Chrys Vilvang
Prof. Sudeep Dasgupta
Television and Cross-Media Culture June 16th, 2015
Possible Futures of the Past: Docu-Memory and the Media Archive
Chapter 1:
Introduction: Memory, Media, History, and the Archive
We are living in an era of unprecedented documentation. The proliferation of portable digital technologies has created a contemporary environment where the capabilities to create and store media are no longer reserved to a privileged segment of society. The accumulation of media in both personal and public archives has grown at a previously unfathomable rate. Digital technologies have forever changed the processes and expectations of rapid access and retrieval established in the analogue era. As their digital counterparts increasingly replace analogue forms of capturing and preserving media, it has become apparent that both cultural and personal memories are being shaped by this technical transformation. Pierre Nora has dubbed the drive towards increased documentation the ‘acceleration of history’ and associates the growth of the historic trace with a decline of the phenomenon of memory. Nora positioned memory and history not so much as being fundamentally oppositional, but complex in their difference and relationality, problematizing the notion that increased documentation contributes to expanded memory and instead suggesting that “we have seen the tremendous dilation of our very mode of historical perception, which, with the help of the media, has substituted for a memory entwined in the intimacy of a collective heritage the ephemeral film of current events” (7-8). Writing in the late 1980’s, Nora’s interpretation of the corrosion of memory with regards to documented history foreshadowed the growth of devices for personal documentation and helps configure the potential degradation of true memory as it is increasingly substituted for mediated history. The transition from analogue to digital, from embodied to seperable, will certainly alter the way we conceptualize the
relationship between memory and history in the contemporary era and onwards, but the stakes of this transition may not be as grave as Nora suggests.
Indeed, much of contemporary archive theory has problematized this growing obsession with the preservation of the past as a site where questions of knowledge and power are extended into the present (Schwartz and Cook 3). Far from being neutral, objective, or impartial representations of history, archives are increasingly understood in relation to their strategic construction of the past, exerting control through the records that have become central to memory and identity formation (Schwartz and Cook 2). The contemporary trend of increased documentation has contributed to a shift in the concept of the archive; cultural or collective memory of historic events have become linked to specific, personal media representations. A growing segment of society are documenting their unique experiences of reality, which has subsequently led to the unprecedented accumulation of personal and public media archives; the consequences of this
development for the phenomenon of memory, however, remain largely to be seen. It is therefore important to understand the stakes of this transition and capitalize on the unique privileges it may offer.
In order to recognize the potentially adverse consequences produced by an increase in the dependence on media in relation to memory, one must first conceptualize an understanding of the phenomenon. As the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud’s conception of the psychic apparatus for collecting and storing memory has remained remarkably relevant in the contemporary study of media and archival science. This may come as a surprise given Freud’s well-known aversion to media technologies, as Thomas Elsaesser has suggested; “Freud was apparently more interested in the human body/psyche as (technical) medium than in technical media as such: in the face of the invasion of mass media he was, above all, a cultural conservative, as if his invention of psychoanalysis was aimed at preserving the embodied and gendered nature of
communication against its increasing disembodiment, mechanization, decontextualization and automation” (105). Freud was of course writing in a time very different from our own, but his refusal to acknowledge the technical media of his day in his work has left his conception of memory, perhaps most famously addressed in 1925’s ‘A Note upon the “Mystic Writing Pad’”, open to reinterpretation and application in the contemporary era.
In order to contemporize this conception of memory, it is important to locate a confluence of the fields in which it has been utilized. One such intersection of the increasingly interwoven fields memory, history, media, and the archive would be the genre of documentary. In the age of widespread media production however it is important to reconsider documentary not within the rigidly defined and often restricting categories of cinema and television but rather as any contemplative structuring of media gathered to produce a more powerful meaning or story with some claim to reality. This
reconceptualization would allow for a shift from the privileged position of media producer or archivist that accommodates for the contemporary phenomenon of
unprecedented digital media accumulation and storage. Because of the aforementioned prevailing trend towards increased media capabilities produced by the proliferation of portable digital devices for the capturing and storing of media, a growing segment of society can be considered as a new generation of documentarians. People are increasingly looking to their own archives as a way of retrieving the past, the realm once reserved to the privileged few in the construction of collective memory is shifting to disembodiment and decentralization with the introduction of vast personal archives. If mass media was responsible for the mechanization and standardization of collective memory, a new set of consequences must be considered in the age of increased personal media recording and storage as it restructures the processes of personal memory. As media themselves
increasingly encourage and solicit the documentation of life, the commodification of our personal experiences has developed a strong relation to the way in which we represent ourselves and consider our personal archives.
The reconceptualization of documentary designed to accommodate the
unprecedented growth of digital media archives leaves the genre open to experimentation by anyone with access to an archive and the willingness and technical ability to engage with it so as to construct a meaningful composition. If the process of archiving is viewed as a site where questions of power and knowledge converge, then the ability to create vast unique and personal archives should be understood as a privilege of the contemporary era. The drive to document experience has afforded a new generation of potential documentarians the ability to revisit and reconstruct their own memories and history by accessing and engaging with their personal archives. This privilege however is often
taken for granted, and as José van Dijck suggests many people value the act of collecting more than their actual collections. The reality remains that despite being given the opportunity to rely on media for the recollection of history and the reconstruction of memory, the growing digital archive has largely become a site of untapped potential in establishing a personal relationship with the past. Pictures are stored on external hard drives never to be accessed again, or uploaded to social media to receive a brief public consideration before being swept aside by newer contributions to the public archive. The ability to engage with our own archives should be understood as an advantage for the preservation of memories but the desire to revisit history in a contemplative fashion has not been widely developed in an age where the immediacy of documentation has created a vast and largely untouched archive. If this media privilege is to become beneficial in the reconstruction of memory, then ways of conceptualizing the archive in relation to history and personal experience should be the focus of the modern documentarian.
In what will follow, we will trace a conception of memory, history, media, and the archive as it relates to more contemporary developments in the digital era. An exploration of three documentaries from the current era will provide a framework upon which to portray alternative visions of memory documentation and preservation, ranging from the passive, to the creative, and finally the imaginative. New technologies are restructuring and disembodying the experience of memory, but this does not have to be seen as a degradation of the phenomenon, rather it must be understood as containing the double edged potential to corrode or bolster depending on the ways in which we choose to engage with our own personal archives. The various representational regimes established in the long history of the documentary film can serve as a guiding principle to the way one must conceive of the new potential of the personal archive. Simply accumulating media is largely inconsequential in the reconstruction of the past as it only becomes useful at the point of revisitation and consultation.
Chapter 2:
Towards a Media/Memory Theory
In order to understand why memory and documented history have often been problematized as functioning in opposition with each other it is important to understand why memory has been traditionally regarded as malleable and contrast it with visions of history as static. In 1925 when Sigmund Freud published his canonical work on the process of memory, ‘A Note upon the “Mystic Writing Pad’”, he used a relatively simple children’s toy as an analogy for the inscription and preservation of personal experience. The mystic writing pad or Wunderblock seems a remarkably primitive choice given that technical apparatus capable of capturing motion and audio were already in existence, but is perhaps indicative of Freud’s personal aversion to media technologies. Consider Freud’s assertion that “devices to aid our memory seem particularly imperfect, since our mental apparatus accomplishes precisely what they cannot: it has an unlimited receptive capacity for perceptions and nevertheless lays down permanent – even though not unalterable – memory traces of them” (208). To understand Freud’s conception of memory and the process of inscribing and storing, it is crucial to explore just how the technical apparatus known as the mystic writing pad worked and what aspects of this process remain relevant in the contemporary study of media.
The mystic writing pad is a multilevel system of three layers comprising a wax slab, a translucent sheet of wax paper, and a transparent sheet of celluloid. When writing on the mystic writing pad the wax slab will permanently retain whatever marks have been made; however, lifting the upper two sheets will erase those marks on the receptive layer, freeing it to receive new inscriptions. Freud utilizes this process of erasing and
simultaneous retention as an analogy for the psychic apparatus, suggesting that the top layers comprise our immediate perception while the wax slab in its ability to permanently store traces represents our Unconscious. Following this logic Freud suggests that lifting the top two sheets is akin to the constant reception and re-inscription of perception while the process of writing and renewing represents “the flickering-up and passing-away of consciousness in the process of perception” (211). The analogy is helpful for envisioning how perceptions pass into the Unconscious for preservation, although complete retrieval
is never possible, a mnemic trace or permanent inscription, susceptible to mutation, affected by new inscriptions, remains. Freud notes of the permanent trace that “the Mystic Pad cannot ‘reproduce’ it from within; it would be a mystic pad indeed if, like our memory, it could accomplish that” (211).
Freud conceives of memory and the process of inscription and retrieval as a mystical phenomenon, one that cannot be accurately replicated by any technology of his era. This line of thinking is in keeping with Pierre Nora’s suggestion that history is a limited representation whereas memory is inherently affective and magical. Nora furthers this line of thinking by suggesting that “History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it” (9). History has, however, been rather kind to Sigmund Freud as his name and theories continue to surface in many academic debates despite much of his work having been largely discredited. Freud’s disapproval of cinema is therefore not only indicative of his desire for memory to remain tied to the internal psychic apparatus (not any disembodied form), but also of how documented history can work as Nora suggests to suppress the more imaginative processes of reconstruction involved in unmediated remembrance.
The idea of what constitutes an archive is itself the subject of much speculation given the unprecedented accumulation of media in the digital era, and Marlene Manoff has suggested that as different disciplines have attempted to redefine the notion, it has increasingly become “a kind of loose signifier for a disparate set of concepts” (10). One of the most significant contributions to the debate surrounding the archive, memory, and history is Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. The concept of the archive as a neutral site of preservation was to be problematized by questions of memory and power and Derrida drew upon the ideas of Freud to aid in his deconstruction of the claims of impartiality or objectivity. Central to Derrida’s argument surrounding the archive and the desire to selectively preserve history is the idea that in controlling what gets preserved and how it is stored, any theory of the archive must account for its relationship to the future. Archivable meaning is therefore always concerned with the evolving structures of archivization in so much as they will ultimately codetermine the future significance of what has been preserved (Derrida 18). In suggesting that
Derrida accounts for the drive towards conservation as it has become increasingly linked to the question of experience itself. The question surrounding Freud’s understanding of memory in relation to the archive thus becomes “Is the psychic apparatus better
represented or affected differently by all the technical mechanisms for archivization and for reproduction, for prostheses of so-called live memory, for simulacrums of living things which already are, and will increasingly be, more refined, complicated than the ‘mystic pad’” (16)? To address this question Derrida proposes a simplistically eloquent response that “what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way” (18). Indeed, it would be difficult to argue that a psychoanalytic conception of memory is not affected differently by modern archivization capabilities, but whether it is better represented remains largely to be seen.
Historian Pierre Nora would suggest that the representation of memory through the archive is in fact not true memory at all in so much as it has become disembodied and therefore loses crucial elements of its psychology like spontaneity, individuality, and subjectivity. Nora had already argued by the late 1980’s that “The less memory is experienced from the inside the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs – hence the obsession with the archive that marks our age, attempting at once the complete conservation of the present as well as the total preservation of the past” (13). Both Derrida and Nora’s criticism of the archive as a site of deferred memory presuppose that recorded versions of history erode the more mystic aspects of internal psychological processes, but the growth of the archive has not always been imagined in such a problematic fashion.
In an extremely influential article that appeared in The Atlantic in 1945, Vannevar Bush envisioned a world in the absence of war, where scientific innovation could shift away from technologies of warfare and the extension of physical power to expanding the power of the mind. The article is remarkable for its accuracy in predicting that
technologies would become increasingly portable, reliable, immediate, and most importantly, widely available. By proposing his concept of Memex as an immediately accessible archive, Bush is largely credited with forecasting the rise of the personal computer. It was Bush’s contention that the expansion of the archive would become increasingly problematic and difficult to consult if technologies were unable to develop a
system of storage and retrieval that mimicked the associative powers of the mind. Bush had alternatively presented Memex as a solution with the ability to rapidly consult a growing archive as potentially liberating the mind for more creative thinking, by accelerating the laborious process of consulting thus assisting the process of
remembering. This view is largely oppositional to conceptions of the archive destroying creative thought, and provides a helpful counter assessment of the liberating potential of new technology. Understandings of how the archive alters memory all rather accurately prophesized that documentation would continue to occupy an increasingly important role in the construction of history, but did not fully anticipate another crucial shift in the archival process, that being the growth of advanced digital technologies for capturing and storing unique personal experience. The rise of increasingly personalized media has meant that the archive must no longer just be considered with regards to history, but also consider the role media is increasingly playing in the constitution of the self.
The rise of the archive does not inherently destroy the mystical process of memory nor does it inherently possess the ability to liberate the mind for the production of creative thought, the cerebral consequences of the growth of documentation are entirely hinged upon how one chooses to consult and engage with the archive. Cinema, much like the archival sciences, has long been a subject of contestation from a
psychoanalytic perspective for the ways in which mediated representation restructures notions of experience. Mary Ann Doane notably revisited Freud’s conception of memory in The Emergence of Cinematic Time to problematize the ways in which the rise of cinema contributed to modern conceptions of linearity and temporality. Doane’s interpretation of “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’” sees Freud’s analogy as confronting notions of time by marginalizing it as “theoretically a by-product or
aftereffect of some other process” (38). Doane invokes Étienne-Jules Marey and his work in chronophotography to point to the impossibilities of a true mediated representation of movement through space and time. Marey was not interested in cinema per se, but focused his chronophotography projects on the visual recording of time, his attempts to do so ultimately figured this impossibility. This argument is bolstered by Freud’s aversion to the media technologies of his era, particularly cinema, as the reality they claim to capture or represent is inadequate for his concept of perception and memory
storage and retrieval. By representing precisely what Freud and Marey would deem as unrepresentable; time, the widespread growth of cinema was responsible for altering the spontaneous and associative nature of perception and memory by constructing visions of temporality that were linear and unchanging.
So far we have taken Freud’s concept of memory and extended it into Derrida’s theory of the archive, Nora’s vision of history, Bush’s prophesized Memex, and Doane’s understanding of cinematic time to portray the passing of perception into the unconscious and the storage and retrieval process as a somewhat mystical phenomena constantly at odds with technologies increasingly designed to replicate and conquer its uniqueness. Thomas Elsaesser has promoted the idea that “cinema is one culturally specific way of dealing with the question of memory or mnemic traces, and it can be usefully contrasted with other (mechanical) forms of data registration, data storage and data management” (104). This contrast has become more apparent and significant with the growing proliferation of digital technologies that attempt to mimic the cerebral processes of remembering as oppose to the longstanding linear tradition continued by cinema. José van Dijck sees the introduction and growth of technologies of storage and retrieval that break with the linear archive tradition as an underexplored field of media studies with real consequences for the materialization of memory. If a longstanding critique of the archive was the way in which it disembodies memory, rendering it as a collective experience rather than a unique and personal construction, then in the era of increased personal archival practice the role of media in the construction of personal memory will become of growing consequence. Media must therefore be understood as possessing the potential to limit access to the past and render history static as well as construct,
manipulate, or creatively represent alternative versions of history that preserve the mystic nature of personal memory.
Chapter 2.1:
Problematizing Technology
Digitization is perpetually shaping the way we conceive of both collective and personal memory, and the unprecedented growth of multimedia archives confronts us with issues of time and order (van Dijck 312). Wolfgang Ernst sees the contemporary archive as being in a constant state of transition that requires rapid reconceptualization in response to the proliferation of new technologies. Central to Ernst’s argument that archives now must be envisioned in a transitory state is the development of technologies that have replaced the aesthetics of the fixed order or linear archive with one of
permanent reconfigurability. This idea of an archive that is no longer static but constantly alterable bears a resemblance to the mystic writing-pad in so much as it construes of constant perception in the present as having the ability to alter the way one constructs the past. If the rise of the archive and the cinema in relation to history were increasingly problematized for limiting the creative and non-linear processes of memory than perhaps new technologies have reinvigorated this long dormant phenomena and liberated media representation from its static and unchanging nature. The introduction of new
technologies for the processes of memory were long construed as enclosing and limiting the mystical aspects of storage and retrieval but with the unprecedented growth of the personal archive enabled by digitization we may finally be in an era were the tide has begun to turn. This contention is of course entirely dependent on how one chooses to utilize the new technologies available to them, but is significant in so much as the contemporary environment is producing archives at an unprecedented rate.
The very notion of mass media has become fragmented by the proliferation of personal media technologies, contributing to the decentralized construction of experience and reality through unique avenues enabled by digitization. This evolution has
undoubtedly been involved in the reshaping of memory and the consequences vary in accordance with ones dependence and engagement with media. There is nothing in the mind that resembles an archive and attempts through technology to delineate and mimic the cerebral processes of recollection remain primitive in their inability to truly represent the spontaneous and magical phenomenon of memory. The mind is not a warehouse of
stored memories waiting to be retrieved or reconstructed; instead memory must be conceived as “a complicated encoding process, where memories are preserved through elaborate mental, social and media schemata” (van Dijck 327). The interweaving of the mental with the social and media representation all effect memory to unique effects in accordance with the proportion to which they are relied upon by the individual. John B. Thompson has pointed to the self-evident direction that these trends have long suggested; “self-formation has become increasingly interwoven with mediated symbolic forms and therefore, mediality is a defining factor in the construction of the self as a symbolic project” (209). So if we are increasingly defining ourselves based on the media we interact with and produce, then doing so in a thoughtful and constructive manner becomes a modern element in the development of our identities. If memories in relation to media are subject to disembodiment than the personal stakes are significant in so much as “human memory is a flexible agency through which identity development, and thus personal growth, is made possible” (van Dijck 327).
Chapter 2.2:
A New Set of Problems or Potential Solutions?
Perhaps, it is not only important to contrast cinema with modern digital archive technologies as Thomas Elsaesser argues, but also better understand the way these new technologies have allowed cinema to develop a modern means of storytelling that utilize the archive in constructing a narrative that is faithful to the mystical phenomenon of memory. In understanding this, examples from modern cinema can be utilized as an aid in the development of visionary memory construction and provide a theoretical
framework for the new ways the personal archive can be employed for beneficial purposes. The archive is not inherently detrimental or beneficial for the phenomenon of memory, but if documentation continues to hold a certain power in the growth of the individual then envisioning ways to creatively engage with media will become
increasingly important as technologies for representation continue to grow. As has been previously suggested, there is perhaps no genre of cinema more intertwined with the construction of memory and history through the archive than that of the documentary. The documentarian in their ability to create and consult an archive is put in a privileged position for the establishment of meaningful narratives that will wield an uncertain strength over the viewer in their subsequent construction of history according to media. The documentarian, much like the archivist, is therefore well versed in the art of selection so as to create the most powerful understanding of what they hope to preserve and portray.
These positions in their privilege have been problematized according to the way they construct collective memory, but the esteem or privilege associated with these professions has not only been eroded by the criticism of their claims to authenticity and neutrality but also by the proliferation of the technologies to capture and store media as they enter the realm of the amateur and everyday. Media will continue to be consulted for the reconstruction of memory and the constitution of identity, it is therefore important to consider the different models and theories in media production that tackle this significant issue. The idea of the documentary and archive itself must be detached from their
preserve media continue towards widespread availability. In reestablishing these roles the genre itself must be redefined to accommodate the new ways media is structured for both amateur and personal reconstitutions of memory and history. The potential for
empowerment and personal growth through contemplative media practice is present in the thoughtful engagement and consultation of the personal archive, but this privilege does not grow simply out of the process of capturing and storing. Alternative visions for the use of the personal archive have been represented in countless ways, but what can contemporary cinema teach us about the potential of the archive in the production of creative thought and preservation of mystic memory? The answers are not definitive and models for the creative use of media can be as unique as the individual cerebral processes that conceive of them, nevertheless, there are undeniably ways of engaging with the archive that are more productive and beneficial than others.
Cinema has long concerned itself with the question of memory, and there is no shortage of historic examples that have either directly or indirectly tackled the issue in relation to the medium. Because the expanded version of documentary conceived for the purpose of this argument includes the amateur and personal constructions of media so as to create a more powerful narrative than the static archive, the media objects of analysis are not locatable within the relatively limited scope of the cinematic documentary per se; they do however confront questions of memory and the archive in unique ways, each presenting a vision for how the constitution of the self through media is potentially understood and utilized. The interwoven fields of history, memory, media, and the archive have been in evolving conversation with each other with different interpretations of them as harmonious, oppositional, or otherwise contributing significantly to the debate surrounding how media alter the fundamental nature of human existence. If the
collectivization and disembodiment of experience was the source of concern surrounding the psychoanalytic conception of malleable and mystic memory, then understanding what aspects of this trend remain and which have been altered by new media technologies will prove important in reconceptualizing the potential of the archive in the constitution of the self.
Recently, social network site Facebook provided what could be perceived as a solution to the growing archive by algorithmically producing short documentary films
composed partially of the uploaded content provided by users. These films were unique to each user and offered a constructed vision of history according to the metadata that accompanied each contributor’s Facebook content. The popularity of the films showcased the desire for the new generation of media producers to have their content revisited and arranged in a way that produces greater significance. However, it is worth noting that the associations and representative regime put forth in these videos points towards a
disturbing trend in media production, that being the entirely depersonalized and
disembodied reconstruction of the past. It is certainly convenient to allow ones media to be assembled into a professional looking package by forces that require little
consideration, but if the archive is to be construed as a site of power, then allowing ones archive to be manipulated by non-human forces is very problematic in the preservation of the personal agency associated with memory. As an alternative to this trend, certain documentary filmmakers have reinvigorated the genre through experimentation, questioning the conventions of cinematic representation and creating new and exciting visions for how one can conceive of the media archive in relation to history and memory. These contributions mirror some of the potentials envisioned by Bush when he spoke of “a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record” (8). In 20,000 Days on Earth (2014) Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard reinvigorate the familiar day in the life documentary form to express a new vision of the potential of the archive and represent an alternative conception of temporality. Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg (2007) also breaks strongly with the documentary tradition to create an historical archive that blends the facts of the past with the imaginative powers of the Unconscious in the formation of a personal history that is as much fantasy as it is reality. Analyzing what each of these contemporary examples can offer to the ongoing debate surrounding memory and media will provide a distinct portrayal of some of the consequences and potentials of the new technologies and privileges afforded our generation.
An investigation of the three specific media examples to follow will illustrate different aspects of the historic debate surrounding these important issues. Three broad and potentially overlapping categories will be established, not to definitively quantify what modes of engaging with media are more productive than others, but rather to help in
promoting the contemplative engagement with the new personal archive. By exploring the unique potentials of each model, the analysis of each media product will help in deconstructing how media production and storage can and should be understood as a privilege, but requires input and consideration beyond the simple increase in abilities to capture and preserve. Consider José van Dick’s assertion that modern digital materiality can be both an effacement or an innovation, and therefore “not only should we pay attention to what digital – as oppose to analogue – technologies erase in the process of mediating memories, but also what transformations of memory they allow” (325). Accounting for this would allow us to embrace the new era of mediated memories by invigorating them with the mystical power of memory in its truest, internal form and would present a counter to Nora’s claim that “We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left” (7). Memory is not disappearing, it is evolving, the negative potentials of the disembodiment of the phenomena as envisioned and feared by Freud are still at stake but the consequences of this evolution are double edged. Memory is not a fixed object and its fallibility and malleability contribute to its inherently mystical nature, it is best considered as a contested site where questions surrounding the development of identity and the self are constantly reestablished. Understanding the oppositional
viewpoints and potentials of mediated memories will allow for an examination of the modern archival documentary in relation to both the negative and positive effects of this unprecedented transition. There are indeed many problematic media archive practices in the current era, still others may not warrant the aversion of the memory purist in so much as they are emblematic of Bush’s claim that “man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems” (8).
Chapter 3:
Passive Archiving: Social Media as Archive/ Users as Documentarians Personal history, logged in memory, is a sort of slide projector
flashing images on the wall of the mind. And there’s precious little order to the slides in the rotating carousel. Beyond that confusion, who knows who is running the projector? … If we refuse to do the work of creating this personal version of the past, someone else will do it for us. That is a scary political fact. -Patricia Hampl 136, 135
Any investigation of the ways archival practices are becoming increasingly personalized must consider the sites where these personal archives are stored and displayed. As previously mentioned, technologies such as digitization and portability have allowed for the unprecedented accumulation of personal media, while attempts to store and access the material in an efficient fashion have attempted to keep up with this growth. Vannevar Bush had envisioned a system of rapid retrieval that mimics the processes of association found in the mind and José van Dijck has explored some of the more modern software attempts to detach personal archive practices from the static and linear systems of the pre-digital era. These forms of engaging with personal archives are of great interest in the modern study of media practices but do not necessarily intersect with the expanding world of documentary film. Documentaries, no matter how personal, must be conceived as being intended for some form of audience and therefore shaped by the way in which they will be received. The process of archiving in relation to
documentary is therefore concerned not only with how we choose to represent our experiences for ourselves, but also with how we want them to be perceived by others. The creation of our own media for the purpose of memory preservation is not necessarily linked to its public display, but doing so has become a significant aspect for many in the modern constitution of themselves. The most popular tool for self-representation through media in the contemporary era would have to be the modern social networking website,
with the profile therefore becoming the carefully selected public archive of the users experiences and memories.
With approximately 1.39 billion active users and 300 million photos uploaded per day, Facebook is the social media juggernaut and represents a significant portion of the sites where the personal archive is most largely displayed (Noyes). Facilitating the massive archive is no small task and the Facebook format has frequently evolved to accommodate the growing number of users as well as their preferences for representation. Although it would be difficult to suggest that anyone who actively uploads content to Facebook can be considered a documentarian and anyone who navigates the website becomes an audience, there is a certain level of activity and engagement required by users in order to utilize the archival potential of the website. In order to assist with the navigation of this increasingly complex and rapidly growing archive, Facebook has consistently introduced tools to bridge the problems of storage, time, and space faced by users. By allowing photographs to be identified and retrieved according to who is present, where they were taken, and when they occurred, Facebook has created a series of
associative links that can be utilized in the reconstruction of experience by users according to a limited range of, but nevertheless unique, connections created. These principles ease in the navigation of an otherwise overwhelming amount of stimuli constantly produced on the website, and can be understood as helping to impede the overwhelming nature of the increased speed and intensity found in the bombardment of images faced in modernity.
This acceleration of the diffusion of photography was problematized in the concept of modernity long before the digital era. Mary Ann Doane built upon these ideas to explore the way cinema itself constructed temporality and represented time. As we are now living in the age of unprecedented personal media production, Facebook has
furthered the development of time representation, emblemized by their terminological switch from the potentially palimpsestuous ‘wall’ to the temporally restricted ‘timeline’. The linear categorization of media according to the time it was created is entirely in keeping with the pre digital archival practices that were problematized and questioned in relation to their static representations of history. As Facebook continues to shift away from the unique potentials offered in the digital era and employ classic linear temporal
strategies for the storage and preservation of media, it must be understood not as
countering the anxieties of modernism, but rather multiplying them at an unprecedented rate. Although to engage with Facebook as an archive still requires a basic level of activity on behalf of users, the prevailing trend of the site seems to suggest a general tendency towards decreasing the creative involvement of users. Comments are replaced by likes, faces are immediately identified by facial recognition software, location data is transmitted from devices, and the time of the upload is preserved forever in its historical temporal position. In making the interface more automatic and user friendly, Facebook encourages a more passive and less critical engagement with the material produced for it. Victor Burgin has pointed to everyday digital processes as “engendering narrative forms that might once have been received as avant-garde rejections of the representational regimes of classical realist cinema” (14). This, however, has not been the approach of Facebook, and the consequences of their assemblage of media storage and retrieval for the mystical processes of memory are potentially quite problematic; these issues are perhaps best represented by the recent introduction of the algorithmically produced Facebook documentary film.
David Beer has referred to the increase in algorithmically determined data flows as creating a new sort of power that permeates into what he has termed the ‘technological Unconscious’. The Unconscious as the site of memory as previously put forth by
Elseasser and Doane amongst others, required a certain level of human agency to bridge the inherent gaps and fragmentation that occur in the reconstruction of the past through the mnemic traces that have been retained. In proposing the technological Unconscious, David Beer promotes a consideration of “how the activities of content generation and participation of Web 2.0 feed into ‘relational databases’ and are then used to sort, filter and discriminate in automated ways and without users’ knowledge” (998). Freud attached a great value to the processes of memory retrieval and saw this mystical process as harmed by media technologies that created singular visions of subjective experiences. As media technologies have become more available, the ability to document personal history has grown and granted users with the unique privilege of creating their own media archives. The process of filling in the larger story that surrounds a photograph or a cinematic representation in the analogue era, however, always remained the unique
privilege of the human mind. Digital data flows and algorithmically determined representations are now challenging this form of memory preservation and retrieval, creating a disembodied unconscious that is problematic for the creative and imaginative potential to be located within human memory.
Having expanded the genre of documentary to include virtually any crafted assemblage of images designed to create a more powerful meaning or narrative may theoretically present media producers of any level with the ability to construct their own archival films as they relate to their specific memories. This potential would of course require the thoughtful engagement with ones unique archive in order to present it in a manner befitting their own understanding and relationship with their experiences. Facebook has provided an alternative to this requirement by eliminating the contemplation and compilation of ones own archive and assembling personalized miniature documentary films based on an algorithmic assessment of the content on ones profile. Beginning with the successful Year in Review videos in 2012, encapsulating an entire year of content into a short film, Facebook expanded their production in 2014 to celebrate their 10th anniversary with the Look Back video which creates a film of the users entire history on the website (Wagner). More recently the Say Thanks productions have given users the option of presenting friends with short documentaries of their unique relationships, with the slideshow clocking in at approximately 45 seconds (Kelly). The videos have been quite popular amongst users, with over 200 million opting to view their Look Back productions and approximately half of those viewers choosing to share them for others on their profile (Wagner). The success of these videos is indicative of users desire to have their own media presented in a coherent and professional looking production resembling a documentary, but is problematic in so much as it removes the creative aspect of archiving and presentation to reduce unique histories into a singular format.
(Horan)
(Smolinski)
The photographic content of the Facebook videos are unique to each user profile and selected automatically based on their position in the timeline and the number of likes they received (Chowdhry). An algorithm is used to determine which photographs will
appear at which point in the film so as to construct a narrative deemed by Facebook to be representative of ones year, decade, or relationship. If one has carefully cultivated the content of their profile in a manner they wish to preserve, then the resulting video provides an automatic and easy encapsulation of their photographic memories that requires little consideration or reflection as the overarching message put forth has already been suggested by the style and framing of the Facebook production. It is not difficult to imagine a scenario in which this automatic assemblage of media without consideration could become problematic, photographs which have been deliberately tagged with inaccurate information would not be subjected to the scrutiny of an active media producer as the digital information provided is utilized regardless of its faithfulness to reality. The end result can be bizarre, anachronistic, and wholly misrepresentative among other things, but even accurately presenting the reality of someone’s year in a predetermined and inconsiderate fashion can become problematic. This was the case for Eric Meyer who after losing his six year old daughter to brain cancer in 2014, was prompted by Facebook to create a Year in Review video with a photograph of his daughter at the forefront accompanied by the default tagline “It’s been a great year!” (Chowdhry). These glaring problems are not simply overlooked by the users whose history they claim to represent, but the popularity of these videos among users who choose to share them and do not take issue with their representation are not without their own unique set of problems.
We have previously explored how the archive has been seen as a site where questions of power in relation to personal memory and identity formation are addressed. It has been alternatively presented as both capable of preserving the more mystic and imaginative processes involved in recollection as well as lying in fundamental opposition to them. Schwarz and Cook revealed aspects of the psychologically motivated desire to collect and preserve as well as how this process impacts our knowledge of the past and our perception in the present. Control over our own archives is linked to the preservation of our own unique memories in direct proportion to how much we choose to insert them into the media we produce. Patricia Hampl has positioned our ability to develop forward as dependent on a healthy relationship with our pasts and therefore sees the function of memory as “intensely personal and surprisingly political” (136). The popularity of the Facebook videos suggests that they work quite adequately in assisting many users to
construct a healthy relationship with their past, but there are consequences to this massive depersonalization of memories as they corral history down seemingly unique but
ultimately generic paths of remembrance. Consider Hampl’s assertion, “If we refuse to do the work of creating this personal version of the past, someone else will do it for us” (135). This was in reference to the political stakes of the denial of history and the ability of the reigning regime to control the future through creating an archival past that glorifies and justifies their present aims. In the age of the vast personal archive, it is now important to consider the stakes of the control of our unique media. If we accept the version of our own history provided by the Facebook videos then we become a largely passive observer of the archive that constitutes much of our own memory and contributes to the perception of ourselves in the present. If the unique process of memory retrieval continues down the path of disembodiment and location in the digital archive, the stakes of the collective representation of personal experience will have severe consequences for the mystical act of memory.
The Facebook Year in Review and Look Back videos both contribute to the linear structuring of memory according to the representation of time as it is conceived in the era of social networking. Freud and Marey both regarded time as an unrepresentable concept, which was elaborated upon by Doane. If the cinema was guilty of fundamentally altering the way time was perceived by an audience, can this assessment be extrapolated into the documentary videos of the Facebook era? Motion through space and time was a
fundamental concern of early work contributing to the rise of cinematography. Cinematography and motion are however notably absent from the creation of the Facebook videos as they employ only the stationary photographs provided by the users who upload them. The motion to be found in these videos is therefore entirely located in the motion graphics that accompany the documentary to construct the linear and greater meaning of this photographic assemblage. Categorizing an assemblage of still
photographs that make no representation of motion through time may be considered problematic in qualifying these videos as documentary, but the opposition of film and photography is wholly constructed. Victor Burgin suggests that to equate film with motion through time and photography with stasis and space is to “confuse the representation with its material support” (23). The Look Back videos position every
photograph of the year in a series of frames on a virtual wall, which are then selected and zoomed into so as to grant significance in the overwhelming mass of media produced over the course of an entire year. The motion graphics harken back to the ages of print media, when one might actually have had physical copies of their photographs and elected to frame and preserve the ones deemed significant in a personal archive. This careful and contemplative process is however completely eliminated as an algorithm has determined which photographs to grant with significance and which to scroll past as though inconsequential in the experience of ones history. The emotional response to each photograph is also corralled by generic slogans that are inserted at strategic moments in the video, interwoven with personal statuses so as to add a personal element to an otherwise sweepingly universalized media product. The amateur photographs and shallow or unreflective statuses that accompany the slick professional motion graphics and timeless cliché slogans even contribute to a visual marginalization of the personal content used in the production of these otherwise entirely collective videos.
As a genre, documentary has always navigated a rather delicate path between the artistic construction of reality and its neutral representation. The quality of a documentary film is at least partially determined by the quality of the subject it seeks to address
working in conjunction with the way it is constructed and represented. Trinh T. Minh-Ha has noted that when assessing documentary films, jurors persistently find it difficult to separate the quality of the filmmaking from the reality it attempts to capture (83). If they are to be considered as personal documentaries than the Facebook videos with their professional motion graphics and text that accompany them must be understood as comprising the filmmaking quality and the photographs as the largely marginalized story it represents. Sigfried Kracauer in 1927 positioned the photographic archive in terms of its power to represent as overwhelming and unfaithful to the reality to which it makes claims. Kracauer suggested that, “from the perspective of memory, photography appears as a jumble that consists partly of garbage” (426). Photography as a medium for
representation is not without its own unique set of issues, but consider how divorced the content of the photographs in these films have become from their cinematic form.
Marshall McLuhan’s theories concerning the way meaning is created entirely through the mediated form it takes can perhaps be tailored to understanding the problematic nature of
the Facebook videos which push the personal content of the documentary to the
background while simultaneously claiming to represent the unique reality of each user. When he famously declared “the medium is the message” McLuhan was speaking to the ways media that accelerate and enlarge the scale of previous human function often do so without being properly understood and acknowledged (7-8). The extent to which this claim is made is perhaps a little definitive, especially in the field of documentary as the content is so intrinsically linked to the quality of the film, but the theory may still provide a better way of understanding why Facebook videos create a problematic version of memory for the users who allow their personal media to be integrated into mass produced media representation. If increased personal documentation and digital technologies for storage and retrieval are to be considered as extensions of memory and therefore the self, then the way this media is presented is a crucial element in establishing its ultimate message.
McLuhan argues that the effect of a medium is made strong when it is given another medium as content, and as such a narrative film can be considered as a mediated representation of a novel or a play. Following this line of thinking it is further suggested that in failing to recognize the effect of the medium on its representation of content we are ignorant to the fact that what we absorb is not so much the message but the medium itself (McLuhan 18). This fairly absolutist approach is nevertheless helpful in the consideration of how documentary as a genre strategically employs the archive in a forceful manner so as to create a dominant understanding of the final product. The content of any documentary film is whatever segment of reality it claims to represent, but this categorization is problematic for assessing the aesthetics of the film, as stylizing or fragmenting this reality can often be construed as misrepresentation. This has lead to the development of an entire documentary aesthetic of objectivity that determines what aspects of filmmaking can be considered honest and what others may be manipulative (T. Minh-Ha 80). Memory, much like the archive, and the documentary, are however never fully honest, they are carefully selected and composed to reconcile a version of history that reflects reality as much as it reflects the person who has captured it. For McLuhan there is no honest representation through media as the second the content of something, in this case reality, takes a new form, its true or original message is disregarded. Yet if
documentary can be considered as having some claim to reality that connects true content with constructed style, then the manipulation of this style to produce a certain meaning is a delicate subject, especially when the reality it claims to represent is our own.
Consider how the Facebook videos, which must be considered documentaries under the previously expanded definition of the genre, address the personal realities of the histories they represent. The content of the film is the existing photographic media found on a user profile that is selected and granted significance within the greater storyline as determined by an algorithm. The algorithm uses the metadata that accompanies a photograph such as the people present, the location, and the date to establish the importance a given moment will be granted in the archival compilation of the users year, decade, or friendship. As has already been suggested, the archivist and the documentarian are in a privileged position when it comes to the construction of memory and history, but to what extent are these roles present in the production of the Facebook video? It could be suggested that by engaging with Facebook on the level of uploading content that every user is involved in the production of their own video, and this is indeed true as without any contributed media content the production could not be made. But let us consider the Freudian understanding of the way perceptions pass into memory, as we are constantly receiving stimuli in the form of images and experience, the process of storage while continuing to receive is something that decidedly no technology can replicate. It is thus considered a mystic experience and the processes of retrieval and preservation, despite the replication attempts enabled by digital technologies, remain a largely personal, unique, and elusive phenomenon. The constant uploading most users actively engage with (300 million photos per day) is perhaps more akin to the
psychological process of perception, as the real power of memory, just like the archive, is not in its ability to receive, record, or document but rather in its ability to be consulted and retrieved. It is only in this retrieval of what has been preserved that the mystic elements of memory and the power of the archive are present, and by pre-determining automatically which aspects of the users photographic archive will be used in the production of the Facebook video, the human element of this significant role has been eliminated.
Removing the personal element of the composition of the personal archive means that when using the Facebook videos as a documentary and/or memory aid, we are no longer in the position of power over our own history; beyond this, the aesthetic of the videos must force us to question how much of our history is even absorbed when consulting the universal Facebook version of the archive. McLuhan saw the content of any medium as being “like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind” (18). In the case of the flashy motion graphics and generic narrative attached to the personal photographs of their users, it becomes easy to see how in the case of the Facebook documentary, the medium may have become the message. What attracts the attention of the viewer in these films is the way in which they are constructed; the photographs have already been uploaded by the user, so the content is presumably familiar and therefore less significant in the composition of the final media product. Facebook is using our unique personal photographic archive and its associated memories as the content to distract us from the fact that what is actually being promoted in the videos is not so much our own histories, but the website itself. This presents a problematic new vision of the archive in the age of portable digital media production as the videos at best corral unique and personal experience into a collective and generic representation, and at worst are really not even representing memories or history at all, placing our disembodied experience in an advertisement for an archive that discourages active engagement or further contemplation.
The consequence of the Facebook videos and other trends that encourage the passive engagement with our own media, that allow algorithms rather than personal consideration to construct our understanding of our past, are grave for the mystical power of memory. Media and archival practices have long been problematized for the way in which they construct, fragment, and alter history as well as the way in which they have increasingly come to disembody and compromise the internal phenomenon of memory. The Facebook videos offer an insight into the harmful potentials of widespread media technologies designed to capture and preserve personal experience but do not require further participation on behalf of users to create the final version of the media archive or in this case the documentary film. The ability to store and consult an unprecedented amount of personal media should be considered a privilege, just as the ability to engage
with it and construct our own meanings can be understood as positioning ourselves as both the subject and the documentarian of our own life story. When Patricia Hampl spoke of the significance of engaging with our memories and suggested that failure to do so would allow them to be controlled by external forces, she probably could not have imagined a trend as forceful and depersonalizing as the Facebook video. The subjective and associative power of memory is not something that can be faithfully represented by any automated and disembodied assemblage of media. Experiences and memories can be aided by documentation; their storage and consultation in the archive can still assist in the creative and imaginative engagement with our history. It is only when the mind is
completely removed from the process of construction that the mediated representation of our own history begins to erode and collectivize the unique and personal true nature of our reality.
Chapter 4:
Creative Reconstruction through the Archive: 20,000 Days on Earth A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel
looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we
perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
-Walter Benjamin 257-258
This excerpt from Theses on the Philosophy of History reveals Walter Benjamin’s specific interpretation of how anyone experiences the present in relation to both the unknown future and the scattered fragments of an unorganized past. The desire to form a more complete understanding of the past is persistently and violently interrupted by the demands felt in the present of constructing a determined linear path to the future. The painting as a visual metaphor for this portrayal is largely the product of Benjamin
abstract work of art. As an artistic medium, film is always interwoven with the
representation of the passage of time, and as such may be substituted as a visual metaphor more capable of capturing this specific understanding of temporality. If the Facebook videos were guilty of encapsulating a specific section of time and projecting a singular interpretation of the documented archive, it is important to understand why this limited representation of history is problematic for the constitution of the self in the present. Envisioning an alternative to this restricted cinematic portrayal of temporality that is more faithful to the realities of the constant blurring of time as well as the creative elements of human memory will then prove an important task of the modern
documentarian, archivist, or historian. To preserve an experience or a historical moment in a way that does not confine it to a specific yet largely irretrievable place and reproduce a singular version of the past with a fixed significance in the present for narrating a teleological future to come, but rather create a representation that is open for revisiting and more importantly reinterpreting is thus the difficult relationship between memory and history that must be considered when creatively engaging with the archive. In 20,000 Days on Earth (2014), Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard have set out to use the familiar form of the documentary film to explore a representation of history that is at once involved with facing the future and immersion in the present.
20,000 Days on Earth is ostensibly a day-in-the-life documentary that follows Australian born rock star Nick Cave through the routine minutiae of his daily experience. As a musician, songwriter, author, screenwriter, composer, and occasional actor, Cave’s lifestyle and routine may not be as familiar as the everyday person but is quickly
rendered usual by simplifying the reality of existence in the present to some fundamental elements; “I awake. I write. I eat. I watch TV. This is my 20,000th day on earth”. What becomes apparent early on is that this will not be an objective documentation of a confined space in time for Cave, but rather a temporally complex representation of the experiences of a man, who much like everyone else, is forced to face the future and contemplate the past while constantly immersed in the present. The major difference being that for Cave, the fragments of his past are far more heavily recorded than the average person, and moreover, these documents have been recorded and accumulated by often unfamiliar and external sources, creating a much larger and depersonalized archive.
As a public figure with a career spanning five decades, Cave seems an ideal subject for an archival documentary film, but to confine his reality to a specific and linear tracing of history would be to neglect the conception of temporality as envisioned by Benjamin in his analysis of “Angelus Novus”. The film thus sets out on the seemingly impossible task of using a temporally specific medium to represent the anachronistic and associative nature of human memory and history in the present. By including unconventional techniques that certainly break with the documentary tradition, like the hallucinations of characters from Cave’s past, a fictional team of archivists working meticulously in the reconstruction of Cave’s historical documents, and ‘private’ interviews conducted between Cave and noted psychoanalyst, Darian Leader, the largely staged film is nevertheless successful as a documentary with a unique vision for the representation of the complex relationship between memory, history, and the archive.
In Thomas Elsaesser’s contemporary analysis of Freud in memory and media, the idea of the unconscious as the provisional answer to the problem of inscription/recording and storage/retrieval was put forth as a way of partially explaining the problems
encountered when attempting to reconcile these mutually exclusive processes. For Freud, the technologies associated with capturing and representing the passage of time were insufficient for aiding or replicating human memory in so much as they created a singular and unchanging version of the past whereas the act of memory retrieval itself was thought to be both a malleable and even mystical process. The idea put forth by Elsaesser was that a reconceptualization of the Unconscious could be employed for an alternative vision of memory in relation to media. Freud had suggested that immediate perception had to be understood as a feedback loop that retained no audiovisual data, requiring constant immersion in the present to constantly receive and process new information. The
Unconscious was therefore offered as the site where excitations of perception or mnemic traces were stored and occasionally retrieved, although the voluntary and involuntary processes of recollection remained mysterious. Central to Doane and Elsaesser’s analysis of Freud was the idea that once immediate conscious perception had passed into the Unconscious, conceptions of time were irrelevant for the preservation and retrieval of memories. Doane suggested that for Freud, the Unconscious was to be thought of “as a space, a storehouse, a place outside of time, infinitely accommodating, where nothing is
ever lost or destroyed” (42). This idea is helpful in positioning memory as something that is not affected by any notion of time, something that is not corroded or diminished by temporality, but rather a potentially limitless site where impressions can remain vivid and retrievable regardless of their linear or historical position. Retrieval however is also not always intentionally effected and can be triggered by various perceptions, it can also be diminished to the extent that its reconstruction belongs more to the realm of imagination and fiction rather than historical fact. Elsaesser furthers this line of thinking by
suggesting that to conceive of the Unconscious as a space or anything resembling an archive is problematic for conceptualizing the process of memory retrieval. An
alternative vision of the Unconscious not as a place, but as a ‘place holder’ is put forth to better represent the psychic apparatus. This conception allows for the role of the active conscious, or immediate perception, in the process of filling in this place, detaching memory from a specific linear or cerebral location and revealing the significance of the present in the retrieval of the past. This understanding helps frame the specific forms of memory retrieval represented in the film, a unique cinematic construction of the way the Unconscious and history are constantly permeating into our present actions.
Elsaesser’s concept of the Unconscious as a ‘place holder’ that is waiting to be filled in by the active process of memory retrieval is helpful in understanding how cinema as a tool for the representation of history is conceived and utilized by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard in 20,000 Days on Earth. Consider how the Facebook videos conceived of memory and what tactics were employed to represent a specific portion of personal history. The processes of association are neglected to produce a singular and generic version of experience, one that is algorithmically determined and categorized according to linear position and significance. The agency of the subject is marginalized as their contribution to the meaningful assemblage of experience and images is reduced to the initial step of documentation, with the remaining responsibility left to the software. If the unconscious is a ‘place holder’ that requires either deliberate or involuntary recollection to be filled in, then allowing a computer program to fill in the lapses or gaps is
problematic for the mysterious elements of human agency involved in the process of memory. If memory is about consciously inserting what remains in the Unconscious from previous perception then images and film can be understood as helpful tools in the
reconstruction of our unique histories, but producing an archive is only the initial step as it is only truly granted power and understood as a privilege when it is revisited and utilized in the present. 20,000 Days on Earth as a documentary is therefore perhaps best understood as an employment of a specific medium for representing the mystical and associative connections and relations that are constantly operating throughout every moment of consciousness.
20,000 Days on Earth stages a vision of history in relation to the present that provides an interesting temporal alternative to the confined and limited representation envisioned by the Facebook videos. Although cinema as a medium already creates a problematic vision of temporality by claiming to represent the movement of objects through space and time, an altogether impossible task, it is worth noting that for Freud, the concept of time itself was equally problematic. Both Doane and Elsaesser have noted when speaking of Freud in relation to media that his aversion to technologies that claimed to represent the passage of time was not that they were unsuccessful, but that no medium could ever succeed in representing something as inconceivable as time. Time, for Freud, was only a symptom of reconciliation designed to compensate and narrativize the intermittence and rupture that occurred between conscious perception and memory storage. Cinema is therefore only a furthering of the pathology of temporality that aids in this compensatory effect by claiming to represent precisely what it cannot. What is unique in the representation of time found in 20,000 Days on Earth is that though it is guilty of cinematic temporal pathology, it does not view this effect as problematic but rather utilizes it as an enabling feature in the performance or reenactment of an entire history as it is compressed and revisited in the present consciousness of the subject. An analysis of the way in which memory retrieval is represented in the film reveals how Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard have reimagined cinematic temporality to produce a film that is successful in portraying a unique vision of history and memory in relation to the archive and present experience.
In analyzing three specific strategies employed within the film to represent the intrusion of memories into the immediate perceptions of Nick Cave, it becomes clear that the ‘talking cure’ advocated by Freud is but one method among many to retrieve and reinvigorate the experiences and stories that shape our lives. Presenting one of Cave’s
