The temporalities ordinarily governed through normative
narrative frames—in which the boundaries between the properly historical, the
natural and ahistorical, the public and private are maintained—are flattened in
Fellini’s 1973 film Amarcord. Amarcord is a film of discontinuous
timescales, a play on how pasts and futures co-exist together in messy and
overlapping “modes of duration.” In this way, events that are framed as world
historical—the fascist parades for example—and events that are deemed interpersonal—crazy
uncle Teo in a tree demanding a woman—are ontologically flattened. In Fellini’s
rendition, historical consciousness, the happenings of a provincial Italian
town, times of life and seasons swirl together—all as carnavalesque
reconstructions of memory catalyzed by the feeling subject, the cinema viewer,
who might claim, as many who first saw the film, that “that was my memory.”[1]
Memories here are atemporal, anachronistic, and resist the
narrative closure and teleological linearity of historicity and thus, instead
of positing history as a sequence of losses or a moral fable calling for the
atonement for past (national) sins (this is especially important in light of Amarcord’s setting during WWII Italy), Amarcord seems to speak to a growing
global feeling of disillusionment with nationalist projects, a faith in the
modernist aspirations to social
perfection, and the inevitability of progress that, according to social
histories and novels set in this time had begun to fray in the wake of
anti-colonial struggles, Vietnam, the 1968 Paris uprisings, and economic
disorder. The past, global structures, consumer culture, Catholicism, and local
pastoral practices all work on the town’s present, but not as monumentalized
forms that stake out the fulfillment of any particular history.
“That was my memory.”
Memory in this film is also pre-personal and may express
specific “public feelings” in response to the historical present in which it
was made: addressing the legacies of fascism, the decay of modernist fantasies,
and the decline of rural life in this particular part of the world. But instead
of languishing in a state of loss, Fellini’s creation suggests the plentitude
of history/memory, the plentitude of time. And thus the uncanny feeling that
these could be my memories even
though I didn’t live in a provincial Italian town during the 1930s. I could
follow the film despite the lack of historical moralizations and national
narrative frames. Somehow, the story made sense through my own archive of
historical consciousness and affective memories because it freed temporality
from the linearity that demands a privileged epistemic position: a national subject,
white and middle class, Evangelical Christian, liberal multiculturalist,
whatever. Like Italian neorealism in general, Amarcord creates, in the words of Gilles Deleuze, the possibility
of a severance of the viewer’s “sensory-motor link,”[2]
giving rise to a new situation: a
feeling described by Deleuze scholar Joshua Ramey as “becoming cosmic,” as
preindividual stimuli play the body, “lives are cross-cut by other lives and
times never directly present to them, and demonstrate the way the lived
coherence of time is riven with faulty memory, and how identity is haunted by
the various personae we play out along our life lines.”[3]
This plentitude of time is precisely what, according to N+1
critic Nicholas Dames, a recent cavalcade of 1970s “throwback fiction,” share
as a major trope, or a common affective register.[4]
It was during the 1970s that a feeling of impasse began to take hold as the
attainment of Good Life fantasies, especially in the United States, that
promised upward mobility, job security, and heteronormative family relations
began to fray. This impasse, a condition of precarity, “animated suspension,” and
a feeling of the historical present as an “elongated durée,” in which Lauren Berlant identifies with our contemporary
neoliberal moment,[5] is
identified by Dames as the structure of feeling experienced by the protagonists
of the books he reviews. These novels, predating the dawn of the
Reagan-Thatcher era, point to a hinge, an opening of historical possibility
that is, crucially, felt by the body
as a slowing, a depression (not depression as a personal, pathology but as a
public feeling). According to Dames, these novels “reinterpret [the 70s] as a
kind of security, an ordinariness, created and protected by the feeling of a social order slowly giving
way.”[6]
While most of the actors in these novels retreat into private caverns of
bathtub and bed, overcome by a grinding recognition that the social
configurations they had hedged their bets on were “slowly wearing out,” Dames
claims that the “self-confined depressives” of theses novels may be read as
REFUSING compulsory cycles of
consumption and production, a REFUSING of the homogenized and relentlessly
progressing time of capitalism. But it is in Lauren Groff’s novel Arcadia that Dames suggests may contain
the most useful critical approach of the historical novel to the cruel optimism
of contemporary neoliberalism. Because neoliberalism continues to rely on
notions of inevitability to render its violences natural, historical novels
that unabashedly embrace nostalgia as an attachment to a past that could have
been, stubbornly refuse the notion that, for example, 70s social
experimentation was a blemish on the face of an adolescent generation, destined
to fade with time and maturity. Rather, this critical nostalgia attaches to an
opportunity not taken, a lingering ache that radical social movements “did not
go far enough,” and a “persistent wistfulness, [that] eludes the feeling of
inevitability that is, after all, neoliberalism’s best ally.”[7]
But is Groff truly nostalgic for an (alternative) past, or
can her book be more usefully seen as haunted by the potentialities of seizing,
elaborating, and improvising on glitches, cracks, and pauses at a time of
impasse or transition? I remain skeptical that nostalgia can ever be deployed
to challenge teleological narratives. It is my hunch that nostalgia, even when
critical, is merely replacing one ideal outcome with another. As critical
nostalgia remains mired in imagining a past event, an ideal outcome is just as foreclosed,
and thus lacking an orientation towards possible futures of living better
together in the present. While Dames identifies a possible mode of critique in
Groff’s nostalgic stuckness, especially in its resistance to narrative closure,
I’d like to suggest another refusal of progressive teleologies. Following the
work of the late Jose Estaban Muñoz, I’d like to imagine the act of lingering
in the past as attending to its unfinished business, a practice of the present
that anticipates or reaches towards futurities that are at once perfectly
attainable but can never be realized in any transcendent conclusion.[8]
At first glance, Amarcord
may seem mired in the nostalgia of childhood, in pastoral idylls, in the
magic spectacles that shaped Fellini as a subject. But the city depicted in the
film was not the Rimini of Fellini’s childhood. Fellini took great pains with
this movie to show the mythic quality of recovered memories, the theatricality,
the carnavalesque renderings of the past as it replays in the mind: the
masturbatory caricatures, the exaggerated speed-ups and slow-downs of camera
movement, the outrageous stagings of local legends in the lush choreographic
language of Busby-Berkeley. Not only did he refuse to film the movie in his
hometown and expressed frustration when those from Rimini were convinced he had
depicted them on screen, but over the course of filming, demanded to alter the
scenes when they looked too
realistic, even demanding more plastic in the famous luxury liner shot.
“Between memory and invention,” is how film critic Sam Rohdie describes
Fellini’s later films, including Amarcord.
Between memory and invention is the uncanny, and the future. Meaning is in the
present—the irreducible object, now enframed, ceases to be “real.” The real object is always withdrawing over the
horizon, into the future. The momentary glimpse of the real, this uncanny
object, is the space of opportunity, a “zone of indetermination” that makes freedom
possible, a space to imagine futures “unlike the present.”[9]
Meaning is open, it is irreducibly to-come. In the nineteenth century, Percy Shelley
saw poets as those doing this work that perhaps filmmakers such as Fellini have
carried into the twentieth, as they may be seen to be “the hierophants of an
unapprehended imagination, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity
casts upon the present.” Poems and movies have the capability to suspend time
and meaning, opening up a space of indeterminacy that also feels uncannily
present to us, real, yet unforeclosed.[10]
Perhaps the best we can do is find a shaky home in the
tensile weave of memory and invention. After all, aren’t even the most
future-oriented utopic imaginings drawn from our archive of memorialized images
that make us feel good? Aren’t politics always about desire? The question seems
to be one of what, where, and who forms the archive and what stories we may be
able to assemble or divine through the materials we find or collect there.
[1] Antonio Monada, Fellini’s Homecoming, DVD, Disc 2, Amarcord, directed by Federico Fellini, (Criterion,
2006).
[2]
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image,
trans. Hugh Tomlinson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989),
4.
[3]
Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze:
Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 151;
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 171.
[4]
Nicholas Dames, “Seventies Throwback Fiction,” N+1 21 (Winter 2015).
[5]
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 195.
[6]
Dames, “Seventies Throwback Fiction,” 150.
[7]
Ibid., 157.
[8]
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The
Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press,
2009), 3.
[9]
Here I am quoting Elizabeth Grosz in her work elaborating on the philosophy of
Henri Bergson, Elizabeth Grosz, “Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom,” in Diana
Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New
Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press,
2010), 148-149.
[10]
Percy Shelley quoted in Timothy Morton, Realist
Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press,
2013), 209.
No comments:
Post a Comment