The Figure Of Memory In Chilean Cinema

Patricio GuzmÁn And RaÚl Ruiz

Bibliographic Data

ID2169983
AuthorsJames Cisneros (0009-0009-3959-2852, corresponding author)
Year2006
Volume15
Issue1
Pages59-75
Publication date2006-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Latin American Cultural Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1356-9325 • E-ISSN: 1469-9575
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13569320600597007
OpenAlexW2091151421
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited8

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Ruptures, memories, and discontinuities (Homage to Walter Benjamin). In The insubordination of signs. Exact citations come from pp. 17 and 18, respectively. 2 El drama y sus tramas: 194. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 3 CitationChow, Rey. Media, movement, migrants. In Writing Diaspora. 4 In the first sentence of Ruptures, memories, and discontinuities: 1. 5 CitationBuck-Morss, Susan. The dialectics of seeing. 'When Benjamin conceived of the Arcades project, there is no doubt that he was self-consciously reviving allegorical techniques' (1991: 170). Buck-Morss insists that Benjamin's allegory differs from the baroque allegory he revives, precisely because of his aspiration to influence or foment future political events. 6 I am following CitationErich Auerbach's classic study, Figura. In Scenes from the drama of European literature: 11–76. 7 CitationDerrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. Derrida repeatedly raises questions of tele-technics, techno-mediatic power, and especially the simulacrum (and its new speed); see for instance 53–4. The meditation on the spectre he derives from his reading of Marx holds a close relation to the figure: 'As is well known, Marx always described money, and more precisely the monetary sign, in the figure of appearance or simulacrum, more exactly of the ghost. He not only described them, he also defined them, but the figural presentation of the concept seemed to describe some spectral "thing", which is to say "someone". What is the necessity of this figural presentation? What is its relation to the concept? Is it contingent? This is the classic form of our question' (1994: 45). 8 CitationBenjamin, Walter. Art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In Illuminations. On his attempts to recover film for experience, see CitationHansen, Miriam. Benjamin, cinema and experience. 9 CitationRancière, Jacques. La fable cinématographique: 201–2. Rancière develops these ideas in a text on Chris Marker's documentary film about Soviet filmmaker Alexander Medvedkine; see also 'L'inoubliable' in Arrêt sur l'histoire. 10 For an analysis of the notion of the aesthetic that Rancière takes from German Romanticism for his film theory as well as his readings in literature and history, see CitationGarneau, Michèle. Film's aesthetic turn: a contribution from Jacques Rancière. 11 Several film theories have drawn the parallel to Plato's cave allegory. See for instance Jean-Louis Baudry's L'effet cinema (Paris: Albatros, 1978), which describes the ideological dimension of the cinematic apparatus without considering, as does Ruiz, the more properly aesthetic dimension. 12 In terms that resemble those of Plato's cave allegory, Ruiz again underlines the priority of the apparatus in the construction of meaning, whether mundane or divine: 'Parmi les exemples les plus importants qui révèlent les épiphanies divines, nous devons signaler les corps polis, parmi lesquels les miroirs, et parmi ces corps, la machine solaire, appelée machine photographique, inventée à notre époque' (Poétique du cinema: 61). 13 Le Temps retrouvé (France/Italy/Portugal, 1999). It also echoes Les trois couronnes du matelot (France, 1983), which focuses on memory and forgetting in Chile in the same terms as La vie est un songe, and On Top of the Whale (Netherlands 1982). 14 CitationBorges. El milagro secreto. In Obras completas: 509. 15 La batalla de Chile consists of three parts: 'La insurrección de la burguesía' (Venezuela/France/Cuba, 1975); 'El golpe de estado' (France, 1977); 'El poder popular' (Chile/Cuba/Venezuela, 1979). 16 Cited in CitationRichard, Insubordination, 15. Richard notes that this focus on exteriority avoids a tendency of certain testimonial literature in Chile to adopt frameworks of national consciousness, and exposes instead the gaps in identity 'to re-aestheticize that lack as a de-figuration of the whole'; this focus on exteriority envisions 'identities-simulacra'. 17 CitationEltit. Emergencias: 166. 18 The shipwreck metaphor also surfaces in Richard (Insubordination: 10), and more extensively in Ruiz's Les trois couronnes du matelot, where a ship of perennial exiles sinks and resurfaces as a phantom vessel that travels in a disjointed time, skipping between epochs as it does between countries. 19 Specters: 101. This frequency is part of the discussion of the screen and vision: 'Visit after visit, since it returns to see us and since visitare, frequentative visere (to see, examine, contemplate), translates well the recurrence of returning, the frequency of a visitation.' The repetition of the ghost's appearance in the present is one of Derrida's working concepts, derived from a French word for 'ghost', revenant, which is also the present participle of revenir, to come back, to return. 20 See Specters: 'At bottom, the spectre is the future, it is always to come, it presents itself only as that which could come or come back' (1994: 39); 'These seismic events [announced, unclenched by Marx] come from the future, they are given from out of the unstable, chaotic, and dislocated ground of the times. A disjointed or disadjusted time without which there would be neither history, nor event, nor promise of justice' (1994: 170); 'Given that a revenant is always called upon to come and to come back, the thinking of the spectre, contrary to what good sense leads us to believe, signals toward the future. It is a thinking of the past, a legacy that can come only from that which has not yet arrived – from the arrivant itself' (1994: 196, n. 39). 'If he loves justice at least, the 'scholar' of the future, the 'intellectual' of tomorrow should learn it and from the ghost' (1994: 176). See also pp. 25, 35. 21 Cahiers: 78. 'Mémoire spectrale, le cinéma est un deuil magnifique, un travail du deuil magnifié'. In this interview Derrida revisits the main theses of his book on film in television entitled Echographies de la television (Paris: Galilée, 1996). This spectral dimension belongs to a discourse on the photographic medium that has been in circulation at least since Carlyle and Emerson, becoming part of Benjamin's comments on its exact technological reproductions and, later, an object of critical study for André Bazin and Roland Barthes. I briefly discuss this discourse on the modern media's deathly images in 'Modalities of contact: Cortázar on exile, literacy and video'. 22 Gilles Deleuze discusses the cinematic 'body' in terms that resemble Derrida's discussion of the spectral body and the role of faith in film. See the section entitled 'Donner un corps' (literally, 'To Give a Body') in L'image-temps: 'Le problème n'est certes pas celui d'une presence des corps, mais celui d'une croyance capable de nous redonner le monde et le corps à partir de ce qui signifie leur absence' (1985: 262). Another example comes from Shaviro, Steven. The cinematic body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 23 Specters: 126–7, emphasis in the original. Throughout the final chapter, 'Apparition of the inapparent', the body is pivotal to Derrida's readings of Marx's debate with Stirner in The German ideology and of the spectral commodity. In his long discussion of the commodity, which has the same structure as the phantomatic screen, Derrida writes that the spectre's invisible visibility revolves around a bodiless body, iterating that if the spectre gives 'nothing to see', this 'is a nothing that takes on a body' (1994: 141, emphasis in the original). Making a distinction between ontology's 'spirit' and the spectre of his own 'hauntology', Derrida explains the second's incorporation or 'incarnation' with a play of différance (already apparent in the chapter's title) that explores language's multiple repetitions to reflect on its opacity, a revenant that haunts thinking. 24 CitationJay, Martin. Downcast eyes. Jay explores the epistemological convergence of modern idealist philosophy and the visual regime surfacing with the Renaissance, coining the term 'Cartesian perspectivism' to underline the degree to which they complement and reinforce one another. 25 'Ça me regard', which translates literally as 'that watches me', means 'that is my concern' or 'that is my responsibility'. Derrida repeatedly uses this expression to tie the relation of responsibility between the spectre and the one it haunts to his discussion of invisible visibility. 26 Specters: xix, emphasis in the original. Derrida's mediation on spectres is subordinated to this problem of transmission between generations, and follows from his own attempt to adapt and refigure Marx to the world order after Perestroika. 27 Richard. Insubordination: 2. Benjamin applies a citational method in his arcades project, where he revives allegory, as Buck-Morss explains, to structure a figural architecture

Art · Art history · Humanities · Movie theater · Cinema History and Criticism · Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America · Spanish Culture and Identity

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