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Experience and Memory in the Films of Wim Wenders

2005; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sub.2005.0010

1527-2095

Silvestra Mariniello, James Cisneros,

Nostalgia and Consumer Behavior

Experience and Memory in the Films of Wim Wenders Silvestra Mariniello (bio) Translated by James Cisneros The Mobile Threshold of Memory Christopher Nolan's film Memento (2000) dramatically demonstrates the impossibility of replacing memory or of reproducing the network that is constitutive of all mnemonic activity. The protagonist has lost his short-term memory after a traumatic experience, and tries to replace it with a veritable cartography of relations and actions—Polaroid photographs (annotated, so he can recognize the people, places, or things in the image), tattoos, written notes he pins up anywhere he can. All this remains inert and ineffectual—an impossible attempt to replicate a network that can never remain fixed, since memory is of the order of the event, and of becoming—a sort of vital sap. By representing the failure of this repeated and desperate attempt to recreate mnemonic processes and associations, substituting them with a network of things, Memento effectively showsthe incessant work of memory, and indirectly reveals its affinity to the film medium. Several—if not all—of German filmmaker Wim Wenders's films evoke or present a mise-en-scène of this invisible and living dimension of memory, exalting the film's shared lineage with the process of remembering. Also worth considering in these preliminary remarks is Belgian filmmaker Jaco van Dormael's Le huitième jour (1996). The film begins with a voice-over that paraphrases the first book of Genesis—"In the beginning... there was nothing"—while the image consists of pixels, the swarm of small white points on a gray background that one sees before or after the daily television broadcast, a nothing that imposes itself on the spectator's gaze. The universe begins with television—or, perhaps, within the television, in its own way. The limit dividing inside from outside is blurred. Wenders's cinema revolves around this uncertain threshold between images, which mediates our experience and our memory as well as the "reality" that supposedly exists before images, [End Page 159] but that is in fact inescapably conflated with them. The Japan of Yasujiro Ozu's films, and the Japan Wenders records with his film camera in Tokyo—the contemporary Japan he sees with his video camera—and the Japan he remembers, for example, constitute a complex reality where images differing in nature are separated by limits that remain unclear. Cinema and Experience: The Existent Cinema's relation to lived experience is one of affinity, of resemblance, of organicness. Lived experience should be understood here in all its integrity, made up of an individual's interaction with the existent, with things, people, signs, sounds, events, and natural phenomena, but also with memories, dreams, and images. In his essay on "The Written Language of Reality," Pier Paolo Pasolini explains that this interaction is film's prime material. Edouard Glissant has applied the concept of "the existent," as old as philosophy itself, to the unlikely context of the rapports between writing and orality. The pretension to Being that defines transparent models of humanity and organizes scales of accession to the human is linked to the appearance of the sign, and especially the written sign. [...] The first way to learn writing is to attempt to reconstruct and stabilize oral works. But writing soon abandons this project because one quickly arrives at the pretension of Being, at the definition of Being. One abandons being, beings, and existents. For me the oral tradition is the realm of the existent and of being, while writing is the exclusive domain of Being. Existence extends itself, spreads itself out and pushes in extension, within extension. Writing perfects itself, founds itself, sharpens itself and fulgurates in a single point, in a vertiginous acceleration that claims to give Being. Now, this tendency has been exacerbated in the West. But today Western works encounter the works of other civilizations, and even the prestige of writing is questioned, because we are abandoning belief in Being and because we want—at least in my poetics—to consider the existent as that which is least limiting and most inspiring for all the world's cultures and civilizations. If the world's cultures and civilizations can share anything— and they do share...