Koepnick, Lutz. “Photographs and Memories.”
South Central Review. 21.1 (Spring 2004): 94-129.
Schppach, Sandra. “Winterschläfer: Zufall,
Schicksal, Schuld.” Tom Tykwer.
Necia Chronister
In her analysis of Tom Tykwer’s Winter Sleepers, Sandra Schuppach describes the film’s narrative construction as resting on the distribution of guilt among “eine Landschaft von Figuren” who have varying degrees of responsibility in an automobile accident that leads to the eventual death of a young girl. Schuppach posits two people emerging from this “landscape,” Theo and Rene, as most directly responsible for the death and discusses their culpability in terms of their relationship to memory. She argues that Rene is constructed as an innocent figure; due to his condition of short term memory loss he is incapable of remembering the accident and therefore cannot carry blame for it: “In diesem Zusammenhang erscheint Rene im Verlauf des Films zunehmend unschuldiger, da er sich nicht mehr an den Unfall erinnern kann...Er ist das Opfer seiner selbst, unschuldig gefangen im Nichts und stigmatisiert” (49-50). Instead, Schuppach assigns Theo blame for the accident precisely because he refuses to acknowledge his own culpability: “Theo scheint seine unvorsichtige Fahrweise zu verdrängen und projiziert die Schuld am Unfall auf den Fremden mit der Narbe” (49). Schuppach poses a provocative and epistemologically charged question: Does culpability require memory?
But is SchuppachÂ’s assignment of guilt fair? If guilt requires memory, then it is inaccurate to assign Theo guilt, for he also does not remember the accident. Perhaps a more productive way to understand the two figuresÂ’ relative culpability is to examine their relationship to photography. Rene discovers a photograph of MarcoÂ’s car that jogs his memory of the event of the accident. He understands the traumatic event after the visual cue of the photograph rehabilitates his own memory of the event. Theo, on the other hand, privileges the authority of the photograph (in this case a photograph of Marco he finds in the abandoned car) over his own bit of memory (the scar as evidence). By relying on the photograph rather than his own knowledge, Theo pursues the wrong person and causes MarcoÂ’s death. TheoÂ’s flaw is not only that he projects guilt and refuses to acknowledge his own responsibility for the automobile accident; he also misunderstands the appropriate relationship between photography and memory.  Â
In his article “Photographs and Memories,” Lutz Koepnick examines the shortcomings of photography in articulating the traumatic experience. He argues that from the standpoint of contemporary trauma theory, “no single story, no coherent narrative, no singular view-point, can ever halt the way in which traumatic incidents swallow time, subjectivity, and selfhood into one amorphous vortex of experience” (107). Modernist photography theory of Kracauer, Benjamin, and Barthes has long described traditional photography as a prosthetic memory device, as committing a “Medusan” violence against the subject, as a “shock-like intervention” to time, and as containing a “scopic regime of central perspective” (105, 107), all qualities that demonstrate photography’s incapacity to deal with trauma. Digital photography, though promising because of its mutability and capability to combine multiple perspectives (think Gursky), ultimately fails as well, according to Koepnick. Multiple perspectives do not bring us any closer to the traumatic experience because they deny the standpoint of the subjective individual: “There is no trauma and pain in Gursky’s images because they know of no such thing as human subjects and their temporal contingencies” (109). Koepnick argues that neither art form, analog nor digital photography, can singly articulate trauma. He suggests instead that a hybrid or combination of the two might yield a better approach to depicting the traumatic event.
In his discussion of Winter Sleepers, Koepnick argues that because of Rene’s amnesia, Rene understands better than any other character in the film the unreliability and non-photographic quality of memory. Rene creates pictures that in themselves do not reconstruct his memory; rather it is his multimedia approach to memory that allows Rene to understand his existence over time:
“For what chronicles the present as the future’s past is not the photographic image itself, but how Rene inserts it into a highly dynamic, discontinuous, multitextual, and inherently unpredictable context… And it is precisely Rene’s knowledge about the fundamentally unstable and non-photographic nature of organic memory that helps him cope with the traumatic experience of a car accident” (111).
Rene’s photography, atomistic and annotated—and yet preserving the standpoint of the subjective individual—articulates the multi-perspective aesthetic approach that trauma theory calls for.
I argue that Schuppach’s assignment of guilt is unsound, precisely because she does not consider the two figures’ relationships to photography in her discussion of their memory. Still, she does pose an interesting question: does guilt require memory? Do we see Rene as an innocent figure (even though he fails to help Theo and his daughter escape the car after the accident) because he does not have memory of the event for most of the film? Why doesn’t he take responsibility for his actions after remembering the event?
Likewise, do we assign Theo guilt (rather than excusing his distracted driving as something that could happen to anyone) because he refuses to probe his memory to acknowledge his culpability? Finally, why doesn’t Rene photograph the accident? Are we to understand the accident as a traumatic event because it evades photography and memory?