Memory, History, and Entrapment in the Temporal Gateway Film
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Lives in Limbo: Memory, History, and Entrapment in the Temporal Gateway Film Sarah Casey Benyahia A thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies University of Essex October 2018 Abstract This thesis examines the ways in which contemporary cinema from a range of different countries, incorporating a variety of styles and genres, explores the relationship to the past of people living in the present who are affected by traumatic national histories. These films, which I’ve grouped under the term ‘temporal gateway’, focus on the ways in which characters’ experiences of temporality are fragmented, and cause and effect relationships are loosened as a result of their situations. Rather than a recreation of historical events, these films are concerned with questions of how to remember the past without being defined and trapped by it: often exploring past events at a remove through techniques of flashback and mise-en-abyme. This thesis argues that a fuller understanding of how relationships to the past are represented in what have traditionally been seen as different ‘national’ cinemas is enabled by the hybridity and indeterminacy of the temporal gateway films, which don’t fit neatly into existing categories discussed and defined in memory studies. This thesis employs an interdisciplinary approach in order to draw out the features of the temporal gateway film, demonstrating how the central protagonist, the character whose life is in limbo, personifies the experience of living through the past in the present. This experience relates to the specifics of a post-trauma society but also to a wider encounter with disrupted temporality as a feature of contemporary life. I demonstrate how these films construct a new way of transmitting the experience of living with the past, through detailed analysis of approximately fourteen films from Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, including a detailed study of Lucrecia Martel’s work. This formal analysis is developed through the perspective of the historical, political and institutional to show how the films transcend a variety of existing definitions in films studies, to blur boundaries of categorisation. Table of Contents List of Figures i Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Cinematic Memory and the Construction of Identity: Mise-en-Abyme and 37 Allegory Chapter 2: Remembering and Forgetting: Politics and Perception of Time 96 Chapter 3: Temporal and Spatial Disruption in the Films of Lucrecia Martel 169 Conclusion 229 Bibliography 239 i List of Figures Figure 1.1 : Les Bal des Quatre Saisons, Brassaï (1932) 54 Figure 1.2 : The ring as punctum in Pour une Femme 59 Figure 1.3: Photographs and journals provoke versions of the past 63 in Pour une Femme Figure 1.4: The credits of Pour une Femme mix family and film archive 65 Figure 1.5: The mise-en-scene of the bedroom which exists in 68 different times and spaces in The Dust of Time Figure 1.6: The Brandenburg Gate as symbolic of transition and division. 73 Figure 1.7: Humans trapped at borders in the late-twentieth century 77 in The Dust of Time Figure 1.8: Statues symbolise time passing in The Dust of Time 77 Figure 1.9: The long take becomes repetitive and static in The Dust of Time 78 Figure 1.10: The documentary point of view in Even the Rain 84 Figure 1.11: Mise en scene reinforces the gap between film maker and 86 the events of the past in Even the Rain ii Figure 1.12: The content of the film cannisters remain unknown in Ararat 90 Figure 1.13: Ani defines the interpretation of the photograph in Ararat 92 Figure 2.1: A Separation (2011): The photocopying of the passports suggests 106 the actual and virtual image Figure 2.2: A Separation (2011): Nader’s re-enactment of past events is reinforced 108 through movement Figure 2.3: The Secret in their Eyes (2009): Esposito continually writes and 116 rewrites his memoir Figure 2.4: In The Secret in Their Eyes (2009), the hero, Esposito, is positioned as a 121 marginal character, often disappearing from view. Figure 2.5: The mise-en-scene of Wanda’s flat in Ida (2014) emphasises absence 135 Figure 2.6: Ida (2014): The enclosed space of the academy ratio reinforces the 137 positioning of the characters as trapped Figure 2.7: The aesthetic of Ida (2014) is reminiscent of early Renaissance 139 painters: Duccio, ‘The Annunciation’, 1307-8 Figure 2.8 : Ida (2014): The aesthetic suggests the ways characters are trapped 140 in their roles - Wanda as a judge. iii Figure 2.9: Windows become sources of light and possibility in Ida (2014) 142 Figure 2.10: In Ida (2014) the contrast between the solidity and movement of the 145 image is constructed to create a haptic response Figure 2.11: The final shot of Ida (2014) is an image of non-place rather than place 147 Figure 2.12: Nostalgia for the Light (2010): The director’s memory of dappled sunlight 152 is superimposed on an image of the cosmos Figure 2.13: Nostalgia for the Light (2010): the telescope and beam of light through 156 the cosmos suggest the film projector Figure 2.14: Nostalgia for the Light (2010): Reproducing the drawings made at the 162 Chacabuco prison camp Figure 3.1: Dark, domestic scenes dominate in the films of Lucrecia Martel: La Cienaga 175 Figure 3.2: The female gaze: Amalia and Josefina in The Holy Girl 179 Figure 2.3: ‘’I didn’t see anything’’: The Swamp 191 Figure 3.3: Deciding not to look: Vero after the accident in The Headless Woman 192 Figure 3.4: Vero in The Headless Woman: Repeatedly looking the other way 194 Figure 3.5 Stills from Muybridge’s series Victorian Ladies (1885) 201 Iv Figure 3.6: The contrasting textures provoke a haptic response in The Holy Girl 205 Figure 3.7 Still life of peppers in The Swamp 211 Figure 3.9: Helena and Amalia in The Holy Girl 213 Figure 3.10: Bodies suspended in time and space in The Holy Girl 215 Figure 3.11 Vero begins to disappear at the end of The Headless Woman 219 Figure 3.12 Zama may or may not see figures in the landscape 226 Figure 3.13 The use of frames within frames enclose the characters in a form 227 of mise-en-abyme in Zama v Acknowledgements I was extremely fortunate to have Jeffrey Geiger as my supervisor for this project and I am very grateful for his insights, guidance and enthusiasm throughout this period of study. I couldn’t have wished for a more sympathetic supervisor. I would also like to thank Karin Littau and John Haynes for their generous feedback from the start of the project to its conclusion. Thank you to John Cant for reading and commenting on my analysis of the films of Lucrecia Martel. Thank you to my employer, Colchester 6th Form college, for their contribution to my funding and to my colleagues in the Media and Film department. The discussion of Ida in chapter 2 forms the basis of the essay, 'Disrupting Categories of Place: Competing Versions of the Past in Ida' in Narratives of Place in Literature and Film, (Routledge, February, 2019). I'm grateful to the editors of the collection, Steven Allen and Kirsten Møllegaard, for their feedback on this work 1 Introduction: The Temporal Gateway Film and the Fear of Disappearing Time The stimulus for this dissertation came from a motif which recurs across film styles and national film boundaries, across films by acclaimed auteurs and commercial directors: that of the central character caught by time, existing in an infinite moment of limbo from which they seem unable to escape. This limbo is a form of temporal entrapment, experienced by characters who cannot understand the past and how it relates to their present and future. This absence of knowledge has the effect of detaching the character from conventional chronology, as the world around them appears to continue, these individuals are flailing, desperately trying to arrest time, to make it material in order to find a space from which to examine the past and move into the future. These characters include an Argentinean detective investigating a past miscarriage of justice (The Secret in Their Eyes [Juan José Campanella, 2009]), a young Jewish woman exploring her past in post- war Poland (Ida [Pawel Pawlikowski, 2013]), a documentary film-maker examining the cosmos for an explanation of his country’s past (Nostalgia for the Light [Patricio Guzmán 2010]), and a daughter discovering the traumatic history of her parents’ marriage in post-war France (Pour une Femme [Diane Kurys, 2013]). The films’ preoccupations with time is a way of transmitting the experience of living with national traumatic pasts at first or second hand, finding a new way to represent the past which neither fixes and memorialises it, or forgets it. Due to this exploration of time as the subject of the films, I refer to this group as temporal gateway films; the focus on time allows the films to address wider anxieties than just the specifics of national histories. The films share a series of formal characteristics in their construction of time which allows the spectator to share the protagonists’ experience of temporality as uncertain and indistinct. These characteristics (which are explored in more detail in chapter 1) include the focus on a central character who is searching for something, to establish a truth about a past event which concerns them personally, but which is also linked to the 2 wider political and historical context (these include the second world war and its aftermath, the Armenian genocide, the military dictatorship in Argentina among others).