Thursday, May 14, 2026

74

To come back to writing, can it be anything other than writing the loss? At the opening of our discussion, Linda said that every film is an attempt to remember something which cannot be remembered. What a profoundly generous way of approaching an image, I thought, even though a part of me was skeptical. Are all films concerned with remembering? Was all remembering concerned with its own underside, the crisscrossing hatches of ratcheted metal, stretching over barely moving air? Was the statement more a theory of film or a theory of memory, of impossibility or absence? Later, I wondered about my own practice. Did the theory hold? Was it also an attempt to remember things which could not be remembered? Had I forgotten already, in such a short distance, what the images I used to make were supposed to be about? Reflecting on this to Dr. B, I said that I didn’t think I was concerned with what I would remember or not. Rather, I had become consumed with trying to grasp where I was, the manifold ripples that structured a day, what cuts through the center of the body, a grammar. I had wanted to produce images without the use of the camera. Years ago, it was the conditions of the arrival of a photograph – the reflections of light from a window left open and the ability to trace the undulating warps of a sheet of plastic over the smudged fingerprints of some other moment – that I had been captivated by. What if we started there, I had asked, by which I now understand to have been a way of asking: how do we get here, and why is it so hard to do that? What writing had opened for me was not a way of moving across the impossibility of remembering, but a way of holding the impossibility of naming the present. What cannot be encircled, placed within a frame, or uploaded. The clatter of my keyboard and a pulsing light. A few fluttering thoughts. Images without end.

No comments:

Post a Comment

74

To come back to writing, can it be anything other than writing the loss? At the opening of our discussion, Linda said that every film is an ...