The Passage of Time and Construction of Memory: A Thesis

As a supplement to/outline of my presentation for today's class, I wanted to post an explanation of the thesis project I am currently working on. Loosely titled "Through a Century of Ideas: Time and Memory in the Work of Walter Benjamin, Chris Marker, Gilles Deleuze & Wong Kar-Wai" (until I think of something better), the paper will examine the notions of time and memory as they appear in the works of these four figures.

I've been interested for the past year or so in the potential connections between Walter Benjamin's work and that of Deleuze. While I don't want to conflate their arguments, it seems that there are a number of possible connections between their writings, and so I'm looking at Deleuze's Cinema books and a number of Benjamin's essays (and The Arcades Project) to figure out how they interact with and possibly enhance one another. Both Deleuze and Benjamin write extensively on the passage of time and recollection of the past, though where Benjamin's work focuses on the fragmentary and transitory nature of modern experience, Deleuze addresses (in the Cinema books – certainly not in general) more the nature of time itself and the way that Cinema as a medium allows us to experience it qualitatively. Both theorists also use Bergson, and so I will be looking at their different applications of Matter & Memory.

Because this is a project that focuses on cinema, I also wanted to look at directors/film-makers whose work examined the same themes. Wong Kar-Wai and Chris Marker, I think, are working through the same kinds of problems in their films and so I will be examining their films in conjunction with the writings of Deleuze and Benjamin. I'll show some clips in class.

I'm really interested in the way these four figures, whose writings and films span roughly a century, work through the same kinds of problems and what we can get out of engaging with these different socio-historical moments as well as with different mediums.

I'll talk more about my research, concerns, and the things I've been mulling over recently in class, but I also wanted to share with you all a short piece I did for Film Forum last semester that was inspired by this project. I titled it after Proust (mostly because I thought it was funny), and it's a short sort-of documentary piece I shot on the Bolex. It clearly needs some work but addresses some of the same topics in a much more personal/informal kind of way so I thought I'd post it here.


-Ashley Arostegui

From Tarkovsky to My Grandmother and Vice Versa

Last semester I was walking around Sheepshead Bay and a rare house caught my attention, a house full of ornaments in its front yard. Questions and assumptions came to my mind. Who lives here? It is a hermit? It is an artist? The image of that house in front of the Shore Boulevard took me back in time to my grandmother’s house, it made me recall the memories of my childhood and adulthood observing my grandmother’s unique decoration style. I want to tell the story of this house and of the lady that lives there as a way of bringing back the memories of my grandmother and her house. Furthermore I want to tell this story as a way of telling my own story. In a way it will be a portrait piece with elements of auto-ethnography. (I don´t know if this tag striates the project!)

The fundamental things that resonate about my grandmother and my connections with this house and this lady are the memories of the objects of my granny´s house. I was always fascinated with the shelves full of saints, her glass dresser with little bottles of old perfumes, the plaster dogs and cranes at the entrance. Just like the lady in Sheepshead Bay the fact that my grandmother transformed her modern 50´s house into a pastiche has been always a shame for my family. Mildred family doesn´t like her decoration neither. The objects, the shame and that stubborn character of both ladies the one alive here in New York, and the other already death, but so much alive inside my mind, are the elements that I will like to approach in my video piece.

Is not easy to make the connections and that’s where Tarkoski and Godard inspire me. Only in the uncertain in the interval is where these memories will emerge to a new life. I believe that the only way of actually achieving the goal of this project is following Deleuze description of time image, combining shots in new ways, rejecting continuity editing, playing with time (the factual time and the subjective time - both mine and the viewers).

The other interest that I have with this project is repetition and the invisible links that our living experience is building. In this search I find associations with Bergson's Matter and Memory: each image exists in relation with all other images, the universe is always shifting it center, the perpetual movement of life.

I will use HD video footage from the lady and the house in Sheepshead, from NYC buildings, and found footage from NYC. The sound will include also the house, the lady and some of my thoughts and conversations with my sisters and my mother.

Susana

On Bergson, Cones of Memory, & Childhood

During tonight's class, I realized that one of the most exciting things about childhood is that there's no cone of memory for children to access when they react to their perceptions; or childhood is precisely that time in which many of our habits (and cones) are being built or formed.

I, for example, thought extensively about outer space as a child. When I learned that there were planets bigger than ours and even other suns larger than our own, I extrapolated that the beings inhabiting those planets must have been infinitely larger. When I saw a big building I wondered if it was secretly an alien scientist sent from another planet to take measurements and notes on ours, and so I looked for clues that it might be a sentient being and not really a building. (I never did find any evidence, they were very clever scientists.) Eventually, I grew out of this.

I think this process of becoming an adult or learning the norms of society is very striating in a way. We learn the typical ways of responding to or looking at things; we become habitual creatures, asking please and saying thank you. I'm not saying that these are bad things- I think that the ways we learn to relate to and perceive the outside world are often necessary. I think it's equally necessary, though, to develop ways of seeing/thinking/feeling the world that are more akin to childhood. While I'll never look at buildings again in the same way, I think that sometimes we need to see possibility rather than automatically acting or reacting. This, as we talked about in class, is where art seems to come in, widening the gap of indeterminacy and allowing for potentially new experiences or emotions. I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this (I promise that it's not just nostalgia!) but maybe I'll come back to this post with some links to other things, to artists, or something...

-Ashley Arostegui