the physics of multiverses is never

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fully explored in these alternate-reality films, the basic logic of parallel realities provides a useful metaphor for mapping the fluid subjectivities associated with the digital age. I define alternate-reality films as those that present a type of time traveler who travels to a world other than, but generally simultaneous to, his or her own. We are presented with two or more tangent universes through the creation of a single moment in time when the protagonist makes a decision or when chance intervenes in the protagonist’s experience. This splitting sets up the film’s database aesthetics in which characters are given a choice or set of choices about their future path, creating what might be regarded as a hybrid of database and narrative structures. It allows the films to explore, as Marsha Kinder puts it, “the particular choices made, and the possibility of making other combinations which would create alternative stories” (2002: 6). Importantly, these branching narratives also signal the degree to which individual characters seem to have lost control over their circumstances. In alternate-reality films, characters become something like video game avatars for whom narrative is a means of navigating various subject positions. It is a perception of character that resists stable identification and rejects essentialist notions of identity for something more mutable by choosing one timeline over another. The most common metaphor for describing the temporality of alternate-reality films in the 1990s comes from chaos theory’s concept of the Butterfly Effect, or sensitive dependence on initial conditions. The concept is discussed in a number of sources, including James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science (1987). Gleick explains that meteorologist and mathematician Edward Lorenz determined that tiny deviations in a weather pattern could quickly have large-scale effects, thus making it impossible for computer models to predict the weather beyond a few days (ibid. 20–23). The concept takes its name from the popular description of this principle: a butterfly fluttering its wings in China could combine with other forces and conditions to produce the difference between a thunderstorm and a sunny day across the world. As Gleick is quick to point out, you could, by this logic, change the weather, but you would not know what the weather would have been if you had not acted. Informing representations of time in contemporary cinema, chaos theory logic in alternate-reality films plays out multiple alternatives with the potential to imagine a new, and possibly better, world. In a sense, these films are designed to bring chaos—the unpredictability of modern life— under control. The popularity of chaos theory is underscored by N. Katherine Hayles, who argues that “disorder has become a focal point for

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contemporary theories because it offers the possibility of escaping from what are increasingly perceived as coercive structures of order” (1990: 265). The implicit goal, then, of these alternate-reality films is to evade this sense of coercion, to offer the possibility, however contrived, of an escape from what might be seen as constraining identities or circumstances.

I Want to Be a Rock Star: Me Myself I and Database Identities The first category of alternate-reality films, which involves a splitting in the past, centers on a character who has made a choice in the past and is now confronted in the present with the effects of that decision. This alternate-reality plot permits the protagonist to view the world as it might have been if he or she had made the opposite choice. In Me Myself I, Pamela Drury (Rachel Griffiths), a thirty-something journalist, is facing a personal crisis linked to her upcoming birthday. After a birthday spent on a disappointing blind date, Pamela imagines how her life might have been had she accepted a marriage proposal a few years earlier. Looking back to the instant when Pamela’s world splits, Me Myself I employs a database approach to explore the implications of Pamela’s decision, which determines her career, her residence, and to some extent her tastes and personality. The film frames Pamela’s identity in terms of the acceptance or rejection of heterosexual marriage, a logic that is repeated in Brett Ratner’s film The Family Man (2000), in which Nicolas Cage’s character essentially has to decide between personal isolation accompanied by unimaginable wealth and a working-class job compensated for by a fulfilling marriage and happy family. Questions about female subjectivity are addressed throughout Me Myself I, with the alternate-reality plot conceptualizing Pamela as a kind of avatar who operates less as a developed character and more as a subject position defined by her past decisions. Kinder notes that such characters in interactive database narratives “function not as individuals but as subject positions, which are defined by history, culture, and genre, and which are only temporarily occupied by individual players or actors chosen from a database by those in charge” (2002: 11). While video games may have commercial motivations for designing such characters, as Kinder points out, avatars can also be used ideologically to interrogate gender roles and other social norms. In Me Myself I, this is foregrounded in an opening sequence that features interviews with teenage girls answering questions about their dreams for their careers and personal lives: “I want to be a rock star”; “I want to be a sky-dive instructor”; “I want to get married, but not straightaway.”

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The diversity of the girls’ aspirations and answers is ultimately reflected in Pamela’s own experience as an unmarried, professional woman, setting in motion the film’s focus on time and subjectivity. The alternate-reality plot of Me Myself I maps a set of relations between the subject and everyday life, in this case the “choice” between marriage and family on the one hand and a rewarding career on the other. The film self-consciously refers to the antifeminist backlash of the 1980s and 1990s, described by Susan Faludi in terms of women’s lives being “framed as morality tales in which the ‘good mother’ wins and the independent woman gets punished” (1991: 126). In many of these antifeminist films, career success is depicted as closing out prospects for romance. Me Myself I ’s sympathetic portrayal of Pamela suggests that the film will operate as a corrective to backlash films such as Baby Boom (1987), Fatal Attraction (1987), and Broadcast News (1987). Like many of the career women in the backlash films whose careers placed them in major cities, Pamela becomes identified with the urban spaces of Sydney as she dodges traffic and grabs fast food on the way to work, while wearing fashionable clothes and talking on her cell phone in the manner of the stereotypical 1990s office worker, the multitasker. Moreover, Pamela’s life in Sydney is characterized by a sense of rootlessness. She lives in a downtown apartment that she is renovating, suggesting a life that is itself in a state of transition. After the disappointing blind date, Pamela goes through a box of old photographs and souvenirs, discovering a picture of former boyfriend Robert (David Roberts). Robert’s photograph signifies a return to Pamela’s lost past, as well as the conditional sense of what could have been had she accepted his proposal thirteen years earlier. This establishes the privileged moment in the past that prompts an analysis of her choices, utilizing the logic of the database by establishing these possibilities as a series of mutually exclusive opposites: city versus suburb, single versus married, and career versus family. Pamela later comes into contact with this alternate reality when she is struck by a car driven by an alternate, married version of herself. To distinguish between the two of them, I will refer to the single Pamela as Pamela One and the married Pamela as Pamela Two. Pamela Two is the version of Pamela who accepted Robert’s proposal, moved to the suburbs, and raised three children while writing for a glossy women’s fashion magazine. Pamela One, disoriented by this uncanny meeting, goes home with Pamela Two, and they discuss their shared and divergent memories. Later that afternoon, Pamela Two disappears, leaving Pamela One the responsibility of attending to the needs of Pamela Two’s self-centered husband and their three obnoxious children, all of whom

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seem to have a slightly “virtual” quality in relationship to Pamela One’s “actual” experiences at the beginning of the film. At first, Pamela One is overwhelmed by her new position in this world. Without access to shared memories, she loses access to her original identity. For example, she “forgets” that she has been to the hospital, and her family and friends are unaware of her successful career. She is forced to improvise her relationship with Robert and their children. This notion of virtual forgetting becomes associated with Pamela One’s attempt to rethink and reinterpret her experiences based on her recently acquired knowledge. Through this alternate-reality premise, Pamela One becomes an outsider, which has the effect of rendering everything in this world artificial and unfamiliar. Endeavors to move back to her original world eventually fade as she begins to accept her status in this world and sets about making it as comfortable as possible. Even though she begins to play along in her new reality, Pamela One also begins to observe the degree to which life with Robert would have been undesirable for her, with Robert fulfilling the role of a stereotypical traditional husband, valuing his career over hers and refusing to help with the housework. Throughout these sequences, one of Pamela One’s goals becomes the transformation of Robert into a more caring and sensitive spouse, following a trajectory not unlike the shift Susan Jeffords (1994) associated with the movement from the 1980s “hard body” to the “‘new’ men” of the early 1990s. Thus, Me Myself I seems less concerned with Pamela’s powerlessness within the homogeneous spaces of suburban life and more interested in the avatar character as a way of negotiating multiple identities—and possibly even altering those identities by selecting among a multitude of options from the database. Ultimately, Me Myself I builds towards a convergence between the two possible worlds to provide Pamela One with an escape from her confining new existence. During a family dinner at the restaurant where Robert originally proposed to Pamela, Robert (unaware that a switch has taken place) repeats the proposal, recreating the moment of the original bifurcation. Overwhelmed by the repetition of the marriage proposal, her knowledge of both potential worlds, and Robert’s ignorance of her “real” identity, Pamela One is unable to answer as neither situation is favorable. Does she endanger the world in which Pamela Two lives by declining the proposal and rejecting Robert’s sincere efforts to change? Or does she accept the proposal at the risk of negating her original decision and the life that it produced? The youngest son, Rupert (Trent Sullivan), comes to her rescue by subtly arranging for Pamelas One and Two to return to their original identities. After Pamela Two “returns” to the table, she accepts

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Robert’s proposal. Pamela One then returns to her normal life in Sydney, where she finishes remodeling her apartment and revives a budding romance with a fellow journalist open to the possibilities offered by her life in the city. To some extent, the affirmation of Pamela One’s decision can be read as a corrective to the 1980s backlash films as she is able to prioritize a career over marriage. However, the film’s resolution can also be seen as a double affirmation. Both women have made the right decision, with the film reinforcing an ideology of volition and agency. Through the alternatereality plot, Pamela is given the opportunity to “try on” the role of mother and suburbanite without losing her subject position as an urban professional. This opportunity is provided by Pamela One’s unique status as a kind of game avatar navigating a gaming narrative. However, despite the attempt to question the social norms depicted in the film, the database structure defines Pamela’s choices within a relatively narrow range of possibilities.

Mind the Gap: Sliding Doors and Branching Narratives Sliding Doors is representative of the second variant of alternate-reality films in which the branching takes place in the film’s chronological present. Unlike Me Myself I, Sliding Doors introduces the possibility that our world, and our position within it, is based on contingency rather than any historical legitimacy, on chance rather than choice. Whereas Pamela operates from a position of knowledge, Helen (Gwyneth Paltrow) in Sliding Doors appears unaware of the parallel timelines. The film enables viewers to identify with both versions of Helen, although our knowledge of Helen’s actions in one world conditions our perception of her in the other world. Furthermore, unlike Me Myself I, Sliding Doors offers a contrast not between suburban and urban models of Helen but between two economic classes— the upwardly mobile, white-collar professional and the blue-collar laborer. Helen’s two possible pathways self-consciously follow the logic of the Butterfly Effect. Reinforcing the contingency of her identity on a relatively arbitrary occurrence, Sliding Doors can be read as an implicit critique of the assumption that our choices are entirely free, unencumbered by the historical and social contexts in which they are embedded. The film opens with Helen running late for work, calling ahead for breakfast on her cell phone, and practicing excuses for her tardiness, in a scene that resembles the opening sequence of Me Myself I in affiliating urban life with the demands of multitasking and the possibility of multiple identities. On learning that she has been fired from her job with a London public relations

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firm, Helen leaves her office to take the train home. The shot alludes to the pivotal sequence from Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1982 alternate-reality film Blind Chance in which the film’s protagonist, Witek, catches a train, misses it, or misses it and gets arrested by a police officer, with each scenario producing vastly different results. Similarly in Sliding Doors, depending on whether she catches the train, Helen either discovers her boyfriend, Gerry (John Lynch), in bed with another woman or arrives too late and remains unaware of his infidelity. To distinguish between the two storylines, I refer to the Helen who finds Gerry with Lydia (Jeanne Tripplehorn) as Helen One and the other Helen, who misses the train, as Helen Two. The critical moment when Helen either catches or misses the train is identified with cinematic ways of seeing. When we first observe Helen rushing toward the subway, a small child blocks her path and therefore prevents her from boarding. The film then appears to rewind, repeating the scene, but with Helen unobstructed and therefore alighting the train at the last second. The film crosscuts between the parallel realities—differentiated through visual cues such as a bandage on Helen Two’s forehead and Helen One’s new haircut—and establishes them as equally viable. The simultaneous, rather than successive, narrative structure articulates a logic of time that allows the two worlds to converge and diverge more easily. The result is, in part, that boundaries become blurred to the point that it is sometimes difficult to decipher which of the two worlds we are watching. This confusion builds on their physical likeness; both Helens live in the same London neighborhood and frequent many of the same restaurants and bars. Owing to the contrived contingency of the sliding doors, Helen’s possible lives follow markedly divergent directions. The first Helen, who catches the train, also catches all of the breaks. After discovering the affair, Helen One leaves Gerry, moves in with a friend, and begins dating James (John Hannah), a businessman she meets on the subway. Later, at the suggestion of James, Helen One opens her own public relations firm and successfully launches a friend’s restaurant. In contrast, Helen Two continues in her unsatisfying relationship with Gerry and is forced to take unpleasant service jobs waiting tables and delivering sandwiches to the offices where she previously worked. This contrast plays out most explicitly during the makeover of Helen One. After the breakup, Helen’s friend Anna (Zara Turner) suggests a new hairstyle and wardrobe, as well as a career change. The result is quite literally a new Helen. As Anne Friedberg points out, “Like the hysteric, the shopper may be calling into question constraining identities—sexual,

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racial, class—but to act out anxieties about identity in the realm of the market, one must believe in the commodity’s transformative power” (1993: 120). Helen’s ability to alter herself is predicated almost entirely on her ability to escape her constraining identity through the purchase of consumer goods. Sliding Doors and Me Myself I readily map the desire for self-metamorphosis onto the database aesthetic imagined by the films’ branching narratives. Like other alternate-reality films, Sliding Doors provides an escape within its narrative to bring under control the multiplication of worlds. This takes place through the convergence between the two worlds after Helens One and Two are injured, more or less concurrently, and taken to the hospital, leaving both Helens in comas. Eventually Helen One dies, and thus her fairy-tale relationship with James and her career in public relations end. Helen Two wakes from her coma, now completely aware of Gerry’s affair with Lydia. During this sequence, the film seems to imply through subjective editing that Helen Two recalls the experiences of Helen One by showing her “remembering” locations that only Helen One has visited. In this sense, the film equips Helen Two with a special form of virtual memory, placing her in a position of cognitive mastery over the alternate worlds that she has experienced. Through this mystical move, Sliding Doors potentially dispels the sense that the world was ever split. This is reinforced when Helen Two meets James, for the first time, in the elevator as they are leaving the hospital (where he had been visiting his mother) and repeats his favorite line from Monty Python. Through this form of memory, the film is capable of containing the more troubling aspects of the splitting. Helen Two is rewarded for her suffering by her “lucky escape” from Gerry and a working-class life. As we have already witnessed James’ effect on Helen—advising her to open her own PR firm—we are invited to project this world onto Helen Two’s future. Therefore, even though the film seems to choose the working-class Helen, it in fact chooses James and the fairy-tale life that he represents. By endowing Helen with the memories of her other existence, the film grants her the ability to regain agency over her experiences and forge a new identity.

After the Game Is Before the Game: Run Lola Run and Time-Loop Narratives The time-loop film presents a slightly different image of time from the bifurcation in the past and the present. In time-loop films, such as Groundhog Day (1993) and Run Lola Run, a character repeats the same day,

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the same hour, or the same twenty minutes, until he or she can regain control over the temporally disruptive situation and overcome the cycle of repetitions. Run Lola Run joins Me Myself I and Sliding Doors in using the alternate-reality structure to work through questions about constructions of subjectivity. More explicitly than Me Myself I and Sliding Doors, Run Lola Run is figured as a kind of game narrative, gleefully appropriating the time-loop structure of video games and imposing it on cinematic narrative, with Lola quite literally playing the “game.” Run Lola Run’s violation of the laws of physics corresponds with breaking the rules of cinema, and perhaps the rules of life itself. The film’s collage of styles, genres, and cinematic references maps onto Lola’s attempts to navigate the city of Berlin. Run Lola Run is a database of the metropolis in much the same way that for Lev Manovich, Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1928) is a “database of city life in the 1920s” (2001: 276). Run Lola Run’s director, Tom Tykwer, makes use of familiar landmarks to convey Berlin’s status as a city in perpetual transition. The plot of Run Lola Run is relatively simple: Lola (Franka Potente) receives a call from her boyfriend, Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), who has lost 100,000 deutschmarks that he was supposed to deliver to a local crime boss. Lola has twenty minutes to find the money and deliver it to Manni at a specific location or he will be killed. The result is a temporal expansion in which the chronological time of the story is actually considerably shorter than the duration of the film. After hanging up the phone, Lola quickly flashes through the people who could come to her aid—presented as a series of photographs—and decides on her father, who works at a bank. The movie gives Lola three chances to “win,” that is, to get the money and rescue her boyfriend. In each round, split-second differences have profound consequences on Lola as well as the people she encounters. For example, Lola’s time of arrival at the bank will determine whether she witnesses her father arguing with his pregnant lover, which in turn affects his reaction and willingness to grant her request. In the first round, Lola arrives to meet Manni too late, and she is fatally shot when they try to rob a grocery store. In the second round, Lola succeeds in getting the money from her father’s bank, but Manni is hit by a car. The final round takes a very different path, in that Lola’s running does not cause a car accident, as it has in the first two rounds. As a result, her father has already left the bank before she can see him. With no other apparent options, Lola runs into a casino and bets on the roulette wheel, winning twice in a row after betting on the same number. Meanwhile, her altered itinerary creates a new

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Out of time: Lola, after arriving seconds too late, glances through a grocery store window after Manni has started robbing it in Run Lola Run (1998). Photographer: Bernd Spauke, Getty Images.

situation in which Manni crosses paths with the homeless man who took his money and is therefore able to make the payoff to his boss, Ronnie (Heino Ferch). Like Sliding Doors and Me Myself I, Run Lola Run addresses issues of time and space and their relationship to (female) subjectivity through the logic of chaos theory, overlapping the film’s treatment of the Butterfly Effect on the video game narrative. Positioned within the so-called cinematic revolution of the late 1990s, Run Lola Run consistently evokes the prospect of transformation. Its pyrotechnic visuals and playful, subversive treatment of interactive storytelling inspired New York Times film critic Janet Maslin to describe it as “posthuman” (1999).1 Lola’s post-human status underscores the film’s task of resolving anxieties regarding the effects of digital media on both cinema and identity. This is set up in the introduction when the camera tracks randomly through a crowd of people until it finds supporting characters from the narrative and briefly focuses on them. In the accompanying voice-over we hear the following monologue: Narrator: Man, probably the most mysterious species on the planet. A mystery of unanswered questions: Who are we? Where

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do we come from? Where are we going? How do we know what we think we know? Why do we believe anything at all? These questions are addressed in the intervals between rounds. During the first interval, “after” Lola’s death, Lola asks Manni how he knows he loves her. During the second, Manni imagines what Lola would do if he died. In both cases, the film emphasizes the role of the other in the experience of time, with the death of either Manni or Lola prompting the flashback to the past and subsequently the return to the starting point of the “game.” In the first interval, epistemological questions take precedence, with Lola challenging Manni’s ability to know that he loves her, and in the second interval Manni poses a “what-if ” question that follows the temporal logic of the film. Run Lola Run extends this consideration of time and identity through Lola’s interaction with the film’s minor characters, alluding to a general fear that humans no longer have control over their circumstances. Lola’s split-second delays seemingly decide the futures of these individuals. When she runs into a middle-aged woman on the street, through a series of flashforward snapshots we see how the woman’s life will be affected because of that encounter. (The woman wins the lottery in one world, she kidnaps a baby in the next, and she becomes a Jehovah’s Witness in the third.) In all cases, the snapshots convey the arbitrariness of the directions the minor characters’ lives take as Lola moves through the streets of Berlin. In this regard, Run Lola Run can be understood as representative of the “death of cinema” movie. Ingeborg Majer O’Sickey reads Run Lola Run in terms of this discussion of cinema and advances in technology, stating that “while it would be hyperbolic to claim that the new technologies ring the death knell of cinema as we know it, it is fair to say that they have opened up a myriad of possibilities for the industry” (2002: 124). This revolutionary language informs the film’s extensive allusions to the history of cinema: Run Lola Run functions as a type of database of cinematic citations ranging from Blind Chance and the film adaptation of The Tin Drum (1979) to Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). These nods to the cinematic past assume an audience that has some knowledge of or competency over this history through domestic film technologies such as VCRs, DVD players, and cable television. In an interview, Tykwer commented that “a film about the possibilities of life, it was clear, needed to be a film about the possibilities of cinema as well” (quoted in Whalen 2000: 37). Tykwer goes on to compare his film to the famous “trick” films made by film pioneer George Méliès, who introduced fantasy elements to cinema. Specifically, Tykwer cites the apocryphal event when

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Méliès was shooting in Paris, his camera jammed briefly, and in the time it took for him to fix the problem, an autobus had been replaced by a hearse— a technique that became known as the “substitution trick.”2 Tykwer employs this substitution trick during the film’s first round when a medium shot of Lola with a young woman in the background is replaced by a medium close-up of Lola with an older woman in the foreground. Like Méliès, Tykwer suggests an improbable passage of time that draws attention to cinema’s role as a virtual time machine regulating and organizing time and history. The notion of urban space is introduced through the “fractured” city of Berlin—fractured as a result of being the epicenter of Cold War conflict. Andreas Huyssen argues that Berlin’s process of construction and rebuilding in the 1990s makes it an interesting site for the investigation of the city as a cultural sign, noting that “the city on the Spree is a text frantically being written and rewritten” (1997: 57).3 The sense of the city “being rewritten” is registered visually through the images of road construction that Lola dodges as she races against time to meet Manni. Lola’s journey through the metropolis follows a similar course in that each journey “writes and rewrites” what has come before, erasing the effects of the previous rounds. The conflict is established because Lola failed to meet Manni at a predetermined location because she forgot that there was a street in the old East Berlin that had the same name. This moment of forgetfulness recalls Huyssen’s argument about the transformations of Berlin associated with the fall of the wall—transformations that included “the imposed and often petty renaming of streets in East Berlin, which were given back their presocialist, and often decidedly antisocialist cast” (ibid. 60). Lola’s position as an avatar becomes clearly linked to her negotiation of the ongoing changes to the city. And, as Huyssen implies, these changes are directly linked to the utopian, post-Cold War historical “forgetting” of Berlin’s past, setting in tension Tykwer’s preoccupation with the history of (German) cinema and an image of Berlin as a city that seems to be relentlessly erasing its own past. Like the other alternate-reality films discussed in this chapter, Run Lola Run focuses on questions of female subjectivity. In his comparison of Blind Chance and Run Lola Run, Slavoj Žižek addresses the film’s timeloop structure, commenting that “the first words . . . provide the proper co-ordinates of a video game: as in the usual survival video game, Lola is given three lives. ‘Real life’ itself is thus rendered as a fictional video-game experience” (2001: 81). Lola resembles a video game heroine, slowly mastering her situation until she succeeds in rescuing Manni, but at the same time rendering the world of Berlin virtualized. As with Helen in Sliding

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Doors, Lola is equipped with a form of virtual memory that allows her to learn from each round. For example, during the first round, Manni has to instruct Lola on how to take off the safety latch of a gun during their illfated robbery, but in the second round, Lola expertly handles a gun during the robbery of her father’s bank. Lola and the bank’s security guard, Schuster (Armin Rohde), also seem to have a psychic connection, implied when he gently teases Lola after she arrives unusually late during the third round by saying, “You’ve come at last, my dear.” The film’s international cult status can be attributed in part to Franka Potente’s performance and Lola’s techno style. Slate reviewer David Edelstein described her as a “running red-haired riot grrrl” (1999), which became one of the film’s most memorable images. This style marks Lola as the object of spectacle, but it also situates her as a version of the “new woman” of the 1990s. As Barbara Kosta writes, “Lola is the fantasy, the specularized body that arouses pleasure; she is the source of visual pleasure that is erotic in its potential to seduce. At the same time, Lola is the new woman: athletic, determined, and powerful” (2004: 169). This tension between Lola as spectacle and Lola as action hero is central to the film. In a somewhat reductive reading, O’Sickey concludes that Lola is “tamed and reigned [sic] in” at the end of the film (2002: 131). O’Sickey bases this reading on Manni’s masculine performance after finding the street person and recovering the money—his homosocial bonding with the crime boss and his swagger when he approaches Lola. However, Manni’s bravado is undercut by the previous rounds, in which he helplessly waits by the phone for Lola to rescue him, and by our knowledge that his discovery of the vagrant is itself a happy accident precipitated by Lola’s modified itinerary during the third round. Lola’s status as the action hero who drives the narrative is underscored in her final, self-conscious glance at the camera, her return of the spectator’s gaze when Manni naïvely asks what she is carrying in her bag. Viewers and Lola share the secret that she too has come up with the 100,000 deutschmarks needed at the beginning of the film. Rather than seeing Manni as empowered by his accidental retrieval of the lost money, Run Lola Run—through Lola’s conspiratorial wink, preserved in time through the magic of a freeze-frame—invites us to view her as the author of the film’s ending.

Conclusion The alternate-reality films of the 1990s provide their heroines with tremendous power to recreate their identities and to alter their everyday experiences. Building from digital cinema’s splintering of narrative time, these

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films depict characters who function much like video game avatars, able to reset and “start over” when faced with undesirable situations. This desire for mastery over time and identity can be read as a response to the “coercive structures of order” described by Hayles (1990: 265). In fact, by offering their avatar characters the option to repeat or rewrite the past, the films permit a fantasy response to the fragmented identities associated with the digital age. However, whereas Me Myself I reinforces an ideology of choice, with both Pamelas essentially taking ownership of their lot in life, both Sliding Doors and Run Lola Run seem to imply that personal identity may be contingent, based merely on chance encounters. And yet all three films use their characters’ fluid subjectivities to identify problems with contemporary life and present potentially liberating “resolutions.” Thus, while alternate-reality films may build on the database narratives associated with the end of cinema, they do so in order to imagine new possibilities for the present.

Notes 1. This echoes N. Katherine Hayles’ use of the term in How We Became Posthuman (1999). 2. Anne Friedberg relates this story in her discussion of Méliès in Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (1993: 86–87). See also Paul Hammond (1975). 3. Huyssen’s argument draws from Saskia Sassen’s notion of global cities, in which the city moves from “regional or national center of production to the city as international center of communications, media, and services” (1991: 66).

References Bukatman, Scott (2003), Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cheshire, Godfrey (1999), “The death of film/The decay of cinema,” New York Press, 12 (34). www.nypress.com/print.cfm?content_id=243 Edelstein, David (1999), “Chance and consequences,” Slate, June 19. www. slate.com/id/30691 Everett, Anna (2003), “Digitextuality and click theory: theses on convergence media in the digital age,” in Anna Everett and John T. Caldwell (eds), New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality. New York and London: Routledge, 3–28. Faludi, Susan (1991), Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women. New York: Three Rivers.

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Friedberg, Anne (1993), Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gleick, James (1987), Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Penguin. Gordinier, Jeff (1999), “1999: The year that changed movies,” Entertainment Weekly, 514. www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,271806,00.html Greene, Brian (1999), The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. New York: W. W. Norton. Hammond, Paul (1975), Marvelous Méliès. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hayles, N. Katherine (1990), Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. — (1999), How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Huyssen, Andreas (1997), “The voids of Berlin,” Critical Inquiry, 24: 57–81. Jeffords, Susan (1994), Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Jenkins, Henry (2006), Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. Kinder, Marsha (2002), “Hot spots, avatars, and narrative fields forever: Buñuel’s legacy for new digital media and interactive database narrative,” Film Quarterly, 55 (4): 2–15. Kosta, Barbara (2004), “Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run and the usual suspects: the avant-garde, popular culture and history,” in Agnes C. Müller (ed.), German Popular Culture: How “American” Is It? Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 165–79. Manovich, Lev (2001), The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Maslin, Janet (1999), “‘Run Lola Run’: a dangerous game with several endings,” The New York Times. www.nytimes.com/library/film/032699lolafilm-review.html O’Sickey, Ingeborg Majer (2002), “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets (or does she?): time and desire in Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 19 (2): 123–31. Sassen, Saskia (1991), The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Whalen, Tom (2000), “Run Lola Run,” Film Quarterly, 53 (3): 33–40. Žižek, Slavoj (2001), The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski between Theory and Post-Theory. London: BFI Publishing.

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Filmography Baby Boom (1987), Dir. Charles Shyer. MGM. Blind Chance (1982), Dir. Krzysztof Kieślowski. Tor Film Studio. Broadcast News (1987), Dir. James L. Brooks. Twentieth Century Fox. Family Man, The (2000), Dir. Brett Ratner. Universal Studios. Fatal Attraction (1987), Dir. Adrian Lyne. Paramount Pictures. Groundhog Day (1993), Dir. Harold Ramis. Sony Pictures. Man with a Movie Camera (1928), Dir. Dziga Vertov. Kino. Me Myself I (1999), Dir. Pip Karmel. Gaumont. Run Lola Run (1998), Dir. Tom Tykwer. X-Filme Creative Pool. Sliding Doors (1998), Dir. Peter Howitt. Miramax. Tin Drum, The (1979), Dir. Volker Schlöndorff. PS KR. Vertigo (1958), Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Universal Studios. Wings of Desire (1987), Dir. Wim Wenders. MGM.

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List of Contributors Steven A. Carr is an Associate Professor of Communication at Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne (United States). He has been widely published in books and journals such as Film Criticism, Cinema Journal, and Cinema and Modernity, and is the author of Hollywood and Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History Up to World War II. Roger F. Cook is a Professor of German in the Department of German and Russian Studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia (United States) and is Director of the Film Studies Program. He has published widely on German film, literature, and cultural history from the eighteenth century to the present, including the books The Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image, Narrative, and the Postmodern Condition (co-edited with Gerd Gemünden) and By the Rivers of Babylon: Heinrich Heine’s Late Songs and Reflections. Pamela L. Kerpius received her MA in Cinema Studies from New York University (United States). Her interest is in political and presidential history in postwar American cinema and the interrelation of history and fiction. She is a freelance writer and film critic, having written for publications including The Rumpus and Time Out Chicago. She has worked in documentary film research and is currently a copywriter at a Manhattan advertising agency. Christina Lee is a Lecturer in Communication and Cultural Studies at Curtin University (Australia). Her areas of research include memory studies, fandom, and youth in cinema. Her work can be found in publications such as Continuum, Cultural Studies Review, Images of the “Modern Woman” in Asia: Global Media, Local Meanings, and The Revolution Will Not Be Downloaded: Dissent in the Digital Age. She is the author of Screening Generation X: The Politics and Popular Memory of Youth in Contemporary Cinema.

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Michael Pigott is an Assistant Professor of Video Art and Digital Media at the University of Warwick (United Kingdom). His research interests are in video art, film aesthetics, digital media, and world cinema. Michael is the author of World Film Locations: Venice (forthcoming) and has published in Directory of World Cinema: Eastern Europe, The Machinima Reader, and Kronoscope. J. A. Rice is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Kentucky University (United States). His research focuses on new media writing, visual rhetoric, and pedagogical theory and has appeared in numerous scholarly journals and collections including Composition Forum, Educational Theory and Philosophy, and Writing Posthumanism Writing. With Sidney I. Dobrin and Michael Vastola, he is the editor of Beyond Postprocess. Michael Sugimoto is an Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and Film in the Asian Studies Program at Pepperdine University (United States). He teaches in premodern and modern Japanese literature and postmodern Japanese mass culture and film, researching the links between social memory, subjectivity, and national identity. He has published in Comparative Literature Studies and National Identities. Adam Trainer is the Music Director of RTR FM, Western Australia’s longest running FM radio station. He has a PhD in Communication Studies from Murdoch University (Australia). Adam has been published in journals and books including Australian Screen Education, Senses of Cinema, Liverpool of the South Seas: Perth and Its Popular Music, and Creative Nation: An Australian Cinema and Cultural Studies Reader. Zoe Trodd is a Faculty Fellow in the Departments of English and African American Studies at Columbia University (United States). She has a PhD in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University and her books include American Protest Literature, To Plead Our Own Cause: Personal Stories by Today’s Slaves, and Modern Slavery: The Secret World of 27 Million People. She researches American protest literature and visual culture with a focus on how writers and activists use the memory of earlier protest movements. Chuck Tryon is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Fayetteville State University (United States) where his teaching and research have focused on various aspects of film, television, and convergent media. He is

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the author of Reinventing Cinema: Movies in the Age of Media Convergence. His essays have appeared in publications such as The Journal of Film and Video, Film Criticism, Jump Cut, and The Essential Science Fiction Reader. Daniel Cross Turner is an Assistant Professor of English at Coastal Carolina University (United States). His work can be found in publications such as Genre, Mosaic, Southern Literary Journal, and Mississippi Quarterly. Daniel’s forthcoming book Southern Crossings: Poetry, Memory, and the Transcultural South explores conjunctions and conflicts between primitivism (aesthetic, philosophical, ethnographic, and ecological) and modernity in the literature, cinema, and other cultural artifacts of the US South from 1920 to the present. James Walters is a Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Birmingham (United Kingdom). He is the author of Alternative Worlds in Hollywood Cinema and Fantasy Film: A Critical Introduction and co-editor of Film Moments: Criticism, History, Theory (with Tom Brown). James’ area of research is in film and television aesthetics. Yiman Wang is an Assistant Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz (United States). Her book entitled Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Hollywood is forthcoming. She has published widely on Asian cinema and her work can be found in publications including Film Quarterly, Camera Obscura, Cinema at the City’s Edge: Film and Urban Networks in East Asia, and Engendering Cinema: Chinese Women Filmmakers Inside and Outside China.

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Index Abbas, Ackbar 128, 139 Across the Continent on the Kansas Pacific Railroad (Route of the 35th Parallel) 19 adaptation, filmic 6, 43, 45, 113, 115, 149, 219 aesthetic 3, 9, 18, 33, 61, 66, 93, 107, 111, 118, 131, 146, 148, 152 cinematic 35, 49, 126, 128, 150, 153 collective 113 of melancholy 108 punk 148, 150, 154 age of mechanical reproduction 33, 109 Ah Cheng 113, 114 Ahrends, Martin 75, 76 Akira Kurosawa 89 Alcott, Louisa May 15 All The President’s Men (book, 1974) 6, 40–3 All The President’s Men (film, 1976) 6, 45, 46, 49, 52, 55 alternate-reality films 209–12, 214–16, 220–2 variants of 209, 214 American Civil War 5, 16, 20, 24 films of 12–14, 20, 24 memory of 14 photography of 13–20 American Occupation of Japan 97, 98 amnesia 89, 161, 164, 167 Amores Perros (2000) 179 Anderson, Benedict 88 Anderson, Wes 9, 74, 159, 160, 164

Ansell Pearson, Keith 182 archive fever 105, 106, 109, 118 Arendt, Hannah 91 Armstrong, Louis 28, 31, 32, 35–7 art object replication 33, 34 artifact 15, 27, 30, 32, 94, 96, 127, 143, 155, 183, 187, 188 Ashes of Time (1994) 126 Atkinson, Michael 152 atrocity footage 59 legal and political use of 65–8 manipulation of 62–5 and newspaper advertising 66, 67 and radio broadcast 63, 64 reception of 57, 58, 61, 62, 67 use as trial evidence 59 and use in German re-education 67 “Attack” (1998) 173 audible narration 31 audience 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 35, 47, 50, 54, 63, 79, 110, 111, 135, 201, 208, 219 expectations 62, 67 and memory 180 and time phenomenon 58 aura 33–5 auteurism 70, 169–72, 174 parody of 172 authenticity 8, 41, 46, 52, 67, 83, 143, 149, 155, 164 blurred 144 historical 31, 37 and inauthenticity 64, 160, 172 authority 2, 8, 146, 154

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Index

autonomy 74, 82, 84, 99 avatar subjectivities 10, 213, 222 and gender identity 209 and post-human 218, 222 Baby Boom (1987) 212 Back to the Future (1985) 199, 201, 203 “Bad Route” (1998) 173 Barker, Bernard 45, 47–9 Barnard, George 14–17, 20, 24 Barnouw, Dagmar 65 Barrymore, Drew 201, 202, 206 Barthes, Roland 93 Bazin, André 174 Becker, Wolfgang 71, 73 Benedict, Franklin 170, 172 Benjamin, Walter 33, 34, 109, 117, 181 Bergson, Henri 9, 180–3, 185 Berlin Wall 72, 74 Bernstein, Carl 6, 40–5, 47, 51–5 Betts, Paul 83 Beziehungskomödien (situational comedies) 70 biopic 5, 8, 142, 152, 154–6 Bitter Love or Lost Love 107 Bleibtreu, Moritz 217 Blind Chance (1982) 215, 219, 220 Blue Kite, The (1993) 105 Bogdanovich, Peter 169 Bowie, David 196 Boym, Svetlana 118, 119, 137 Bradlee, Ben 43 Brady, Mathew 13, 14, 19 branching narratives 210, 214–16 Britton, Andrew 204 Broadcast News (1987) 212 Bromley Contingent 152, 156 Bronfen, Elizabeth 130 Browne, Jackson 168, 174 Brühl, Daniel 72 Brüssig, Thomas 71 Boy George 196 Buchenwald, forced tours 63

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Buckland, Warren 199 Buck-Morss, Susan 90 Bukatman, Scott 209 Buñuel, Luis 167, 170 Burns, Ken 6, 27–9, 31–7 see also Jazz; Ken Burns effect Bush, George W. 61, 89 Butler, Rhett 22, 23 Butterfly Effect 210, 214, 218 Byington, Spring 14 Calderón, Miguel 172–4 camera 19, 29–31, 54, 110, 111, 117 and counternarrative 24 movement of 14, 30, 31, 51, 95, 110, 112, 132, 167, 184, 198 Cantril, Hadley 64 capitalism 70, 73–6, 83, 84, 151, 200 Carr, Steven Alan 6, 7, 57 Carrey, Jim 178 Cartier-Bresson, Henri 14, 15 cartography 90 Cartwright, Lisa 62 Catlin, George 18 Chaos: Making a New Science 210 chaos theory 210, 218 Chase, Daveigh 192 Chen Chang 138 Chen Kaige 120 Cheshire, Godfrey 208 Cheung, Leslie 127, 134, 135 Cheung, Maggie 127, 129, 134, 136, 138 Chinese cinema retrospectives 108 Chow, Rey 100, 101, 127 chronology 2, 28, 44, 60, 214, 217 Chungking Express (1996) 128, 129, 131, 135, 136, 138, 139 cinema, as time machine 220 cinema, time effects in 2 cinema verité 64–6 cinematic Heimat humor 70 cinematic retrospection and reprisal 105

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Index Citizen Kane (1941) 178, 206 click theory 209 Coburn, Tom 62 Cole, Nat King 138 collective memory 5, 24, 91, 137 collective narratives 79 commercial culture 114 commercialization 65, 108, 120 Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) 44, 47, 51 Common Market 84 Communist Party, in China 106 consumer socialism 84 consumerism decadence as a close coordinate of 114 real existing 81–5 context 7, 18, 28, 30, 37, 42, 52, 58, 59, 81, 94, 99, 114, 127, 145, 150, 191, 205, 215 cultural 27, 67 filmic 32 historical 28, 33, 36, 41, 61, 133 issues of 57 Cook, Bernie 68 Cook, Paul 8, 145, 148, 156 Cook, Roger F. 7, 70 Cooke, Paul 85 Coraci, Frank 195, 196 counterfactuals 23 counter-memories 5, 12, 20, 24 counternarrative 12, 13, 20, 21, 24 cracks of 23 failure to embrace 22 Cox, Alex 8, 142, 152–4 Coyle, Jake 43 Crane, Stephen 12, 14, 23, 24 Crowther, Bosley 58, 63, 66 Crowther, Bruce 54 CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000–) 100 Cukor, George 13 cultural capital 31, 58, 118, 120

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cultural identity 84, 151 cultural media 97 cultural memory 67, 82, 167 cultural movement 144, 147, 151, 152 Custen, George F. 156 Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé 18 daguerreotypes 3, 18, 19 Dallas (1978–91) 195 Daring and Suffering: A History of the Great Railway Adventure 20 database aesthetics 210, 216 database narratives 10, 211, 222 David, Keith 28, 29, 34 Davis, Fred 174 Davis, Miles 38 Days of Being Wild (1991) 126, 134–8 de Havilland, Olivia 22 Dead or Alive 196 Dean, John W. 43, 49, 50, 51 decadent inertia (da fei bu qi) 113 Dee, Frances 21 Deep Throat 49, 52, 53 Deep Truth 40 DEFA 70 déjà disparu 128 Derrida, Jacques 105, 118 Destructors, The 202 Diary of Anne Frank, The (1959) 58 digital media 209, 218 diorama 3, 18, 165 documentary 6, 7, 26–8, 33–7, 57–60, 64–7, 143, 144, 148, 149 and fiction 59, 64, 65 Documentation Center for the Everyday Culture of the GDR 73 Donnie Darko (2001) 9, 191, 192, 194–6, 198–201, 204–6 Doppelgänger effect 80, 134 doubling effect 99, 136 Doyle, Christopher 128, 138

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232 Draaisma, Douwe 10, 183 dramatization 6, 41–4, 179, 195, 204 Draper, J. W. 183 dream 2, 22, 35–8, 79, 124–7, 137–9, 177, 184, 186, 189, 199, 211 Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West 90 Dresen, Andreas 70 Duran Duran 195 Duval, James 194 E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) 199, 202 Early, Gerald 29 Echo & The Bunnymen 196 Edelstein, David 221 Ehrlichman, John 50 Eichmann, Adolf 59, 61 Eiji Okada 93 Einstein’s Dreams 2, 3 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 63, 67 Ellbogengesellschaft (“society of elbows”) 76 emperor system, in Japan 97 emplotment 14, 40 Ervin, Sam 47, 49 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) 4, 9, 177, 179–83, 188–90 European Union 84, 85 Everett, Anna 209 expository documentary 27, 33 use of historical context in 28 failure 7, 8, 106, 113, 137, 200–2 to acknowledge otherness 96 celebration of 37 to embrace counternarrative 22 and postsocialist nostalgia 117–20 predetermined 105, 113 representational 36 fallacy of presentism 57 fallacy of realism 116

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Index Faludi, Susan 212 Family Man, The (2000) 211 fascism 91 Fatal Attraction (1987) 212 Fei Mu 8, 105, 107–9, 112–20 Felt, Mark 52 Ferch, Heino 218 Fielding, Raymond 65 Fifth Generation filmmakers 104, 113 Fight Club (1999) 4 filmic nostalgia 105, 106, 113, 117, 118, 120 Filth and the Fury, The (2000) 8, 142, 143, 148–52, 154, 156 Fischer, David Hackett 57 flashback 9, 99, 100, 167, 177–9, 182–4, 190, 219 Flock of Seagulls, A 196 forgetting 4, 60, 88, 89, 98, 101, 181, 189, 213, 220 Fox, Michael J. 199 Freud, Sigmund 126 Friedberg, Anne 2, 215, 222 Frow, John 106 futurity 109, 113, 118–20 Gabbard, Krin 37 Gable, Clark 22 Gabriel, Teshome H. 118, 119 Gardner, Alexander 13–20, 24 Garment, Leonard 52, 53 General, The (1927) 5, 13, 16, 20, 21 Generation Golf 82, 83 Giddens, Gary 28, 36, 37 Gleick, James 210 global pacifism 92 globalization 4, 84, 108, 119, 128 Globe Theater 3 Glover, Crispin 200 Glover, Danny 164, 171 Go Trabi Go (1991) 70 Gondry, Michel 9, 178, 185, 187 Gone with the Wind (1939) 5, 13, 21, 22

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Index Gong Li 136, 138 Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) 7, 70, 72–9, 81–5 Gordinier, Jeff 208 Gracyk, Theodore 28 Grainge, Paul 161, 164, 167, 169, 174 Grant, Beth 202 Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, The (1980) 8, 142, 144–9, 154 Greene, Brian 209 Greenwald, Alex 197 Griffith, D. W. 14, 178 Griffiths, Rachel 211 Grill Point (Halbe Treppe) (2002) 70 Grosz, Elizabeth 2 Groundhog Day (1993) 216 Grundy, Bill 153 Gyllenhaal, Jake 193 Gyllenhaal, Maggie 192 Hackman, Gene 162, 164, 166 Haldeman, H. R. 43, 44, 50, 51 Hamlet (1948) 149 Hannah, John 215 Hanson, Cynthia A. 156 Happy Together (1997) 135, 138 Hausmann, Leander 71 Havill, Adrian 40 Hawking, Stephen 209 Hayles, N. Katherine 210, 211, 222 Hearts of the World (1918) 14 Hegel, Georg 88 Hepburn, Katharine 21 Hinds, Samuel S. 21 Hiroshima 7, 89, 91–6, 98, 99 Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) 7, 89, 93–7, 100, 101 Hiroshima Traces 89 Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park 91–3, 101 historical accuracy 46, 51, 54 historical context 28, 32, 33, 36, 61, 133

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historical meaning 31, 35, 36 historical memoir 42 historical memory 91, 99 historical subject 27, 33, 35, 37 historiography 5 and fallacy of presentism 57 and myth 57–61, 64 history 2–8, 10, 40–2, 129, 132, 143, 144, 191, 195–8 contemporary 6, 137, 167 contested 198–204 repeating 133–9 rewriting 8 Hitchcock, Alfred 219 Hitler, Adolf 61 Hoffman, Dustin 45 Holbrook, Hal 52 Holiday, Billie 38 Holocaust (1978) 58 Holocaust films and cinema verité 64, 65 and cinematography 62, 65 and controversies 58, 62 and documentary 57–60, 64–7 and newsreels 58–67 television broadcast of 59, 62, 68 Holocaust imagery 57, 62, 65 and commercialization 62–5 and objectivity 62, 65 and photojournalism 65, 66 Hong Kong cinema, contemporary 128 Horse Thief, The (1986) 121 Howard, Leslie 22 Hughes, John 197 Hui, Ann 128 Hunt, E. Howard 47, 49, 50 Huston, Anjelica 162 Huston, John 14, 23, 24 Huyssen, Andreas 4, 10, 220, 222 city as cultural sign 220 Hype! (1996) 156

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Index

Ice Storm, The (1997) 205 iconic period references 195 ideology 26, 37, 38, 90, 97, 116, 151, 198, 214, 222 Žižekian 27, 36 Ideology and the Image 30 Idol, Billy 196 Illies, Florian 82, 83, 86 Imagined Communities 88 imperialism 91, 92, 97, 99 In the Mood for Love (2000) 8, 126, 129, 131, 133–5, 137–9 In the Shadow of the Moon (2006) 85 Indiana Jones (1981–) 199 interactivity 208 and interactive storytelling 218 intertextual reference 106, 134, 135, 202 invasion of China 96 It 195 J. Geils Band, The 196 Jackson, Samuel L. 28 Jähn, Sigmund 74, 80 Jakubowska, Wanda 60, 65, 68 Jameson, Fredric 4, 161 Jazz 6, 27 “The Gift” 36, 38 “Gumbo” 28, 31, 35, 38 “A Masterpiece by Midnight” 31, 38 “Swing: The Velocity of Celebration” 29, 30 Jazz history conceptual identity 32 event 32 filmic representation 27–32, 35–8 ideological dreams 35–8 and internal dialectic 32–5 Jeffords, Susan 213 Jenkins, Henry 208 Jing Tsu 115 Jones, Kent 175 Jones, LeRoi 38 Jones, Steve 8, 145, 149, 156

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Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) 58 Jules, Gary 194 Junichiro Koizumi 97 Kaiser, Olaf 70 Kaminski, Janusz 62 Kaplan, Alice 101 Keaton, Buster 13, 14 Kelly, Richard 9, 191, 195–9, 201–6 Ken Burns effect 27, 28, 31, 38 Kerpius, Pamela L. 6, 40 Khamatova, Chulpan 78 Kierkegaard, Søren 119 Kieślowski, Krzysztof 215 Kinder, Marsha 210 and interactive database narratives 211 King, Cammie 22 King, Stephen 195 Kleindienst, Richard 54 Kleinert, Andreas 70 kongqi (air) 107, 116 Kosta, Barbara 221 Krämer, Peter 201 kumen (angst and melancholy) 115, 116, 118 Kwan, Stanley 128 Lacuna Inc. 178, 183, 184 Lange, Art 38 Lanzmann, Claude 96 Last Stage, The (1948) 60, 65, 68 Lau, Andy 127, 134 Lau, Carina 133, 134 Law, Kar 120 Le Feu follet (1963) 171, 175 Leacock, Richard 64 Leavenworth, Scotty 192 Lee, Christina 8, 124 Lee, Leo Ou-fan 121 Leigh, Vivien 21 Leung, Tony 129, 134, 135 Leutze, Emanuel 19

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Index Li, Tianji 107, 114, 115 Liberation 59, 60, 64, 65 Liddy, Gordon 50 Liebovich, Louis 45 Lightman, Alan 2, 129 lin mo (trace) 109, 112 Lin, Brigitte 134, 139 Lin, Maya 101 Ling He 107, 108 Lipsitz, George 146 Little Women (film, 1933) 5, 13, 14, 18, 20 Live Forever (2003) 156 Lodge, John 21 Loewy, Hanno 68 Lorenz, Edward 210 Lost Landscape (Verlorene Landschaft) (1992) 70 Lucas, George 191, 199, 204 Luchting, Wolfgang 95 Lukas, Florian 75 Lukas, Paul 21 Lydon, John 145, 148–51, 156 Lynch, David 197 Lynch, John 215 MacGregor, Clark 47 Mackey, Nathaniel 38 Magnificent Ambersons, The (1942) 171, 175 Malle, Louis 170, 171, 175 Malone, Jena 192 Man with a Movie Camera (1928) 217 Manifest Destiny 19 Manovich, Lev 217 Manson, Marilyn 154, 155 Mao Zedong 3 mapmaking 90 March of Time, The (1935–51) 65 Marsalis, Wynton 28, 31, 32 Maslin, Janet 218 Matters of Gravity 209 Matthews, Peter 206 Mausoleum in Tiananmen Square 3

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McCarthy, Todd 199 McDaniel, Hattie 22 McDonnell, Mary 192 McElwee, Ross 12 McLaren, Malcolm 8, 144, 145, 147–9, 153, 156 Me Myself I (1999) 209, 216–18, 222 and database identities 211–14 media coverage of 9/11 61, 62 and atrocities 58–62 and Liberation 60, 65 and war crimes trials 65, 66 melancholy 96–100, 107, 108, 111, 113–18, 165, 168, 175 Méliès, George 3, 219, 220, 222 Melville, Jean-Pierre 170, 171 memoir 13, 40, 42, 45, 52 mémoire involontaire 181 memorial 3, 7, 18, 91–3, 101 memorialization 4, 5, 18 of Hiroshima 92 memory 2–10, 20, 41, 60, 128, 129, 132, 177, 178 of American Civil War 14 and audience 180, 194 collective 5, 24, 137 counter 5, 12, 20, 24 cultural 67, 82, 167 historical 91, 99 and melancholia 96–100 national 98 object of 188–90 phantom 10, 191, 194 and photography 183 popular 8, 57, 143, 144, 150–5 pure 9, 180–2 repeating 133–9 sensory 135, 137 spatial/temporal logic 89–92 structure of 179, 180 virtual memory 216, 221 war 89

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236

Index

memory practices 7, 88 memory-image 182 metanarrative 8, 29, 143 Meyer, Russ 144 Miller, Francis Trevelyan 14 Mingus, Charles 38 Mirroring Evil (2002) 64 Mitchell, John 47 modernity 89, 92, 93, 95, 96, 101, 114, 134 montage 2, 29, 31, 32, 34, 120, 162, 167, 185, 186, 194 Montgomery, Douglass 14 monument 3, 4, 13, 18, 76, 92, 118, 137, 172 monumentalization 119, 167, 172 “moonlight and magnolias” approach 22 Moreland, David 197 motion 31, 32, 43, 46, 120, 132, 213 mourning 96, 98, 101, 128, 138 multiverse 209, 210 Murray, Bill 162 Murrow, Edward R. 63, 64 museum 3, 10, 32, 64, 73, 88, 92–4, 97, 105, 189 “My Way” 145–7, 153 myth 5, 7, 8, 57–61, 63, 64, 85, 143, 152 narrative branching 210, 214–16 structure 126 time-loop 216–21 national identity 7, 79, 84, 88, 92, 126 nationalism and memory, spatial/ temporal logic of 89–92 Nationalist Party, in China 106 nation-state 7, 88–91, 101, 133 Never Mind the Bollocks (1977) 144 New School of Cinematography 14 New York Times, The 58, 63, 66, 165, 218 Nichols, Bill 26, 30, 32 Nierentisch 84

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Nietzsche, Friedrich 172, 175 Night and Fog (1955) 60, 61 Nightmare on Elm Street, A (1984) 195 Night Shapes (Nachtgestalten) (1999) 70 1980s trend 191, 195, 196, 198, 201, 202, 204 Nixon, Richard 40, 43–5, 49, 50–5 No More Mr. Nice Guy (Wir können auch anders) (1993) 70 nostalgia 2, 4, 5, 7–9, 71, 76, 77, 101, 116, 126, 127, 129, 139, 162, 166, 167, 170–2 activation of 73, 74 filmic 105, 106, 117 mode 161, 164, 168, 169 mood 161, 162, 164 and nondiegetic music 168, 169 and nostalgic kitsch 4, 9, 84 postsocialist 117–20 reflective 118, 119, 137 restorative 118, 137 shared 74 for “society of niches” 77–81 space of 109–13 transcoding 113–17 vision of 160, 161 western nostalgia for east German products 81–5 in Wong Kar Wai’s films 134 Nowhere in Africa (Nirgendwo in Afrika) (2001) 71 objectivity 5, 8, 27, 35, 36, 62, 100, 101, 107, 110, 111, 116, 174 O’Hara, Scarlett 21–3 Oldman, Gary 152 Olivier, Laurence 148–50 Olsen, Mark 197, 198 O’Meally, Robert 38 Osborne, Holmes 192 O’Sickey, Ingeborg Majer 219, 221

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Index Ostalgie (nostalgia for the East) 71, 73, 76, 77, 81–4 O’Sullivan, Charlotte 175 otherness 94, 96 out-of-time-ness 8, 131, 132, 139 Pakula, Alan J. 6 Pallana, Kumar 167 Paltrow, Gwyneth 161, 214 panorama 3, 18, 19 Parker, Jean 14 parody 9, 42, 159, 168, 169, 172, 174 pastoralism 16 corpse-less pastoral of future 17 pervasive fragmentation 18 Paths in the Night (Wege in die Nacht) (1999) 70 Peking Opera convention 120 perception 7, 9, 33, 138, 143, 144, 182, 183, 185, 189, 210, 214 Personal History of David Copperfield, The 23 petit-bourgeois 107, 118 phantom memories 10, 191, 194 Photographic History of the Civil War, The 14 Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War 13, 14 Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign 14, 17 photography 2, 5, 13–15, 19, 20, 62, 109, 183 as metaphor for memory 183 photo-narrative 20 pictorial storytelling 19 Pigott, Michael 9, 177 Pine, Frances 128 Ping Lam Siu 131 Pittenger, William 20 Plowman, Andrew 86 popular memory 8, 57, 143, 144, 150–5 postindustrial society 2, 10, 75

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postmodern relativism 96 postmodernism 4, 6, 27, 37, 161, 171 postsocialism 8, 108, 109, 112, 114 nostalgia and failure 117–20 postwar 15, 18, 59, 62, 84, 97, 100, 114 culture 65 economic stress 115 Germany 98 Japan 89–92 ruins 111, 116–18 Potente, Franka 217, 221 Powell, Michael 170, 171 Power and the Glory, The (1933) 120 Pressburger, Emeric 170, 171 proto-cinematic forms 3 proto-filmic visual narrative context 18 Proust, Marcel 181 punk culture 8, 143, 144, 146–8, 150, 151, 153, 154 pure memory 9, 180–2 undistilled 182 QB VII (1974) 58 Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) 199 Rashomon (1950) 7, 89, 97–101 memory and melancholia in 96–100 Ratner, Brett 211 Reaganism 191, 204 real existing socialism 79, 80 realism 93, 116, 118, 152, 184 Red Badge of Courage, The (1951) 13, 14, 22–4 Red Shoes, The (1948) 171 Redford, Robert 43, 45, 46 reflective nostalgia 118, 119, 137 reflexivity 32, 42, 51, 54, 82, 143, 159, 168 “Refugee–Today and Tomorrow” (1938) 65

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238 remaking 2, 106, 117, 138, 210 and failure 8, 104, 105, 137 one’s identity 209 rememberer 178, 182 remembering 4, 9, 10, 22, 23, 37, 41, 52, 137, 169, 194, 204, 205, 216 of film 104 of the unimaginable 89 of war-related events 98 see also memory Renan, Ernest 88, 101 Renov, Michael 33 repression 106, 109, 119, 126 Reservoir Dogs (1992) 179 Resnais, Alain 60, 89, 94, 96 restorative nostalgia 118, 137 retracing 8, 12, 109–13, 132 retro 9, 73, 130, 161, 169, 198 reunification of Germany 70 rhetoric 26, 27, 36, 143 and emplotment 40 of failure 117, 119, 121 visual 5, 13 Rice, J. A. 6, 26 Richard III (1955) 149 Riefenstahl, Leni 91 Riva, Emmanuelle 93 “Roadrunner” (1980) 150 Roberts, David 213 Robinson, Edward G. 63 rockumentary 8, 143, 144, 152, 155 Rohde, Armin 221 Romney, Jonathan 143, 175 Rotten, Johnny 8, 149 Royal Tenenbaums, The (2001) 4, 9, 159–61, 163–6, 168–70, 174, 204 Royle, Nicholas 134 Ruffalo, Mark 184 ruins 8, 107–9, 111–14, 116–20 and nostalgia 109, 119, 137 postwar 111, 116–18 and their preservation, distinction between 118, 119

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Index Run Lola Run (Lola rennt) (1998) 71, 209 and time-loop narratives 216–21 Russell, Andrew J. 19 Sandler, Adam 196 sangokujin 97 Santner, Eric 98 Sass, Katrin 72 Savage, Jon 156 Schama, Simon 41 Schechner, Alan 57, 64, 65 Schindler’s List (1993) 61, 67 Schlaraffenland 85 Schofield, Andrew 152 Sconce, Jeffrey 204, 205 Scott, A. O. 165, 166, 168 Search, The (1948) 59, 60 Sedgwick, Stephen 19 “Self-Portrait at Buchenwald: It’s the Real Thing” (1991–1993) 64 semicolonialism 114 sensory memory 135, 137 Sex Pistols 8, 148–50, 153 Filth and the Fury, The 8, 142, 143, 148–52, 154, 156 Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, The 8, 142, 144–9, 154 marketing of 145 rise and fall of 151 and rockumentary 144, 151, 152 Sid and Nancy 8, 142, 152–4 Shandler, Jeffrey 58 Sherman, General 12 Sherman’s March (1986) 5, 12, 20 Shintaro Ishihara 97 Shoah (1985) 96 Sid and Nancy (1986) 8, 142, 152–4 Silbert, Earl 43 Simmel, Georg 209 Sinatra, Frank 145, 146 Sirica, Judge John J. 43, 53, 54

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Index Sliding Doors (1998) 209, 217, 218, 222 and branching narratives 214–16 Sloan, Hugh 44 Slotkin, Richard 60 Smiths, The 196 Smurfs, significance of 214–16 socialism 74, 84 consumer socialism 84 real existing 79, 80 see also postsocialism Socialist Unity Party (East German) 72 society of niches (Nischengesellsch) 77–81 space 2, 3, 6–8, 32, 36–8, 41, 44, 117, 126, 128, 129, 198, 209, 212, 218, 220 commemorative 92 exploration 74, 75, 79, 80 and nation-state 89, 90 of nostalgia 109–13 and time continuum disjunctures 129–39 travel, as time travel 74–7 see also time spatial displacement 126 spatial/temporal logic, of nationalism and memory 89–92 Spielberg, Steven 62, 191, 199, 202, 204, 206 Spray of Fragrance, A (Xiang xuehai) (1934) 108, 120 Spring in a Small Town (screenplay) 107, 113, 115, 121 Spring in a Small Town (Xiaocheng zhi chun) (film, 1948) 7, 8, 105, 107–9, 113, 115, 116, 118–20 Spring in a Small Town (Xiaocheng zhi chun) (film, 2002) 7, 8, 104, 110 Spungen, Nancy 152, 153 Stans, Maurice 47 Star Wars (1977–83) 199, 201 stereoscope 3

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Stewart, Susan 160 Stiller, Ben 161 Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany 98 Strange Days (1995) 4 Stranger, The (1946) 63 Sturken, Marita 62 Su Dongpu 115 Sublime Object of Ideology, The 36 Sugimoto, Michael 7, 88 Sullivan, Trent 213 Sun Alley (Sonnenallee) (1999) 71 Sunset Boulevard (1950) 179 Swansea, Charleen 12 Swayze, Patrick 203, 206 Sweet, Timothy 15 tactical remembering and forgetting 4 Takeshi Kaneshiro 129, 134 Talmadge, Herman 48 Tange, Kenzo 92 Tarantino, Quentin 205 Tatsuya Kimura 135 Tears for Fears 194, 195, 198 technological innovation 10 teleological historicism 32 television miniseries 58 Temple, Julien 8, 142–5, 147–51 temporal location 3, 129 temporality 2, 10, 32, 89, 91, 120, 121, 161, 164, 167, 180, 184, 186, 209, 210 Teo, Stephen 129 “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” 33, 109 third-person narrative 42 That Was the Wild East (Das war der wilde Osten) (1992) 70 Thompson, E. P. 10 Three Stars Red (Drei Stern Rot) (2001) 70 Tian Zhuangzhuang 8, 104–6, 108–13, 116–20

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240

Index

time 1–10, 58–60, 62, 67, 126–9, 131–9, 178, 191, 215 alternate realms of 3 and audience 58 effects in cinema 2 and narrative 210, 212, 216–21 spatialized 8, 133 see also history; space time machine 2, 220 time travel 2, 4, 74, 76, 85 time traveler 2, 10, 135, 210 Times 66, 67 Tin Drum, The (1979) 219 Today (1976) 153 Tokyo War Crimes Trial 91 Tommy Knockers, The 195 Tong, Janice 128, 139 Toplin, Robert 54 Trachtenberg, Alan 15 Trainer, Adam 8, 142 transformation 10, 28, 72, 89, 150, 184, 209, 213, 218, 220 trauma 6, 7, 98, 137, 162, 173, 187 Travers, Peter 166 treaty port phenomenon 114 Tripplehorn, Jeanne 215 Triumph of the Will (1935) 91 Trodd, Zoe 5, 12 Tryon, Chuck 10, 208 Tucker, Sherrie 38 tuibai qiliang (desolation and melancholy) 113 tuifei (decadence) 112–17 Turan, Kenneth 204 Turim, Maureen 120 Turner, Big Joe 34 Turner, Daniel Cross 9, 159 Turner, Zara 215 21 Grams (2003) 179 2046 (2006) 8, 126, 133, 135–8 Tykwer, Tom 217, 219, 220

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uncanny 126, 130, 134, 139, 193, 194, 212 urban space 209, 212 U.S. Signal Corps 58, 59, 61, 62, 65–7 Vance, Robert 19 vanished reality 193 Vertigo (1958) 220 Vertov, Dziga 217 Vicious, Sid 8, 142, 145–7, 152, 153, 155 video game narratives 208, 218 virtual forgetting see virtual memory virtual memory 216, 221 Volkswagen Golf 82 voyeurism 100 Walters, James 10, 191 Walz, Stefan 74 war memory 89 War Production Board 58 Washington Post 40, 43, 44 Watergate 42, 45, 47, 49, 53, 54 Webb, Chloe 152 Wedding Singer, The (1998) 195–8 Wei Wei 112, 121 Wein, George 31 Weir, Peter 171 Welles, Orson 63, 64, 170, 171, 206 Wells, H. G. 1 Wende (collapse of the GDR) 71–4, 79, 85 Wenders, Wim 219 White, Hayden 93 Whiteley, Sheila 156 Wilkinson, Tom 182 Wilson, Luke 161, 175 Wilson, Owen 169, 170, 174 Wilson, Thomas F. 200 Wings of Desire (1987) 219 Winichakul, Thongchai 90 Winslet, Kate 178

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Index Witness (1985) 171 Wong, Ain Ling 108 Wong, Faye 131, 134, 135 Wong Kar Wai 8, 125–8, 130–3, 135, 138, 139 Wood, Elijah 184 Wood, Robin 201 Woodward, Bob 6, 40–7, 51–5 Wrath of Khan, The (1982) 204 Xie Xizhang 109, 113, 114 Yasukuni Shrine 97 Yiman Wang 7, 104

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Yoneyama, Lisa 89, 91, 92 Yoshiro Mori 97 Young Lions, The (1958) 58 Young, Loretta 63 Zelizer, Barbie 65 Zemeckis, Robert 191, 199–201, 203, 204 Zhang Hongmei 112 Zhang Yimou 120 Zhang Ziyi 133 Ziegler, Ronald 44 Zinnemann, Fred 59 Žižek, Slavoj 36, 119, 220

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