The following is a research proposal I wrote in recent years. Whether or not I end up writing a book on this topic, I believe that the points addressed here are important for filmmakers to consider. The argument is basically for closer and more disciplined reading as a way to increase the articulation of the film medium:
Memory Arts were initiated by Simonides in ancient Greek culture and continued by practitioners like Giulio Camillo during the Renaissance. They were extended by rhetoricians like Thomas Wilson in the Early Modern period and reflected by Shakespeare and the Globe Theatre. Memory Arts can provide contemporary film culture with a useful genealogy for the beginnings of film technology.
Frances Yates’ “The Art of Memory” not only demystifies the hierarchy of words over images by describing the history of their interplay through Memory Arts, she also mentions examples of mnemotechnic which would imbue any filmmaker or film enthusiast with nostalgia for the early workings of film. One example is the mental placement of character- and prop-resembling objects over loci, or locations, to aid memory. More striking are varied uses of mental lighting and framing. Perhaps most unique are Early Modern developments like mental re-sizing of objects, a maneuver which allowed people to visualize objects in juxtapositions and perspectives that would be impossible in real life, just as in film montage.
Human Image on a Memory Locus.
From Romberch, Congestorim artificiose memorie, ed. of 1533 (Yates 118)
As film camera technology has a history of under two hundred years, and literature a history of more than two thousand, one wonders if the film medium will ever bloom with the diversity and rigor of form that has developed in literature over millennia. Many people seem to accept the opposite.
Henri Bergson’s “Matter and Memory” (1896), largely seen as the philosophical precursor to film theory, draws back to an idea that Camillo echoed in Plato about the inherent relationship between memory and the spirit. It fundamentally entwines ethics, responsibility, and the power of visual images while elaborating at length about the physical workings of memory in the brain. But Bergson’s later film followers, in a traumatized post-Freudian, post-World War era, may have clung most to “immediacy” of action and physicality – and intuition versus rationalism – as being crucial to knowledge. It is this celebration of immediacy that has made film attractive to artists and to audiences – a delving into the moment. But moving forward, could we not just as easily promote an alternate line of descendants to Bergson’s theories which makes film more accountable to literature and past archives, potentially increasing the capacity of “articulation” in film?
For example, aspects of diction, prosody, and an author’s specific codification of language should contribute just as much – or far more – to films as characters do (or plot structure, or environmental details). In a recent paper, I compared diction and form in John Millington Synge’s account of the Aran Islands to that in Somerville and Ross. Synge’s use of language, nourished by physicality and unusual experience, is marked by simplicity and transparency: when a man jumps from rock to rock in cowskin sandals, that is all that needs to be said. However, striking phrases like “long-legged pigs” or “wreathes of seaweed in their hair” contribute just as much to a visual template different from Somerville and Ross’s version. The female authors not only tend more toward cultural and intellectual allusion throughout their journey in the Islands, but reveal a momentum-driven surreality that stems from physical paralysis: “the creaking of their boots was as… the delirium of a corncrake.” Should not the most interesting forms of language more frequently represent the lives of authors and the characters and situations they create through visuals in film?
We can look, too, at authors whose words were developed in a time impacted by newly-emerging visual mediums. When Joyce depicts a young woman standing under lamplight, why has no filmmaker simply followed that blueprint and accurately captured the depth of feeling of that moment? When scholars read Emily Dickinson’s codification of “noon” as consciousness, or “birds” in their varying modes of flight, should not these visual ideas more accurately express who Emily Dickinson was than any “immediate” or “physicalized” representation of her earthly life?
The millennia of “articulation” which we developed through literature and its word-based corollaries were assisted, time and time again, by visual methods. Visual technologies emerged after millennia-long interaction with words in memory practice. Thus, one could anticipate that the film medium is destined to grow beyond its initial – while ever-relevant – celebration of ‘immediacy,’ and to increase its capacities of articulation through a fuller use of literary archives to inform visual choice.
Sue-Lynn Zan
December 21, 2018, edited May 22, 2020