Cinemnesis: Martin Arnold's memory machine

Afterimage, May-June, 1997 by Akira Mizuta Lippit

As we watch a film, the continuous act of recognition in which we are involved is like a strip of memory unrolling beneath the images of the film itself, to form the invisible underlayer of an implicit double exposure.

- Maya Deren(1)

The following essay tracks the history of a certain machine through the recycled films of contemporary Austrian filmmaker Martin Arnold. It seeks a kind of cryptic archaeology of the memory machine, a secret passage to an impossible technology. One might locate the machine's origin in the Greek figure Mnemon, who was assigned to Achilles as a mnemic prosthesis. Classical historian Robert Graves recounts the narrative: "Thetis had warned Achilles that if he ever killed a son of Apollo, he must himself die by Apollo's hand; and a servant named Mnemon accompanied him for the sole purpose of reminding him of this."(2) Outside of the subject and auxiliary, Mnemon - like all machines, Achilles and memory itself - is destined to falter. Mnemon's inevitable lapse sealed the fate of Achilles, "who put Mnemon to death because he had failed to remind him of Thetis's words."(3) The wish for memory is that it be machinic: external, vigilant, irreproachable. The truth may be that memory is inextricably cathected in the forces of interiority, desire and identification. Mnemon was, perhaps, already too involved in Achilles's death drive.

The desire for a mechanical memory resurfaced sometime in the nineteenth century and took shape in the various apparatuses of modernity: the photograph, psychoanalysis and cinema, among others. And as the desire for the memory machine began to register in the technological archives, it became rapidly clearer that this desire was a drive - that is, its origins lay outside of the subject, removed from its center. Arnold's brief cinema of mnemic tremors returns to the site of an abandoned primordial dream, one that Sigmund Freud, among others, left unfulfilled in 1925. Arnold's cinema attempts to restore the possibility of a memory machine, a technological supplement that finds one of its origins in 1895, the year of a multiple and phantastic inception.

ANAMNESIS (1895)

In 1895, psychoanalysis and cinema provided two new views of interiority, two new anatomies of the psyche and the world. Against the screens of science and art, the two techniques - indeed techne - projected another phenomenology of the inside. Both technologies marked a departure from the disciplines that had determined the representations of the mind and the world. Both spectacles were met with a certain degree of instant resistance from the regimes of science and art. Despite their differences, the exiled practices were, however, bound by a particular focus on the mechanics, dynamics and economies of memory. Framing his "Project for a Scientific Psychology" in 1895, Freud wrote, "A psychological theory deserving any attention must furnish an explanation of 'memory.'"(4) This search for a representation of memory, what Jacques Derrida has called a "psychographic" system, seems to have initiated the first movements of psychoanalytic thought.(5)

Similarly, film offered to the public a virtually immediate memory of everyday life. Film delivered a kind of mechanical nostalgia of the mundane, a mnemic texture to the flow of everyday life - a response, perhaps, to Charles Baudelaire's call for a modernist art based on the order of memory. Siegfried Kracauer, for example, reflecting on the advent of the film medium, insists that the primordial function of the film apparatus is to "record and reveal physical reality."(6) For Kracauer, the cinema functions as an ecto-mnemonic device, a displaced and mechanical locus of memory. Its electric vigilance leaves the apparatus perpetually open, sensitive to the incidents that mark the "flow of life," a term that "denotes a kind of life which is still intimately connected, as if by an umbilical cord, with the material phenomenon from which its emotional and intellectual contents emerge."(7) Kracauer's phantastic umbilicus gives to film a corpus, a maternal as well as material origin. Cinema as Mnemosyne, the allegorical figure of memory and mother of the muses.

The practice of collecting and recollecting impressions of everyday life, interestingly enough, is a common feature of both cinema and the psyche, which share a common ancestor in an optical phenomenon first mentioned by Aristotle in "On Dreams": the persistence of vision. Noting that "affection continues in the sensory organs . . . not merely while they are actually engaged in perceiving, but even after they have ceased to do so," Aristotle speculates that "when we shift the scene of our perceptive activity, the previous affection remains."(8) This affection or sensory trace, according to Aristotle, can follow the subject into sleep and resurface in the dreamwork. In fact, for Aristotle, dreams are an elaborate fusion of bodily impressions and psychic image productions. "The dream proper is an image based on the movement of sense impressions, when it occurs during sleep, insofar as it is asleep."(9) The bodily and psychic apparatuses store impressions, memories of stimulations that "are derived from external objects or from causes within the body"; the dreamwork then replays those traces as images in a type of mnemographic cinema.(10) The line between perception and memory in dreams, Aristotle concludes, is never entirely clear.