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

[christina at christinamcphee.net]

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