Papers by Mischa Twitchin
This is "Tervuren 3" by Mischa Twitchin on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and ... more This is "Tervuren 3" by Mischa Twitchin on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them
The idea of “photographic memory” usually suggests the power of literal, indeed, forensic recall ... more The idea of “photographic memory” usually suggests the power of literal, indeed, forensic recall of a scene, an image, a speech or a text: offering a mental image in which different times and places are linked as if they were suddenly identical, as if the veracity of the one attested to that of the other. In fact (as critics from Bergson to Stiegler, for example, have shown), this conjunction of terms attests to the historically conditional sense of even the memory that supposedly lends a “naturalising” aura to the photographic. In this paper, I will explore questions of both temporal and ethical implication in examples of photographs taken in Terezin, which for one part of its history was presented as a so-called “model” ghetto within the Nazi’s programme of genocide against European Jewry. Indeed, what questions concerning a “model” are exposed in the relation between photography and memory, when refracted through the name of Terezin? My presentation will reflect on both the contr...
[run time: 6:06] editor's note: sounds best in headphone
DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals - DOAJ, Oct 1, 2014
In conversation with Stanley Gontarski, Beckett observed that, while his last play What Where, “w... more In conversation with Stanley Gontarski, Beckett observed that, while his last play What Where, “was written for the theatre… it’s much more a television play than a theatre piece.” Rather than detail the textual differences between the play as written (or, indeed, rewritten) for theatre or television, the following discussion looks at examples of the play’s mise en scène (including Beckett’s own) to try to make sense of writing for one medium when read in the light of another. How does an idea of mise en scène come into question through one medium (writing, stage or screen), when this medium is itself put into question by another (instead of being simply subsumed by it, as McLuhan famously observed)? This question is distinct from a simple “adaptation” (in which the conventions of one medium are presupposed by the possibilities of another). Rather, it concerns how the play’s aesthetic resistance to such conventions in one medium (manifested in its mise en scène) insists or returns in those of another. With respect to the Dublin film version of What Where, the discussion engages the concept of mise en scène with the aesthetic politics of a now neglected sense of “medium” within modernist art practices, which is itself more or less contemporary with the epistemologically distinct (and also often neglected) sense of mise en scène (analysed particularly by Patrice Pavis [2013]). This is to recall issues that seem forgotten in a “post-medium” culture, addressing what Beckett called the play’s “Field of Memory.” Evoking the actors’ playing space with this term, Beckett marks the question of mise en scène as belonging specifically to the word play of 'What Where'
This is "Portrayal of Past and Present in One (Brecht)" by Mischa Twitchin on Vimeo, th... more This is "Portrayal of Past and Present in One (Brecht)" by Mischa Twitchin on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them
Photographs decontextualize whatever they show, with artefacts made visible in a new image, one t... more Photographs decontextualize whatever they show, with artefacts made visible in a new image, one that has a history of its own. Does the tourist photo, for instance, simply reproduce this decontextualisation, even as it aspires to capture a particular time and place? Or is the former the condition of the latter – offering an example of the ethnography of modernity? What “knowledge” of colonialism becomes manifest in this expression of a cultural unconscious? Similarly, is Malraux’s “museum without walls” the reproduction of a decontextualised anthropology of art (as is typically claimed); or a specific anthropological instance of the history of images? An Atlas of the re-enchantment of the dis-enchanted, perhaps? Or, perhaps, the renewed enchantment of the disenchanted in the aura that survives through the technologically reproducible? In becoming montagable as a photographic image, distinct from the materials that compose an artefact in other culturally specific idioms, what is ethnographically distinct about European phantoms? What of the power, or the potential, of the material images collected and conserved in European museums is transmitted or transformed in being assimilated to the almost universal medium of the photograph? What of their own technologies is reproduced or repressed? What is supposed of the condition of “visibility” within this encounter and its involution of conceptual practices? And what becomes of the temporality of the image – of what is imagined – in the temporal composition of voiced narrative, as an appeal to what may be thought of after the film has “finished”? What are the “walls” that make the museum visible – that give image to its modes of thinking, to its practices; not least, in exhibitions? How are they recognised in the essay-film – in the thought-figure of reflections on the glass walls of vitrines, for instance, which become screens fleetingly capturing the time and space of transforming images? What becomes of the trace of an apparently impossible reflexivity – of the viewer-viewed – echoing the paradigm of the ethnographic project: to see oneself from another’s point of view, at least in the modern “idea” (or phantasm) of the tourist photo and its digital avatars? In this two-part project, “European Phantoms” juxtaposes images taken at an exhibition in Ostend with extracts from an essay by TJ Demos
A "world in their own image" (a Museum of World Cultures 4)" by Mischa Twitchin
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Jul 22, 2020
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Papers by Mischa Twitchin