Monday, August 25, 2008

Impossibility in memory forgetting: Atonement (Part II)


The thin borderline between fantasy and memory was heightened with Briony constantly revisiting her childhood memory, consciously in the form of a letter asking for forgiveness from her sister and a novel draft based on the event she saw by the fountain; unconsciously in the form of day-to-day conversation with other nurses, from which we grasped bit by bit Briony's real feeling towards Robbie, and hence disclosing the part of memory she had screened off and repressed over the years. Lots of mirror shots were used throughout the film to associate the kind of vanity in story telling by exposing the ego in each of the character, if we recall Lacan's mirror stage of "I". Briony has constantly been splitting among her outer self and inner ego. Is not it the same for memory? How could we tell the truthfulness of our memory? Are they only fantasies or more accurately dreams?

In the first part of the story, we might well be thinking that Briony experienced tremendous shock from what she saw happening between Robbie and her sister Cecilia by the fountain. She immediately expressed her shock through the narrative of her play, in which she rhetorically paralleled Robbie to the character of her story and described him as "the most dangerous man in the world", which led to her preconceived "mistake" in accusing Robbie for the molestation after the second shock in the library. Fantasy and memory again intertwined within little Briony's mind. It was through memory that Briony's fantasy got nourished, while from the other way round, it was through fantasy that Briony's memory got revived and relived. As Deleuze described, "writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience." (1) Briony's writing (fantasy) was constantly refining and redefining her personal experience that lived through memory. It was never formed in a chronological and ontological way.

It was not until the flashback of Robbie saving Briony by the river bank were we able to know the true feeling of little Briony. She has been repressing her love towards Robbie whom she regarded as a "crush" when she was 18. By then, it would make full sense to interpret the accusation as repulsion out of jealousy. That "mistake" made in remembering the assault was to a certain extent quasi-deliberative. As Briony watched the incident, we were immediately flashbacked to the actual scene from the perspective of this "two figures by the fountain", learning the true story behind. With a smooth transition from the previous to the present scene, this part of flashback worked as a holistic structure of the story rather than a distinctive intervention. One might realize that it was a flashback very lately if he or she missed a second of attention to the details. It not only brought us back to the past just a moment ago, but at the same time challenged our conventional way of looking at past events. Was it really past or simply living along with our ongoing memory? When we perceived it as something that followed, it might turn out to have happened before. "Memory is of the past" as historians put it but here we could see the linear temporality of memory being broken down and challenged by cinematic approaches.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Impossibility in memory forgetting: Atonement (Part I)


According to Freud in the Uncanny, the notion of screen memory was defined as one that "owes its value as a memory not to its intrinsic content, but to the relation obtaining between this content and some other, which has been suppressed." (19) When impression of a particular experience is retained in our memory, the content of such an experience may have no meaning to us, yet the content related to it which has been absent so far may be important to us. There are basically two psychical forces involved in producing these memories–one as wanting that experience to be remembered while the other resisting this choice. In this film we shall see how a novelist has been struggling with her memory of the past because of guilt and trying to resist her own forgetfulness of these memories due to physical abnormity conquering her dying body.

The whole story was basically structured into four main parts:
I) England 1935 – The Tallis House
II) North Western France. Four years later – The Retreat of Dunkirk
III) London. Three weeks earlier – The Hospital of London
IV) An interview of truth

Due to the disclosure of part IV, I am tempted to interpret the first three parts of the story as the mind–memory and creation–of the novelist, Briony Tallis and throughout the film sufficient hints were suggested for audiences to associate to such allegory. As Ian McEwan reminded us in the Making-of Atonement, "what you must never lose touch of, is that this is all being reinvented for us by Briony." The opening frames kicked off with "a kind of dynamism in the camera" which showed us the creative energy and confidence of a 13-year-old bourgeois Briony who had been the subject dragging the camera around the big Tallis House. It should be noted that from then on, a particular background music composed of typewriter clacking sound appeared throughout the story, which not only on one hand expressed the unanimous creativity of little Briony, but on the other hand also suggesting consciously to us that we were indeed going through the creation process of 77-year-old Briony's novel, which had in a sense rendered it impossible to differentiate the truthful part of the memory–things that did happen–and the fantasy part–things that did not happen at all. Was the memory working as part of the plot she created for her new novel? The clacking typewriting sound served as an obvious medium to connect this narrative time of the past with the present reality of the novelist who had been doing her best to record what she did and amend what she did not. The truth was unveiled at the last part of the film in form of an interview that largely enhanced the authenticity of the film by suggesting a sense of present established through first person interaction with the character. As Wright mentioned in the Making-of, "the cinematic equivalent of first person is interview. This is as close as one gets to talking directly to an audience, to remove the veil of fiction."

The intertwining or inseparability of memory and fantasy has been discussed further by Freud in his another essay called The Creative Writer and Daydreaming, from which he tried to associate a writer's creativity with his or her childhood memory. When children enter adolescent, they will cease playing to give up the link with real objects and turn their mind to fantasies, or daydreams. How these fantasies are formed relates so much to the one's memory of the past. (28, Uncanny) If this were the case, the first part of the movie, which focused on the childhood of Briony, has been the crucial source for drafting her fantasies over the other parts of the film. The most obvious content was the one in hospital where nurse Tallis were ordered to comfort a dying French soldier. Based on the story from this hallucinated soldier, Briony responded with her own memory of the past–something about the story between Cecilia and Robbie–intertwining with her current fantasies with this soldier that pointed towards their future marriage. This present experience–encounter with the soldier–has evoked Briony's recollection of childhood memory from which she always desired the love of Robbie but unsuccessful, and so she tried to fantasize a future marriage as an implicated way to fulfill such desire.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

DON'T YOU FORGET?


友人的畢業習作,覺得很有意思。

他把廢紙再造並聚疊起來,形成了有如木一樣堅硬的質料,然後將其裁成字母,組成"DON'T YOU FORGET?"的凸版印刷,在懷緬已逝的工藝技術之餘,教人思考現代科技所銷毀的生活質感:一樣的字體、一樣的內容、一樣的產品...我們還會記得那份由人手所造而帶來的驚喜與悸動嗎?

記得有日哥從家附近的市場買來兩個久違了的“菠羅包”,不亦樂乎,我還以為是價廉的原故...“你在美心買不到這麼新鮮的,而且每個都不一樣!”令他開懷的原來是那份漸漸被埋沒的人情味,是多少句“謝謝光臨”都比不上的。透過友人親手的製作,作品被賦予感情,獨一無二之餘,更力證時間的考驗,而值得深思的,是整個資本主義社會的麻木不仁。