Cinemnesis: Martin Arnold's memory machine

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 from one side the recycled films of contemporary Austrian filmmaker Martin Arnold. It seek fors a kind of cryptic archaeology of the memory machine, a unknown passage to an impossible technology. single might locate the machine's origin in the of greece figure Mnemon, who was assigned to Achilles as a mnemic prosthesis. Classical historian Robert Graves tells the narrative: "Thetis had warned Achilles that if he at any time killed a son of Apollo, he must himself die by means of Apollo's hand; and a servant named Mnemon accompanied him for the alone purpose of reminding him of this."(2) Outside of the make subordinate and auxiliary, Mnemon - like all machines, Achilles and memory itself - is destined to falter. Mnemon's inevitable lapse sealed the fate of Achilles, "who set 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 fact 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 hundred 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 control removed from its center. Arnold's brief cinema of mnemic tremors get backs to the site of an abandoned primordial dream, individual that Sigmund Freud, among others, left unfulfilled in 1925 Arnold's cinema attempts to restore the possibility of a memory machine, a technological appendix that finds one of its origins in 1895 the year of a multiple and phantastic inception.

ANAMNESIS (1895)

In 1895 psychoanalysis and cinema provided sum of two units new views of interiority, sum of two units new anatomies of the psyche and the world. Against the defences of science and art, the sum of two units techniques - indeed techne - throw outed another phenomenology of the inside. the one and the other technologies marked a departure from the disciplines that had determined the representations of the mind and the world. the two spectacles were met with a certain step of instant resistance from the regimes of science and art. Despite their differences, the exiled practices were, however, border by a particular focus upon 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" combination of parts to form a whole seems to have initiated the first motions of psychoanalytic thought.(5)

Similarly, film proffered to the public a virtually immediate memory of everyday life. Film delivered a kind of mechanical nostalgia of the mundane, a mnemic web to the flow of everyday life - a reply perhaps, to Charles Baudelaire's call for a modernist art based upon the order of memory. Siegfried Kracauer, for example, reflecting upon 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 make open sensitive to the incidents that mark the "flow of life," a boundary that "denotes a kind of life which is still intimately joined as if by an umbilical cord, with the material phenomenon from which its emotional and intellectual easy in minds 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 for the use of all feature of both cinema and the psyche, which share a belonging to all ancestor in an optical phenomenon first mentioned by dint of 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, on the contrary even after they have ceased to do so" Aristotle speculates that "when we shift the display of our perceptive activity, the previous affection remains."(8) This affection or sensory trace, according to Aristotle, can go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake of 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 peculiar is an image based upon the movement of sense impressions, when it present itselfs during sleep, insofar as it is asleep."(9) The bodily and psychic apparatuses store impressions, memories of stimulations that "are derived from external realitys or from causes within the body"; the dreamwork then replays those traces as images in a emblem of mnemographic cinema.(10) The line between perception and memory in dreams, Aristotle finishs is never entirely clear.