The lighthouse occupies a grey area in our understanding of architecture in its relation to society. Reyner Banham asserts that architectures purpose has since its inception been to organize materially and symbolically social life . Modernism, Banham says has signaled the end of this era and the inability of architecture to affect social forms, thus, becoming mere containers for the processing of information and networks . The lighthouse as an architectural phenomenon straddles both of these definitions, yet does not conform directly to any. The lighthouse is outside of the direct networks and communications through which economic, political, and ideological systems organize social life, however, it serves to mediate and organize these networks. That is to say it does not exert a direct organizational framework upon society. Furthermore, it does not act as a container for the processing of information, as Reyner’s analysis of modernist structures indicates. It is pure information, or viewed through a semiotic lens, an indexical sign, it announces “Land!” at a fixed point in time and space.
Therefore, the architecture of this lighthouse, situated as it were on a mound of earth, extended even higher through its elevated form, merely acts to extend the range of this symbol across space. Thus, the architecture serves no function other than to sustain the production of an exterior symbol. It’s interior and exterior articulations, in architectural terms, are dictated by the optimal accommodation of the infrastructure necessary for the production of light and its extended range. This is illustrated by the shift in light house designs; from those accommodating a lighthouse keeper in the times of oil powered lights, to the streamlined designs of computer powered, self sufficient electronic lighthouses. The very necessity for structure and extensive infrastructure in the production of light lays bare the limitations of mans ability to control the elements and harness natural forces of light. Furthermore, the very need for light as symbol to announce the presence of land mass presents the limitations in mans understanding of navigation, and the impotency of maps. This however, has largely been done away with in an era of GPS locating, which still in times of cloudy weather fails to solve this problem.
The lighthouse is also interesting in that it indicates mans inadequate means for representing materially the complexity of natural phenomena. It is an establishment of fixed landmarks which reduce and delineate the unknown immeasurable geography of darkness to a quantified representation space. It is like a map in that it attempts to abstractly represent complex and variegated forms (the shoreline) through a single fixed point. This single point is inadequate in reconstructing for the sailor the contours of the shoreline, but instead acts, as a weather report, as a reference point. It signals the extreme limitations of the land mass and announces ‘here a light stand, this light stands on land,’ while the shape of the land behind this marker is still unknown, more so the height and variance of the sea floor. Thus, unable to do much else the sailor proceeds with caution weary of coming fluctuations in sea floor heights and approaching shore lines. It thus delineates the landscape and creates boundaries through symbols.
Perhaps more than anything else, the lighthouse represents capitalism, specifically its systems of import and export. Heidegger asserts that modern politics directs itself though speed and mobility and furthermore that modern capitalism is highly dependent of the constant movement of goods across national and international boundaries. Built and maintained by local governments, lighthouses have been for millennia integral parts of a vast network of private and public exchanges via water based transportation. They act as a road sign on a highway providing a reference point through which a destination can found, while not indicating directly any fixed destination other than itself. By providing such a reference, the light house facilitates and guides the speedy and constant movement of goods which is integral to modern capitalism. As well, by existing as such an important node, the lighthouse becomes inextricably linked to the broader economic networks of Toronto, the Greater Golden Horseshoe, the province, the country, and the world; or seen in another light its connection to the railroads, the highways, and the airports. It is a point in a tight web which would be inconceivable without it. Furthermore, it reinforces Heidegger’s notion that the city is no longer a state but that a state is made up of cities; it reasserts the importance of the extensive economic, political, and social ties that exist between cities and regions and the intricate organization of these nodes of production storage and dissipation in a global economy.
This economic role fulfilled by lighthouses has since the advent of the GPS become almost negligible. Boats of almost every scale have access to GPS systems as their lowered prices have made them available to the general public and industries alike. As such, the lighthouse has lost its purpose; no one looks to it anymore to guide them to land, as even the sea floor is mappable by these systems. Thus, the lighthouse loses its weight as an indexical symbol and becomes more of a floating signifier and a multitude of varying associations permeate; nostalgia for past technologies, a history of seafaring, or quaint seaside communities to name a few. It is no longer architecture with a definitive function, as this function is no longer required of it; it announces something to an indifferent world. In a sense, it becomes art.
The lighthouse is a particularly interesting architectural phenomenon. It straddles multiple definitions of space and transcends them to become architecture as pure information. Furthermore this information attempts to abstract and represent a variegated mass through a single fixed point. This production of symbol has been integral to facilitating the constant movement of goods which is essential to modern capitalism. However, now in the age of the GPS this role has been largely lost and it has become a floating signifier, indicating quaint seaside towns more than the complexity of virtuosity of capitalism and trade.
Wrote a summary of Nietzsche's work On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life. I really like the his argument but its somewhat difficult to decipher so I thought i'd post this for those of you interested in getting an idea of this work.
Nietzsche: On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life
Neitzche beings his paper by positing several contradictions, and working through the method of adopting personages, exemplifies how knowledge of this contradiction could work to serve life. History must serve life, he asserts, but it also must help us forget, because forgetting is what makes life possible. What Neitzsche is attempting to do here is to make us conscious of the constructed nature of history, which, while negating any notion of absolute truth, is nonetheless, necessary for the construction of the present and thus the construction of life. Delineation of the past and the world around us is central to existence; however, it also produces a falsification of the past, a discriminated version of the truth. So if history cannot be said then to serve the absolute truth then it must be made to serve life, for it is necessary to life. Through the various personages he invokes, the ways in which history and forgetting can be used to serve life is revealed.
The first personages Nietzsche invokes are the basic units of man and animal to exemplify the fundamental distinction between their experiences of memory and history. Animals, he asserts live unhistorically, the animal is “contained in the present, like a number without any awkward fraction left over, it does not know how to dissimulate, it conceals nothing and at every instant appears wholly as what it is; it can therefore never be anything but honest” . Man, however “braces himself against the great and ever greater pressure of what is past: it pushes him down or bends him sideways, it encumbers his steps as a dark, invisible burden which he can sometimes appear to disown, so as to excite their envy.” Therefore, to Nietzsche man is in a fundamental sense burdened by his own history. Constantly in dialogue with both the past and the present, he is unable unlike the animal, to experience a pure present, to exist in an absolute sense of presentness. Thus, man is envious of the animal’s ability to forget, for the animal can exist in the pure happiness and simplicity of a moment without its memory hearkening back to the consequences of yesterday’s actions and horrors.
But how does forgetting result in happiness? Nietzsche tells us that “if a man could not forget he would see everywhere a state of becoming: such a man would no longer believe in his own being, would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flowing asunder in moving points and would lose himself in this stream of becoming.” That is to say, that without forgetting man would be in constant rumination and would be unable to embrace life and action so as to be happy. On the other hand, if man is constantly able to forget, through strength of will or heart, then man would be unable to feel the morality of their actions and would exist without the acknowledgement of the consequences of action. Man cannot exist unhistorically because man is rooted and situated in history through the consequences of the previous and historical actions of man. Can one escape the past then through the act of death, that is to say a transformation to a state of nonexistence? Nietzsche asserts that death brings no solace; “if death at last brings the desired forgetting, by that act it at the same time extinguishes the present and all existence and therewith sets the seal on the knowledge that existence is only an uninterrupted has-been, a thing that lives by negating, consuming and contradicting itself.” In this statement, he is saying that through death one cannot escape the past and that it is impossible to live in the present alone because when we die our presentness dies as well and we enter the realm of the has-been, the past. This presents a theoretical double bind, we cannot escape the past through death yet we need to forget so as to live. Thus we need the past through the actions of delineation and selective forgetting to serve life. How can the past then be made to serve life? Nietzsche here employs three personages of history so as to illustrate how this can be made possible.
The first personage is that of the monumental man, that is to say a man of ‘deeds and power’, who has a monumental sense of history. Monumental history is for those “who need a teacher, models, and comforters, but to whom his contemporaries are no consolation.” History for such a man is an assurance of the ‘continuity of greatness’ which brings solace to the drab present and leads such a man astray from the natural condition of apathy. Such a man sees in this history of great men an escape from the temporality of the present, an option to go on living through posterity by becoming such a man, a monumental man of a monumental history. It is also a comfort, for it serves, as Nietzsche states “to show that greatness once existed and was possible and thus is possible again, helping in times of doubt” However, to view history as a lineage of great men is by nature an act of delineation and discrimination, a constructing of history into a monumental narrative and as a result the past suffers. “It is not the historical cause and effect that motivates them it is the ‘effect in themselves’ because then it is not viewed as being irreproducible.” Thus, the monumental man engages in an act of reframing history through a process of selective forgetting so as to forge the impossible assertion that ‘if it once was done, it could be done again’, with no consideration to the complexity of circumstances and context in forming these original moments of greatness . The monumental man is thus using active forgetting to justify action, and through that to serve life. Nietzsche however warns that this form of history, if used by a man incapable of engaging in the production of the monumental, could be used to deride his contemporaries who in fact seek the monumental in the present. To such a man, Nietzsche says “the monumental is never to be repeated, the contemporary is not yet monumental, seems to him unnecessary, unattractive and lacking in the authority conferred by history.” Thus, through such a misuse, the monumental sense of history which is necessary for actions of the monumental scale is used to the opposite effect and hinders progress and action. That is why a particular sense of history must belong to and only to a particular man.
The second personage is the antiquarian, who possesses an antiquarian sense of history. Such a man, Nietzsche tells us “wants to preserve for those who shall come into existence after him the conditions under which he himself came into existence—and thus he serves life” The antiquarian is valuable to life in the sense that he/she helps create the sense of the ‘we’ and situates him/herself and their community in a specific historical moment and through that, makes themselves more content with the culture of their peoples, as they bear witness through such a history the richness of their past. Furthermore, it situates individuals and societies in a history instead of existing as arbitrary or accidental phenomena . In this way the antiquarian, like the monumental man transcends the transitoriness of individual existence by becoming aware of him/herself in history’s narrative. There is danger however, Nietzsche warns, when in this reverence of history the antiquarian is unable to discriminate the varying values of the historical. For then all things historical are at once valorized while the contemporary is devalued because it has yet to gain historical significance, and as a result progress is impeded. Nietzsche illustrates this with the metaphor of a tree; “when the study of history serves the life of the past in such a way that it undermines continuing and especially higher life, when the historical sense no longer conserves life but mummifies it, then the tree gradually dies unnaturally from the top downwards to the roots—and in the end the roots themselves perish.” Therefore, there is a necessity for a discriminatory and critical view of history so as to avoid the burial of the present.
This critical perspective is the third personage: the critical man with a critical sense of history. In order to live, man must be able to take this great heap of history, examine it and break it down to see the glaring and dreadful reality of human nature and history and condemn its tyranny. This task, however, is not a simple one, because it requires one not only to be self aware of oneself in history but also of the very constructed nature of this history. Nietzsche reiterates this point, “it requires a great deal of strength to be able to live and to forget the extent to which to live and to be unjust is one and the same thing.” However, one cannot simply condemn history and do away with it, for every individual and society originate in this history, as Nietzsche says, “we are also the outcome of their aberrations, passions and errors, and indeed of their crimes; it is not wholly possible to free oneself from this chain.” That is to say, by merely condemning these histories, one is at risk of repeating their atrocities as the nature which guided them, indeed guides our own actions. Instead Nietzsche argues for this critique of old habits to be informative of new habits, a second nature, which man can actively pursue so as to combat our first nature. Even in this possibility though Nietzsche warns that we are all too predisposed to abandoning our lofty ideals, our second nature, for the comfort of our first; however, with diligence in adhering to goals one can be comforted in knowing that “ this first nature was once second nature and that every victorious second nature will become a first.” Thus, a critical approach to history with an active engagement with both remembrance and forgetting, can guide man towards actions informed by this practice in the service of life.
Film Fort did a interview with me back in December for their winter screening. The music video I did for Little Girls had its first public screening there. Check it out: http://filmfortblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/featured-filmmakers-december.html
Did a performance at Good Blood Bad Blood this past friday (the 29th) with Ben Filler. We were supposed to do a talk but decided it would be fun to do something different.
Interesting Article on Philippe Rahm a favorite of mine in the world of physiological architecture. He has created rooms that do everything from increasing melatonin levels in the observer using electromagnetic wavelengths to triggering sexual desires using paint colors. He has also delved into the architecture of decay, creating a house made of concrete whose composition degrades into top soil, ending the building life cycle with a nice flower patch. Or a pavilion made of waffles, which slowly crumbled from a mixtures of environmental forces and animal ingestion. I will try to write an article on him later chronicling these pieces and their possible implications for society. For now enjoy this well written article on the subject.
Here is an essay I did for a class on the intersections of film, city, and memory as they relate to Berlin and its contemporary constructions and reconstructions of history and memory.
Berlin: Cinema, Landscape, and Memory
Berlin, and Germany as a whole, is a site of complex history and memory. Given their particular circumstances of being almost wholly leveled by war and GDR negligence, and thus lacking an abundance of physical remnants of history, the process of understanding history and memory is further complicated. This difficulty of remembering with the absence of physical grounding is exemplified in Homers dialogues throughout Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. Post-reunification, the process of reconstruction of national and local memory began. This reconstruction has manifested itself in several different ways. In the case of Potsdamer Platz, memory is re-inscribed as an abstract concept with remnants of the authentic framed by capitalism. With the Hotel Adlon, as with the Holocaust film within Wings of Desire, the process of remembering is manifested as a simulacrum, exploiting the original for the sake of furthering consumption. Finally, Stefan Ruzowitsky’s The Counterfeiters and the site of Sachsenhausen present an explicitly political and ideological framing, and reconstruction of history and memory, which combines numerous forms of reiteration and representation. By examining these films and sites one can develop an understanding of the complex negotiation of history and memory in modern day Germany.
The re-articulation and the reoccupation of Potsdamer Platz presents an altogether distinct paradigm with which to approach the subject of memory and of historical reconstruction. As was illustrated in Wings of Desire, Potsdamer Platz, pre-unification, was a veritable void, not only physically but mnemonically as well. Situated, as it were, in the “no man’s land” between two competing empires and ideologies, it was neglected by both and discarded as a vacant lot. This lot, devoid of all mnemonic indications of what had occurred there and indeed what had existed there prior to the war, became a vacuum of history and memory. Homer’s stroll through its barren landscape in Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire, underscores this point. He wanders through attempting to reconcile his memories of the square’s Weimar-era opulence; however he finds it difficult to ground his subjective memories and indeed historical fact in the absence of the physicality of the original, not to mention a memorial or reconstruction. He constantly repeats the statement “I am looking for Potsdamer Platz, I will not stop looking until I find it again,”1 as if the very earth upon which it stood is no reconciliation to memory. It is as he asserts, robbed of any sense of place or actuality, it is as Walter Benjamin notes devoid of its inherent aura. However, Homers reminiscing is not only grounded in his subjective recollection of specific landmarks, but is also rooted in his desire for the feeling of the former place, its sense of hustle and bustle, its sense of community, and most importantly its sense of centrality as node of culture and society.
This abstract desire to reinvigorate Potsdamer Platz as a center of culture, society, and economics is in fact what informed its re-articulation in the post-reunification era. As Rolf J. Goebel notes in his book Berlin's Architectural Citations: Reconstruction, Simulation, and the Problem of Historical Authenticity; “The new Potsdamer Platz also represents visual remnants of the past, if in a thoroughly dispersed manner. The prewar square, its mixture of rapid-transportation technology, commerce, and vibrant cultural life providing a premier locus of Weimar Republic modernity, was a visually open, star-shaped meeting point of major avenues.”2
In this sense the newly constructed square with its re-inscription of the street layouts, transportation networks, and avenues of consumption hearkens back, in an abstract sense, to the Weimar-era original. The evocation of specifically Weimar-era built form and symbolism is without a doubt a politically and ideologically motivated decision. In this sense, the reunified Berlin is re-inscribing a landscape ravaged in the era of National Socialism and neglected in the time of division, with an abstracted memory of its former vivacious capitalist self. It is attempting to forge a sense of the continuity of history, neglecting almost completely the memory of National Socialism and division, and instead re-appropriating the Weimar-era history as a way to reassert itself as the ‘New-Old’ center.
Wiemar-era Potsdamer Platz
Modern day Potsdamer Platz
The way in which the physical remnants of the Weimar-era are preserved and presented is even more telling of the post-nationalist global capitalist agenda. As Goebel notes: “Soon the visitor discovers that the new buildings incorporate uncanny remainders of Berlin's prewar era: the miraculously preserved Weinhaus Huth (a famous 1912 restaurant and wine store), as well as a remnant of the exterior facade and other parts of the Grand Hotel Esplanade (1911), destroyed in World War II. The hotel's Friihsttickssaal (Breakfast Room), its fragments reassembled on the ground floor of Helmut Jahn's Sony Center, has been designated to house the bar of the revived Café Josty, a legendary prewar meeting spot for artists, writers, and politicians.”3
These preserved fragments of Weimar-era history encased in the hypermodern ahistorical edifices which occupy the new Potsdamer Platz, exemplify the global capitalist approach to history in which all historical memory is embodied in the perpetual present. All memory is free for appropriation and re-contextualization by postmodernism, all of history is able to be reframed as an object of consumption. This notion is exemplified by the re-contextualization of the Esplanade’s Kaisersaal (Emperor’s Hall). The ‘gilded neobroque and rococo stucco’ building typical of the Wilhelminian Empire has been hydraulically relocated from its original location to the Sony Center where it is encased in a glass and stainless steel framework as if it were a museum piece.4 As Goebel notes; “For the novelist and essayist Martin Mosebach, the Esplanade remains have been archaeologically preserved like a dinosaur skeleton, a curiously touching, helpless fossil that seems almost crushed by the gigantic girders carrying the modern luxury apartments above.”5 Further, “In his opinion, the most adequate term for this stylistic collage may be not 'preservation of monuments' but 'exploitation of monuments.”6 Therefore, the newly restored Kaiesersaal is not in actuality a genuinely concerted effort to reconstruct the ‘authentic’ memory or aura of the place but instead a reduction of history as an object to be consumed alongside the other wares of global capitalism. Furthermore, the object is used to re-inscribe the old within the new, and to legitimize the squares claim to historical gravity, and by way of doing so transforming it into a space of historical pilgrimage in the form of tourism. However, given that the object has been de-contextualized and literally framed by capitalist hypermodernity it no longer retains what Benjamin calls ‘the aura of place’. In this sense Homer’s desire for the return to the aura of the place has not been actualized in the ‘authentic’ but has been abstracted and reframed for a capitalist ideological and political agenda, but has nonetheless managed to re-capture the vivacity and centrality of its former self.
Esplanade’s Kaisersaal at the new Potsdamer Platz
The Hotel Adlon, of Jackson baby dangling fame, poignantly presents an alternative to the negotiation of history and memory. Unlike the Sony Center, which constructs an ahistorical casing with which to house remnants of the authentic, the Hotel Adlon is entirely re-constructed with little regard for the original. Originally open on the 23rd of October 1907 under the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II, it functioned as a luxury hotel and diplomatic convention site till the 1930’s.7 As Goebel informs us; “At the end of World War II, it was used as a military hospital until it sustained heavy damage by fire in 1945. Converted into a dormitory for apprentices, its remains suffered final demolition in 1984.”8 The Hotel Adlon reopened on the 23rd of August 1997, however as a completely new building. As Goebel notes: “(The new Hotel Adlon) displays a facade that imitates the neoclassicist style of its world-famous predecessor in considerable detail without being an accurate replica. Most notably, the new venue has one more floor than the original, while its interior combines modern hotel technology with an eclectic mix of styles. Paradoxically, the immaculate sheen of the new Adlon's historical trompe l'oeil facade only underscores the building's lack of historical authenticity, its appearance as a pleasingly theatrical simulacrum.”9
Nevertheless, the hotel in its brochures and advertisements continually calls to the attention of its visitors its illustrious history. Goebel quotes several of these brochures as evidence of this conscious re-construction; “with the new Adlon, the past literally returns in the present,”10 and “Nine decades after it first opened, one of the most famous hotels in the world has returned to its historic site.”11 They go further to cite important guests who had stayed at the Adlon in its previous incarnation, as if the temporal distance and moreover the complete physical reconstruction of the site does nothing to impede the continuity of history and the supplanting of memory into simulated spaces. Fredric Jameson helps make sense of this post-modern negotiation of memory by attributing it to the “cultural logic of late capitalism.”12 As Goebel elaborates: “Jameson defines this type of historicism as the "random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion, and in general... the increasing primacy of the 'neo'" (18). For Jameson, the danger of this arbitrary pastiche of fragmentized traditions lies in the effacement of genuine memory and the disappearance of the traces of authentic history in the self-referential labyrinth of (inter)textuality, stereotypes, and aesthetic image series.” (1269)
This danger of the effacement of genuine memory is evident in the case of the Hotel Adlon where there is no longer a desire for the physicality of the authentic. Aura is evoked as a plastic medium, no longer rooted in the primacy of the artefact. The Adlon transcends fact, it becomes as Goebel asserts: “a site of free-floating cultural signifiers that reconfigure the realities of the Weimar Republic and reunified Berlin into a dizzying melange of name-dropping.”13 Furthermore the choice of the Hotel Adlon as a site of reconstruction was, as Potsdamer Platz, a politically and ideologically motivated decision. The hotel was a shining symbol of Weimar-era opulence and was throughout the period of National Socialism disliked by Hitler. Thus this evocation was in a way an act of historical revisionism and an integral part of the normalization discourse.
The Original Hotel Adlon
The New 'Authentic' Hotel Adlon
The Hotel Adlon can be seen as analogous to the holocaust film being shot within Wings of Desire. Both artefacts are complete reconstructions of either historic places (the hotel) or historical events (the holocaust), however, both lack a sense of specificity and are in fact abstractions more of an idea than of an actuality. The film in Wings of Desire is shot on a set with no historical precursor and furthermore tells a detective story which references the holocaust merely as a backdrop or set consideration. This is reinforced by the scene in which Peter Falk is trying all the different hats on, moving seamlessly through hats that represent different time periods professions and personages. He is in this act trying to find a hat that represents the ‘genuine’ article, the hat that is most effective in reproducing the aura of a specific character in a specific time period. This exercise is in itself a representation of capitalism and post-modernism’s seamless traversing and appropriation of history and its preoccupation, not with the ‘authentic’, but with representative simulation. In this way Wenders is coming to terms with and commenting on the malleability of the holocaust memory. Levy and Sznaider, in their essay Cosmopolitan Memory, elucidate this point: “The holocaust is continuously reformulated, reinterpreted, discussed, evoked, and even at times denied. Along the way, the Holocaust is reaffirmed as the touchstone for a disoriented, de-territorialized humanity searching for moral clarity amid constant uncertainty.”14 So in recognizing the inability to represent the Holocaust as a purely ‘authentic’ artefact free of constructions, Wenders is instead using the very idea of the fact to represent an abstract and universal condition of humanity. He is also coming to terms with the transmutability of memory in a media-oriented, global capitalist society. Levy and Sznaider further this idea: “Globalization transforms culture and the vocabulary used to produce meaning. This transformation becomes most evident when the particularities that make-up a culture are ripped from their original spatial (i.e., local and national) contexts.”15 In this sense, memory becomes a floating object, with no allegiances to specific cultures or time periods, but instead exists as an abstraction which is easily appropriated by numerous global localities. This abstraction of memory is perfectly in line with the global capitalist project of profiting from history and memory. By making memory and the lessons that come with it universal it is more easily marketed to a global community, thereby extending the relevant market. In this sense the representation of the film within Wings of Desire further relates to the Hotel Adlon in its reframing and reconstruction of history as something unconcerned with the preservation of the ‘authentic’ artefact but instead rooted in mnemonic exploitation for the sake of making returns.
This representation of memory is wholly different in the Stefan Ruzowitsky’s The Counterfeiters. The film attempts to represent factual events that had occurred at Sachsenhausen in the counterfeiting operations. However, since the film was shot on a completely constructed set in Babelsberg, irregardless of its historical accuracy, is still inherently a construct and a mediated representation of memory. The events and the physical structures themselves in the film are not simulacra but instead are citational projects as they reference in great detail the ‘original’. However despite this, details such as dialogue and the day-to-day events that surrounded the Sachsenhausen operations can never be represented in a way that is not rooted in a subjective reiteration of memory, as by the surviving inmates and the director’s/writer’s interpretations of the events. In such reiterations, revisionism and construction are inherent in the message of the film and its choice of the depiction of specific events. In this sense the film is inescapably a politically and ideologically motivated construct with the goal of reforming subjective events into objective truths. This does not however work to devalue the film as text, in fact as Levy and Sznaider note: “Cultural representations enable social groups to develop historical self-awareness and thereby also determine their relationship to other groups… (Furthermore) different eras develop distinctive mnemonic forms and content.”16 Thus, cultural representation, even when it is wholly constructed, still has a value in an abstract sense, it allows posterity to come to terms with their past and with that approach their future, informed. As Levy and Sznaider reiterate, the form and content with which memory is propagated changes with different generations as the tools for the dispersion of information change. These new communicative tools do exist as completely mediated constructions, devoid of the aura of the original, however still serve to propagate memory. The Counterfeiters, however, is not completely unconscious of itself as a construct and a mediated iteration of memory. This self-reflexivity is evident in the scene in Herzog’s house, where his wife is addressing the audience. In this way the director is using a Brechtian sense of alienation to make the audience self-aware and in doing so understand their role in engaging in a construct. This is furthered by the jump cuts used in the scene which break the sense of continuity and temporarily peel away the suspension of disbelief, making the audience aware of the film as a wholly constructed and mediated representation of memory.
The representation of memory in the Sachsenhausen site itself is far more complex and exists as a synthesis of all the previously discussed negotiations of history and memory. As one enters there are several buildings that have been renovated to their original condition, such as the towers and the gatehouse, as well as the perimeter wall; these renovations are an attempt by the curators to restore and preserve the ‘authentic’ artefact to its ‘original’ condition. However, by the very process of renovating them, they are reconstructing history and attempting to reinvigorate the ‘original’ aura, which is paradoxically lost in these renovations as they lose the weathered marks of time. This act of reconstructing history is even more evident in the two buildings that house the exhibitions. These buildings (with the exception of the cellar) are complete reconstructions of the ‘original’ and are therefore citational projects. This presents an interesting conundrum concerning the value of aura. Caroline Wiedmer in her essay Sachsenhausen elucidates this point: “The idea that aura is inherent in the object, or in the site, that it ‘conquers’ its audience, as Benjamin writes, must be rethought. Today’s audience seems quite ready to be conquered, even by ‘auras’ that are themselves patently, and paradoxically, reproduced. Aura is in the eye of the beholder, after all.”17 This reconstruction of aura and in fact the utter disregard of it is seen in the memorials erected by the GDR. These monuments, as with the Holocaust film within Wings of Desire adopt memory, not as an actuality rooted in the authentic but instead as an idea to be represented abstractly.
There is however still a primacy of the ‘authentic’ artefact within the site. This is seen in the exhibitions of ‘original’ objects as well as in the preservation of the crematorium site. These artefacts however do not stand on their own as didactic objects encrusted in meaning they are, as everything else in the site, mediated and framed by interpretation. Not only are their inscriptions informing one of the significance of the objects, but the objects themselves (and the site, as in the case of the crematorium) are literally encased by modern constructions (glass displays and in the case of the crematorium a modern structure). Wiedmer elaborates on this point: “There is no such thing as a pure site affording access to a knowledge of the Holocaust untouched by interpretation or construction. And a historically significant site can not necessarily speak for itself. Hence the theoretical bind: without representation there can be only limited memory; and with too overbearing a framework of interpretation, with too much narrative, there is the danger that memory may be distorted, fragmented, or destroyed altogether.”18
Thus, there is always a mediation, an iteration of the object, even in the case of the authentic’. The Sachsenhausen site and its collection of objects and monuments, is not without a projected political and ideological aim. It is intrinsically part of reunified Germany’s continued atonement, which functions, among other things to continue its good standing in global politics and the market. This mediation however, unlike the film within Wings of Desire and the Hotel Adlon does not attempt to capitalise on history and memory in a direct sense, and in doing so attempts to preserve memory more in the factual than in the abstract.
Sachsenhausen Guard Tower in the Nazi-Era
Sachsenhausen Reconstructed Guard Tower
There is within the site a conscious understanding of the transformation of memory and the new ways in which it is represented in a media oriented society. This is most explicitly seen in the exhibition detailing not only the history of the counterfeiting operation but the making of the film depiction itself. Wiedmer helps explain this phenomenon; “The Holocaust has become a narrative so worn as to have elicited specific consumer expectations in which the idea of originality, the representation of ‘the authentic,’ is executed better by Hollywood than in ‘real’ life.”19 By presenting the exhibition of the making of the film adjacent to historical objects of ‘authenticity’, the curator is in a way equating the power of both mediums in translating and mediating memory. In this sense, the film is being legitimized as a factual representation of the events and in this sense becomes itself a historical text. This does not however work to devalue the physicality and aura of the ‘original’ site but instead recognizes the complexity of the way memory is transmitted and understood by a younger generation. Wiedmer notes: “the significance of such authentic sites has changed considerably over the fifty years since the camp was liberated…there are fewer and fewer people around for whom the stones elicit or bring back a direct memory of National Socialism; for younger generations the site itself becomes the memory, not the medium for recalling the events that took place there.”20
Thus, there is a necessity for loading the site with meaning and a mixture of objective and subjective iterations of memory so that posterity can understand it in their own terms and furthermore develop a deeply meaningful emotional connection to the site. Soviet Memorial at Sachsenhausen
Through the examination of the representations of memory in Wings of Desire and The Counterfeiters, in relation to specific sites in Berlin and Sachsenhausen, one comes to understand the complex reiteration of memory. As was seen, the new Potsdamer Platz abstracts memory into a global capitalist framework, where the aura of the original is discarded for framed mnemonic consumption. The Hotel Adlon and the Holocaust film within Wings of Desire take this further by disregarding specificity, and transforming the idea of the ‘authentic’ into a simulacrum for the purpose of consumption. Finally, as was seen in The Counterfeiters and the site of Sachsenhausen, memory is negotiated through a multiplicity of iterations so as to advance to a media-oriented generation a framed political and ideological reading. Thus one comes to understand the unique complexity of Germany’s task in negotiating and renegotiating memory in a post-modern global capitalist media-oriented world. There is still a large task ahead with many sites and memories itching to be revived and celebrated, the way in which these will be dealt with will have a profound effect on the way history will be remembered and memory will be shaped in the future.
So I've been in a somewhat self critical mood lately and have come to the realization that I, just like probably everyone else immersed in this audio/visual/textual tumult often come across interesting artifacts, tit bits of society, and indicators of what seems to be a popular culture ever on the brink of saturation. So this blog will be a way for me to vent this unforgiving barrage and transform it into a halfhearted attempt at introducing a subjectivity to an otherwise shapeless and indiscriminate mass. I will make posts with links to pages/videos/music/architecture/ and pretty much anything else that I find to be noteworthy and then will proceed to make a mostly uneducated analysis of the subject. I don't expect anyone to find my rants entertaining or informative (I usually don't) but I do have some pretty interesting things that I've come across and find worth sharing.
That said I'd like to share with those of you who may not know the man: Chris Marker. Marker affectionately known as 'the Frenchman with the English sounding name' is without a shadow of a doubt one of the greatest story tellers and innovators of French Cinema in the latter half of the 20th century. You may know him for his 1962 darkly surreal, post-nuclear, La Jetée. A 28min optically printed photomontage with minimal dialogue (aside from un-subtitled German muttering) strong narration and a brilliant score by Trevor Duncan. If you like La Jetée then I have a recommendation which is sure to please. Les Astronautes made three years earlier in collaboration with easily one of my favorite Czech stop motion animators WalerianBorowczyk. Borowczyk's brilliance can not be overstated, and I will make a point of writing up a post exclusively concerning the subject of him and his colleagues.
Les Astronautesis comprised of paper cut-out animation mixed with live action sequences, coupled with a sound track of sampled tunes, analog fuzz and all manner of machine age cacophony. The plot follows the inexplicable (sometimes voyeuristic) escapades of a scientist in space masterly executed without narration or dialog. Les Astronautes is fodder for the stop motion nut and is an example of early Czech innovations in a style that would be popularized years later by Terry Gilliam in Monty Python. Discovering it was like finding the missing link between early Dada films by the likes of Hans Richter and David Lynch'smind boggling student short Six Men Getting Sick Six Times. But like I said earlier I will dedicate a whole posting to the Czechs so I won't exhaust my limited knowledge of the subject just yet.
I want to return now to the reason why I regard Chris Marker as such an exceptional filmmaker. Although La Jetée is a wonderful piece it does not display what I consider Markers most revered trademark quality; the seamless blend of text and image. His 1983 masterpiece Sans Soleil in my opinion is the prime exemplification of his delicate negotiation of the conflicting notions of subjective reiteration (in the form of text) and seemingly objective visual representation. Sans Soleil is an essay on the experience of memory and the process of remembering, the reconstruction of personal histories through a collage of moments which seem all the more dreamlike the further we are detached from context. This is a subject which seems to be permanently logged into my perpetuallymelancholicSlavic condition, so I instantly begin to whimper like a 13 year old girl watching The Notebook for the first time.
The sensation I feel whilst listening to the narration written by Marker himself and remarkably delivered in English by Alexandra Stewart is a similar one to what I felt the first time I watched Tarkovsky's The Mirror, a partial relapse into a semi-conscious state of recollection. As I watch those images of Japan and Guninea-Bissau (although I have never been to either of those places) I feel like I'm entering an ambiguous world, familiar and at once strange, a placeless world which I'll call the collective unconscious. A place where the specificity of physical geography and empirical time seem to fade to abstraction, and become a shining representation of the global human condition, a solitary place in which each of us exist as collections of memory and experience. I become aware of the individual as being in constant dialog with existence and non-existence, dreams and reality, the internal and the external. This reminds me a lot of a quote by Tarkovsky regarding cinema: “Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.”
As Marker sifts through the crowds of people littering his visual field he zooms in to examine each face and in some cases friezes the frame at a specific person. The viewer is forced to confront this stranger, this face which by virtue of its expression alone speaks of something too profound for words, too complex for explanation. He explores these individuals as if they were landscapes, physical records of a variety of forces acting to shape and reshape the individual. As I stare into this strangers face they become someone familiar and I begin to feel a sense of empathy. He makes us reconsider how we make sense of things, the shear impermanence of being and with that our relation to humankind in general and ultimately I find myself coming to understand what Marker calls 'the poignancy of things'. Whenever I encounter a filmmaker that is able to instill such a sensation in their viewer I am always in awe, especially because film as a medium is inherently a physical representation of a specific place, time, and society. So to be able to fully transcend the determined and the actual through editing, narration, and film techniques is an act which is in no way short of miracle. To create a film that speaks directly to something internal in each individual irregardless of culture or society is a feat of filmmaking and story telling in general.
I've watched Sans Soleil about 5 times last week in an obsessive attempt to understand and replicate the brilliance of his textual/visual composition. The more I watched it the more I understood its complexity and the more I felt like I knew the narrator and that that narration was part of my own story of my own experience of being. So if you haven't yet come to the conclusion on your own Sans Soleil is a must see and conveniently is part of compilation released by the ever impressive Criterion which includes La Jetée and tonnes of neat extras.
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