About Kinotektur

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Mattias works with his Ph.D. project at the Institute of Form, Theory and History at Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO). The interdisciplinary project ‘Places of Memory and Mnemonics’ pursues an interest in the significance of the built environment for memory practice in society and culture. It focuses on how we use the environments to organise, retrieve, and disseminate memories. Against the background of this interest the project will study the potential to make films with digital video technology to provide with an alternative academic medium. Mattias has presented work from his project at several international conferences and two articles/chapters will appear in print in 2011, published by Routledge and Rodopi, respectively.

Reading the Memories of Space

Last week I visited the ADGD conference in Nottingham with the title: The Multiple Faces of Identity in the Designed Environment. I presented this paper on how the spaces of the National Gallery in Oslo are appropriated for personal and cultural memories to act as arguments for not moving the exhibition out of the nineteenth century building.

Mnemonics as Complementary Space

In august I visited the ISEA conference in Belfast and Coleraine to present this paper outlining a strategy for film/video work within the phd-project. It talks about autobiographical memory in relation to spaces of conflicts and looks at sequences of Harun Farocki’s Images of the World and the Inscription of War and Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre musique are looked at to speculate on possible editing techniques.

I recommend to look at the Prison’s Memory Archive project presented at the conference!

Come and See!

Elem Klimovs film from 1985 tries to convey the horror of the German invasion of Belarus in WW II. We follow a young boy who wants to join the partisans in their struggle, and witness how he looses his innocence when becoming witness to the systematic burning down of a village and its inhabitants by the Nazi army. A deeply moving and disturbing film, it tells us something of the spatiality of such a conflict. The geographical terrain of a certain group of people, with its landscape, buildings and social relations, is the target of the enemy. Home, or Heimat, its subjects and its object are to be exterminated. A stunning footage and a soundtrack of masterly quality. It is unethical in this context to talk about beauty, instead I’d like to praise its precision of expression.

Many sequences of the film are to be found on YouTube, one of them you can see as a link on the right side of this page!

A War Nightmare – The Last of England

Jarman’s film The Last of England from 1987 is a cinematic poem. Imagery of frustrated young men in abandoned industrial landscapes, naked and theatrical dancing, and images from families with kids playing in green gardens mix with clearly staged images of men with rifles, watching over and executing people in ruined urban landscapes. Music, noise or the sounds of screaming people, shots, explosions or fire provide with a soundtrack of horror, of a nightmare.

A narrator holds a monologue in the first minutes of the film. The spoken text does not explain the images. Not the other way around either, the images do not clarify the words. They just influence each other to produce the apocalyptic and sad meditation on society. Jarman uses images of today to picture something of the future, or of his dreams. The result lies clearly in the montage of images and sounds. One image watched separately would barely cause the same feeling of discomfort. I wonder if sound effects are lees invasive on the mind and my memories than the photograph or the moving image? The images tend to force away other memories and claim they truth, the sound does not to the same extent.

The film does not offer a framing narrative to understand the people we see in the ruined cityscapes. In La Jetée by Chris Marker (1962), a much similar film in many ways, the narrating voice binds together the various images into a story we can follow – even if the images are disparate. In The Last of England we don’t know if the images of the children or of the girl have anything to do with the men moving around in the rubble, or the scenes with the executions. They can well be oppositions in their image character, in the visual concepts they convey.

Is the film a poem? Is it fiction or a personal meditation? Or is it simply a prophecy or a nightmare come true of what would happen just a few years later in cities like Sarajevo, Mostar, or Vukovar? A wordless prohecy, nonetheless related to war contemplations such as Wargame by Peter Watkins (1965) or Je vous salue Sarajevo by Jean-Luc Godard (1993). The repetition and the sometimes surreal image montage suggest a mightmare-like experience. The fragmentary commentary and the non-synchronised sound underlines this.

Spatiality extended in time: El Cant dels Ocells

I had high expectations, having read about the film El Cant dels Ocells (Birdsong) by Spanish Albert Serra in the Nordic edition of Le monde diplomatique already last spring. A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to see it at Oslo International Film Festival.

The film is an almost abstract montage of beautifully filmed natural landscapes of mountains, arid land, caves, coastal and snow landscapes. Three tragicomic figures, the three kings, search for the new born child. It is easy so sympathise with the elderly men in their well worn crowns, looking after each other, while struggling forward in slow tempo. So human.

The film offers a different time space. Long shots, no hurry. We have time to wander with our eyes around in the landscapes. Barely audible sounds, sometimes no sound at all. Very little dialogue. The film seems to refuse the acceleration of time of our age. It enters into a filmic landscape of film-makers such as Tarkovsky and Sokurov. There is an excellent scene of the three walking in the desert eventually moving out of the image at the horizon, only to appear again after half a minute or so of empty landscape. I wonder how much the film offers a spatiality of itself, composed with the framed, filmed landscapes, inhabited with fictional character, turned into black and white graphics? Or if this assembly method actually succeeds in communicating to us some kind of inherent beauty of the landscapes depicted?

Speed is political. To do things slowly today can appear provocative. Half of the audience had left the film before it had finished – and this in a film festival where people could be expected to be more used to non-commercial films than elsewhere. El Cant dels Ocells is a beautiful contribution to the meditation on time, space and humanity.

“The Cult of Age in Mass-Society: Alois Riegl’s Theory of Conservation”

In the article by Thordis Arrhenius, she brings forward the notions of intentional and unintentional monuments, as defined by Alois Riegl in an 1903 article. The intentional monuments are “erected for a specific purpose of keeping single human deeds or events alive in the minds of future generations” as opposed to the unintentional, which “were not erected with the purpose of commemorating any specific event or person” (Arrhenius, 2004:74). The unintentional monument is widely understood as any artefact that “reveals the passage of a considerable period of time” (ibid:75).

If I relate this to my own interest of how memories depend on having a spatial location, can the intentional monument – a building, a statue or an engraved stone – be considered as a space to attach personal and collective memories to? It offers a replacement space in absence of the place where the commemorated event happened (which would have been the unintentional monument) – it has been destroyed or changed, is too far away or in foreign hands, not possible to reach or see et cetera. Specifically made for the commemoration of the specific event, it takes the task of housing the memories. It offers a spatial location for the act of recollection, a place functioning as a memory trigger but also as a mnemonic device with similar function as the spaces of ars memoria (Yates 1992) in which contents of a speech was memorised through placement of mental images of them in the rooms of a building. A substitute for the space of the real event. While the unintentional monument can only refer to itself as the physicality of the event, the intentional must refer to something else – another place or the same place under different conditions.

Arrhenius, Thordis. (2004). The Cult of Age in Mass-Society: Alois Riegl’s Theory of Conservation. Future anterior: journal of historic preservation history, theory and criticism, 1: 75-81.

Yates, Frances A. (1992). The Art of Memory. London: Pimlico.

Night and Fog

A reflection on the 1955 film by Alain Resnais “Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog)”. What I found horrifying when I saw the film again after a few years, was spatialising of something which is not graspable. Resnais shows us the spaces of extermination camps, the rooms of the experiences of people. He does not refer to Holocaust as an abstract phenomenon, but to it as a system of spaces, places with logistical challenges. The film manages to create concrete space out of the abstract. It comes close. See excerpts of the film to the right. More facts on the film here

Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma part 3

Godard seems to want to keep us at the surface of the film. We are not allowed to sink into any of the moving or still images. We should follow the construction instead of the contents of the respective ingredients. It is as if saying: it is not about the clips in themselves, it is about them as (dialectical) fragments of a story told. Of the discussion Godard is having. Of the history, of the reminiscing over past and present, of the reflection. He tells us that it is about the history of cinema. But do we misunderstand it, in that we long for the seduction of the moving image, which he does not let us have? By the use of overlays of two or more images, by the expressive fading through expanding circles or coexistence of images simultaneous. By fast cutting from one image to the next, by the vertical montage of image next to voice over or written text. Tarkovsky lets the viewer into the images of his films. Long cuts with limited amount of visible action allow us to wander free with the eyes to explore and take place inside the spaces of the images. Godard uses a Verfremdungseffekt to ensure that we stay in the room where we watch the film, our minds, to the extent that we recognize the references, needing to focus on how the argument of the film is built up. The argument in this case is the fragmentary and contradictory unity of the voiceover, the voice from another film, the text and the image.

Read about the English DVD release here

False friends

“Falsche Freunde (False Friends)” by Sylvia Schedelbauer is a beautiful and intriguing film. Circling around a few clips, such as an institution for children, landscapes at night with a child running, a man with a flashlight, she is creating a dense narrative without words. Repetitive use of the pictures could give a feeling of somebody returning to the same memories over and over again. We see them in similar form again and again, rarely are new images introduced. An enigmatic muteness. Here is a trailer including some of the films from the ATA festival .