Carrie Saxton and Nancy Twilley

Position Paper

Mary Ann Doane, “Temporality, Storage, Legibility: Freud, Marey and the Cinema”  

 

 

In Temporality, Storage, Legibility Doane brings up the issue that one of the most important apparatuses for regulating and storing time was the cinema, and yet, Freud and Marey, two men active during the emergence of cinema, who, according to Doane should have been interested in the regulation and storage of time, resist film.  Prior to film and phonography, one only had written texts and musical scores to preserve time with.  Time became a problem of representation and both Freud and Marey conceptualized time as a problem of storage or representation and its failure. 

 

The author uses Freud in this discussion of the representation of time, even though, by the author’s admittance, Freud made very few direct references to time as a concept.  We know that throughout his career, he was obsessed with the problem of memory and the author finds in Freud’s treatment of memory, three recurring themes: inscription or trace as representation, storage, and protection from an overload of stimuli. 

 

Freud wanted to find a way to represent memory - it needed unlimited “open” space and a “storage” space.  His desire for a spatial conceptualization of memory brought him to the notion of layers and the periodic contact between the layers.  The author discusses Freud’s use of the Mystic Writing-Pad, a child’s toy, as one such way to represent memory: its three layers are composed of a wax slab, a thin sheet of translucent waxed paper, and a transparent piece of celluloid (which functions as protection against stimuli). 

 

Freud came to believe that the unconscious is the truly ideal space of unlimited storage, where nothing is ever lost or destroyed.  This perfect storehouse exists outside of time since the unconscious lacks a concept of time.  Time and memory are incompatible because time leaves no record: the passage of time does not diminish memories – they can be just as vivid for the adult as for the child.

 

Since the unconscious is the perfect record, cinema is thus simply unnecessary for Freud.  Film contradicts Freud’s notion of time as discontinuous, unrepresentable, and leaving no record.  With film, there is too much, too fast: the cinema wanted to record everything.  This overpresence and excessive coverage in film conflicts Freud’s claim on the importance of protection against stimuli.

 
In the second half of her article, Doane addresses Etienne-Jules Marey, inventor of the chronophotograph.  His photographic technique was designed to literally capture time as minutely as possible by capturing a series of photographs of the same action, taken in rapid succession.  Chronophotography led, then, to a series of often overlapping or blurred images of one person, usually performing a commonplace action like jumping or marching.  Since his technology was revolutionary, like fledgling film technology, Marey's subjects didn't have to be.  Rather than representing a fluid time lapse, however, 
Marey's series always captured disjointed moments of time.  In fact, it was the very disjunction inherent in the representation of time which fascinated him.  Although he strove to capture the most minute fractions of time possible, and in the most direct manner possible (sometimes attaching his subjects directly to machines in order to produce an image, thereby cutting out any artistic involvement), Marey realized that a fluid experience of time, as well as a truly fluid representation of it, was impossible.  Gaps between moments, so-called "lost time," Marey realized, always had to exist between the frames of any method of representation--even in the seemingly fluid cinema.  In order to write this lost time back into cinema's representation, Marey would actually cut frames of film apart and retrace their images as a series on one page, forcing the viewer to notice the gaps between them.  He found these lapses in representation analogous to time lapses in the "real world"--for example the minute one between the mental process required to move one's muscle and the muscle contraction itself.  Whereas Freud saw memory and the subject's constitutive elements and experiences as outside time, Marey saw them as inextricably tied to time.  Although neither saw time as faithfully representable, both men worked to represent it or, perhaps better, to draw out its secrets in minute detail.

 

Is the flâneur perhaps the ultimate storage space for memory?

When the flâneur takes a walk, could he be absorbing memories in the unconscious state? 

(Since we’ve discussed him walking much more slowly, almost a somnambulant, and in therefore an unconscious state.) 

Is being a flâneur the perfect way to record a memory? 

Does he keep the space of memory from becoming oversaturated and disallowing fresh impressions? 

How to Freud and Marey, who rejected cinema, resemble its early pioneers?