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Screen Memories

L’Uovo Di Colombo 1933

This image is from the promotional brochure for the launch of Giovanni Boggeri’s avantgarde Studio Boggeri in Milan in 1933. I have captioned it Erect Egg to hint at my adopting it as a mnemic image or screen memory.

A screen memory is an enigmatic memory whose fascination seems out of proportion with its ostensible content. Its psychic power contrasts with the trivial seeming content. The term was introduced by Sigmund Freud in an early paper (1899). He described a screen memory as one that stands in for either a prior or a subsequent disturbing memory. It disguises the original shocking memory, while the persisting vividness of the screen memory (and thus does Freud argue) indicates the importance of keeping the experience alive in the psyche. He wanted to be able to explain ‘the occurrence of these mnemic images, whose innocence makes them so mysterious’ (Freud, 1899 in Standard Edition 3, p.307).

Certain photographers and painters are able to present a relatively everyday arrangement which vibrates with darker undertones and which can reach disturbing levels in the viewer more directly than an obviously shocking picture. Bill Brandt is one such. He can present an ordinary scene in an unsettling light which is far removed from the melodramatic devices of the film noire. Bill Brandt’s 1937 photograph of Halifax or the well known shot of Francis Bacon on Primrose Hill are good examples of this, but above all, for me, Top Withens, 1945.

In his metaphysical paintings Giorgio De Chirico used unexpected juxtapositions of elements from classical architecture and the paraphernalia of the designer’s studio (hardly everyday!) to create a tenor of loneliness and anxiety like his Song of Love (1914) or The Melancholy of Departure (1916).

Song of Love, 1914

‘The term metaphysical represented to de Chirico a search for the essential meaning behind the surface of objects. He beieved that objects acquire various meanings when imbued with the memory of their viewer. If that which de Chirico called ‘the chain of memories’ is broken the objects acquire a new and disquieting guise, “a ghostly and metaphysical aspect that only a few individuals can see in moments of clairvoyance and metaphical abstraction”‘ (Jose Maria Faerna, 1995 De Chirico, New York: Abrams). With names like The Enigma of the Arrival and the Afternoon, The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street the paintings seem to me to be workings and reworkings of a screen memory. Thus they seem to be about both being left behind and an unknown destination. It reminds me of Freud’s statement ‘that two psychical forces are concerned in bringing about memories of this sort. One of these forces takes the importance of the experience as a motive for seeking to remember it, while the other – a resistance – tries to prevent any such preference from being shown. These two opposing forces do not cancel each other out. Instead a compromise is brought about… What is recorded as a mnemic image is not the relevant experience itself – in this respect the resistance gets its way; what is recorded is another psychic element closely associated with the objectionable one – and in this respect the first principle shows its strength, the principle which endeavours to fix important impressions by establishing reproducible mnemic images’ (op.cit. p.307).

An example of such an image Freud mentions in this paper, someone’s earliest memory dating back to the ages of 3 or 4: ‘a table laid for a meal and on it a basin of ice’ (p.306). The psychoanalyst aims to demythologise the screen memory; the artist to exalt it; he deals in tags and their untoward force. A comment about the works of De Chirico I discovered in a blog: ‘des oeuvres, parce que j’adorais deja sans le savoir’ expresses the latter view – I adored them without understanding. But it is the aggravation these images cause that brings them close to being screen memories.

$Welder\'s booth$ Welder’s booth, 1976

I took this picture on an oil rig in the Fortes Field. I don’t know what it means; I think for me it is a screen memory and stands in for something I haven’t much hope of bringing to mind. Whether of not it speaks to anyone else in this way (as an engaging enigma) may determine its value as art.

June 29, 2008 Posted by photophile | 1 | 1 Comment

About

July 2006

Through a glass darkly is my metaphoric allusion to looking through the lens of a camera, awaiting the psychological moment (in the dark). It is also the title of an Ingmar Bergman film I saw a long time ago, and because of one scene in that film, I always remember it: a view of a northern lake in the midnight sun hypnotises the camera. I hold that scene within like a communication with an unknown self. Perhaps had I something of the imaginative grasp of Robert Musil, there’d be no need to take photographs. Here is part of a sentence from his strory The Perfecting of Love: “now and then it happens that one sees something in the distance, an unfamiliar thing and walks towards it, and at a certain point it enters into the circle of one’s own life; but the place where one was before is now strangely empty.”

To the woods

It is, of course, a phrase, from 1 Corinthians 13, followed there by another phrase: “face to face” as a now-and-then, a before-and-after. So, as usual, quite a process is constellated in the space between. This web-space, to an extent represents, a space between. Images are one of the things that tag to such happenings, words also, but ineffably, in one way or another, meaning eludes one.

And now a picture to hold that space.

Who am I?

I think my search for meaning in empty spaces may partly derive from growing up in a culture of mystification. Walker Percy has an interesting slant on this. It is pivotal to his novel The Moviegoer? I’ll have more to say about Binx Bolling sometime. By the way, I am Lyon, hence Leo. I am called that after my father who died when I was five. The woman in my imagination is Lyones after a character in Arthurian legend. Anyway what interests me is the meaning that momentarily emerges from the subliminal choices that register the activity of imagination – in an apparition, or a form of words, perhaps in the threatening surprises of a psychoanalysis – when I sense myself prompted towards a reality other than what I was thinking was real, the way of being I was accustomed to. It seems like a moment of acceptance of aloneness, not such that instills despair, but rather suggests a precarious balance above an abyss of unknowing, an insupportable freedom. In the next breath perhaps, he says, Musil, that is, ” a moment always comes that is like an abyss, and, left behind at its brink, there stands a sick person whom one does not know and who is gradually fading from sight.”

The next picture is from the spring of 1986 – a rusty incinerator aboard the crane barge Thor in the Fortes Field 140 miles offshore in the North Sea.

Case-hardened

21 August 2006

And now I’m picking up the thread again. And time has passed. And a phrase has come to mind: an image darkly forming is the phrase. It is the title of a book, and a Jungian might well take it as a metaphor for individuation. Jung thought of the progress of the soul as a night sea journey; he talked of Jonah and the whale. It is not a metaphor, however, when used another way, as a rather nice way of referring to the photograph: an image forming in the dark, first in the split-second piercing of the dark inside the camera, then developing in the dark of a tank and at last in the obscure light of the darkroom, and before all that, conceived in the dark processes of the mind’s eye. I want to use it in another sense to mark a trend in my interest in picture taking. I mean an image formed of the dark. Brassai’s Paris by night, has the glossy magic of the sensuous and romantic dark.

Prostitute at angle of Rue de la Reynie and Rue Quincampoix From “Paris by Night” 1933

In contrast, there is an image by a young Israeli photographer that cast a spell on me very different from that of the brilliance of the dark of Gyula Halasz Brassai. Sensuous, yes, but there is nothing sensual or romantic in Calanit Schachner’s picture. It takes me back to being a boy sitting in the darkened local cinema and being confronted by the unthinkable, moving black and white pictures of the relief of Belsen on the Gaumont British News. That this had been going on at the same time as my everyday life as a schoolboy! What I couldn’t get out of my head was the footage of the interior of the crematorium. And people can deny that these terrible things ever happened!

Space 5 (from Attic)