French

Rethinking memory: The Violation of a lieu de mémoire in Marcel Ophuls’s Le Chagrin et la pitié

Does a lieu de mémoire possess a tangible frontier? And if so, can that frontier be violated? Drawing on Pierre Nora’s term lieu de mémoire, I examine Marcel Ophuls’s 1971 documentary film Le Chagrin et la Pitié as having challenged a very firm and desperately fixed site of French cultural memory, namely the Resistance. By confronting the myth of a nation of resisters, Ophuls’s film changed immeasurably the relation between country and history, between national and personal memory and had an impact on France that would be impossible to underestimate.

UNTIMELY AFFECTS examines the role of affect in works by Marker and Resnais whose film and multimedia works respond to events of violence and war, including the Holocaust, Hiroshima, postcolonialism and 9/11. The book contemplates a reflexive relation between perceiver-perceived – film, screen, camera, viewer, filmmaker. Through close readings, consciousnesses of various reflective screens and surfaces are interrogated so that the faces of television sets, billboards, the eyes of all the worlds a traveller confronts, engender a movement and consciousness of pure duration itself.
REVIEWS
"Boljkovac makes saliently clear the powerful force of attraction that brings Marker, Resnais and Deleuze into each other's orbits. Readers will welcome close, sustained, and ever-rewarding readings of cinema, history, and philosophy on each and every page."
--Tom Conley, Harvard University

"The philosophical ideas that inspire Boljkovac are extreme: happiness, love and madness at one end; pain, suffering and misery at the other. Cinema is her vehicle into a hope-filled future. Through its encounters with key films and texts by Marker, Resnais and others, Untimely Affects is important and inspiring."
--Adrian Martin, Monash University

"In a sensitive reading of Deleuze and through a moving appreciation of the works of Resnais and Marker, Nadine Boljkovac opens an urgent path for film and philosophy, where they answer the demand to respond ethically to the terrible events that continue to haunt our worlds."
--James Williams, University of Dundee

About the Author
Nadine Boljkovac (PhD, University of Cambridge) is the 2012-13 Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pembroke Center for Teaching & Research on Women, Brown University.

'And then the earth, present to the
point of filming it up close, at root
level. How many times do the
characters confront the earth, the
mud, the original clay of which they
were made, from which they seem not
yet to be free, and chose to bury
themselves in it'.
(Marker, One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich, 1999)
--
‘Forensic medicine,’ Claire Colebrook observes, ‘has its own functions and styles of inhuman observation.’ Prior to the 2015 paperback re-release of Untimely Affects, this presentation draws upon the text to undertake its own process of excavation and observation. It casts its gaze at relations between cinema and life – ethics, time and future, demarcations between material bodies (chemical, biological, social or political), and the production of affects – to speak of the unspeakable, ineffable, imperceptible and unthinkable.

Via traces that Chris Marker and Alain Resnais have left, ‘traces with which one can work, and contours to help draw up the map’ (Marker), this talk grasps at an interconnectedness among all assemblages of life, human and otherwise, to consider memory fragments in terms of the geography of a nomadic subjectivity. Such is to contemplate ‘the eternity of the life- forces, not the perennity of death’ (Rosi Braidotti). Through multiple filmic excerpts and close readings, the talk will encounter foldings and doublings that engender subjectivities beyond the human. The excerpts will aid in an analysis of ‘beauty’ and an exploration of ways for seeing and thinking beyond destruction and extermination.

As it thereby attempts to trace what is beautiful and intangible, what is not in fact a ‘what’ but rather this, thisness, sign or ‘trigger’ (Steven Shaviro), the talk will obsess over ‘things that quicken the heart’ (Marker) ... while questioning how temporal perceptions and sensations, as glimpsed through the moving image, affect ‘our’ perceptions, environments, and planet.
--
'Here we catch a glimpse of a future
in which all mysteries are resolved. [. . .]
this will come about because these readers,
each working on his slice of universal memory,
will lay the fragments of a single secret end to end,
a secret with a beautiful name,
a secret called happiness.'
(Resnais with ‘Chris and Magic Marker’, et al., 1956)

The realist/formalist split, useful for categorisations and film theory classes, is a divide too readily maintained. This essay outlines contributions of each position to then consider the challenge of defining the wondrous osmotic quality of cinema, now ‘post-cinema,’ and attendant questions of new perceptions and sensations of time that affect our self-awareness, perceptions of others, our environments and planet itself in a perilous time of ‘post-truth’.

Special ‘hors-série’ Seminar of the Film-Philosophy and Cross-Media Seminar on Media Ecologies, Ethics and Affect, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam.

Boljkovac’s lecture, “Screens and Screams: Post-Cinematic (Im)Materialities and Perception,” asks: In our perilous time of ‘post-truth,’ how are we to perceive of the cinema’s future? With respect to the cinema’s propensity to directly reveal time and its contact with the objects and subjects it exposes, via works including Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012), this talk contemplates how the medium might continue to expose ourselves to ourselves in ethical and affective modalities.