[-empyre-] Art as transcription gives body to a memory of the Real... (Dominique LeCapra)

[Thyrza Goodeve]

This is beautiful . Thank you

Sent from my iPhone

On Mar 16, 2011, at 3:20 PM, "christina at christinamcphee.net" <christina at christinamcphee.net> wrote:

> Transcription: after Watching Jeanne Dielman
> 
> -cm/post-gp
> 
> Tonight I watched Jeanne Dielman 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by Chantal Akerman, for the first time. I saw De L'Autre Cote/ From the Other Side by Akerman at Documenta 11 but never this classic.
> 
> http://www.paradisefilms.be/index.php/movies/index/page/7
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFn3-QOKBlI&feature=related has the full film online!
> 
> Seeing "Jeanne Dielman' reminded me of an intricate lecture by Griselda Pollock for which I tried to take notes in the fall of 2009.Pollock was moving fast. Appropriately enough for the subject of trauma and transcription, I could not write down every word.
> The following note is a fragmentary transcription with gaps. As found on the back of an old envelope.....crumpled and stuck in your pocket....
> 
> Pollock is looking at how Chantal Akerman's film art is related to her mother, who survived the Holocaust while losing her parents and siblings.
> 
> Chantal and her sister were not able to learn directly through storytelling what had happened.
> 
> Pollock remarks how a mother's acting out is absorbed by the child in her own recognition or self recognition: she refers to the scene in another film, from Israel, called Summer of Aviya 1988
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yjOasfGVWc
> 
> in which a mother forces her child to submit to having her hair cut.
> 
> The silence around the violence means that the child must fill in the gaps. She must feel with the other, with/through the parent, without knowing the story. She gives solace to the mother, in an echo of Bracha Ettinger's wit(h)nessing.
> 
> The child's solace is based on 'nothing' ; without storytelling. It is unbearable and encrypted in the self-recognition of the child.
> 
> Silence, borne of the Shoah: all is transmitted except the narrative.
> 
> Explosion: Saute Ma Ville (Blow up my Town) 1968 : Exploding the locus of the silence-an insurgency "working against my mother?"
> 
> Constant framing to meet her mother's trauma- In "De L'Est" the move is 'implode'"-- a child who does not have the right to explode...
> 
> Insufficiency and overwhelmingness; separation, fear of total disconnection-- the primary traumatic resources. By opening up the traumatic we might be solaced as we are fragilised -
> 
> 
> Intergenerational transmission and asking of place: the nature of where the parents endured beyond a limit of shame; that can be of use to reconstruct a story: an acute respect for specifics (place, locus, moments)....
> 
> [Akerman's acute sensitivity to the actual. The veal, the meatloaf, the letters from Canada, the china cabinet and tchotchkes, the kitchen table at night.]
> 
> Relay-- within the incrypted -- finally arrives at the surface, in a specific place, the occasion in which different encounters may occur. The relay of art works, as intensities seeking to find from across divergent practices, a set of relationships (Aby Warburg).....
> 
> [RELAY http://www.vimeo.com/5526184 ]
> 
> Delicate structures arise at the occasion of the transport of trauma: we carry the weight of the structures, a capacity of us as subjects to bear witness.
> 
> You lend your own identity to withstand. By virtue of something I do not know...
> 
> Suspending the desire to see- suspend voyeurism : the attention of the artist to the specificity of the process-location; can draw out a gazing into a different space.
> 
> [Jeanne is staring into the mirror at the john.]
> 
> Disabling the gaze while opening up a visual field; to stay with it long enough to sustain fascinance
> 
> (Fascinance: aesthetic-affective coming into knowledge-- that is revealed in a vulnerable transferential encounter-event. When the matrixial border space becomes the psychic locus for the viewer's (listener's) encounter with the art work, as in a healing-working through.. Bracha Ettinger_).
> 
> [Too hopeful for Jeanne: she kills the john.]
> 
> Transcription is the art object or art event, art operation or art production which incarnates transcryption of trauma and cross-inscription of its traces,
> 
> in which case the art work is working through the amnesia of the world into memory...
> 
> the lifting of the world's hidden memory into its outside with-in-side...
> 
> The transcryption provides the occasion for sharing and affectively-emotively recognizing an unrecognized thing or event.
> 
> Art as transcription gives body to a memory of the Real... (Dominique LeCapra)
> 
> [Hit play again and watch Jeanne ascend to her apartment.]
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -cm
> 
> 
> 
> 
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