Exiled, Always Elsewhere: Video as an expression of postmemory

Marsha Berry

RMIT University, Melbourne

Prologue

Hirsch (1996) discussed the sense of displacement children of exile feel and asked "What are the aesthetic shapes of postmemory?" (Hirsch, 1996: 664). Tchertov (2005) observes that a "picture can "remember" the images of persons or things carried away by time long ago".

In this paper I theorise my performed creative practice in response to my own wanderings as a child of exiles (Displaced Persons) who immigrated to Australia in 1950. I present the aesthetic shapes and forms I have devised that can perform "post-remembering". The screening of video art in gallery spaces alters more traditional understandings of narrative forms and structures, and presents challenges for story telling. I draw on Bakhtin (1981) and Eco (1979) to locate my video and photographic expressions within narratotolgy and Hirsch's concept of postmemory to provide a cultural frame.

Post-remembering Germany

 "The firestorm [was] incredible, there [were] calls for help and screams from somewhere but all around [was] one single inferno. suddenly, I saw people again, right in front of me. They scream[ed] and gesticulate[d] with their hands, and then - to my utter horror and amazement - I [saw] how one after the other they simply seem to let themselves drop to the ground. Today I know that these unfortunate people were the victims of lack of oxygen. They fainted and then burnt to cinders." Margaret Freyer (in Carey, 1987; 608-611)

Susan Sontag (1989) in On Photography describes her encounters as a child with her father's photographs and the horrible revelations they brought about the Second World War and Nazi atrocities. The moment of seeing the images irrevocably changed Sontag's view of the world through her realisation of death and ultimate cruelty and violence. Hirsch (2001) argues that we do not have to see the images to know the content and that furthermore the shock of the images has a different effect on different generations. This is her starting point for building a theory of postmemory. She defines postmemory as temporally different from survivor memory and that it is characterised by displacement, belatedness, projection and vicariousness.  It is mediated not through direct remembering but through the imagination: through projection and representation.

My starting point is a temporal line of exile and migration between 1929 and 2007. My mother migrated to Australia in 1950 as a Displaced Person from a German refugee camp with my father. Both were former Soviet citizens escaping from Stalinist policies. My mother was the sixth child in a family of seven. In 1929 her father was incarcerated by the Soviets under Sections 58.10 to 58.11 for counter-revolutionary activities and sent to the Solovetsky Islands (Solovki) near Karelia to the gulags. In 1933 he was released. The family went to Berlin to live with my grandmother's parents - exiled. By a twist of fate my mother was the only family member who retained her Soviet status. This meant she had to report to Gestapo authorities every week. She felt safest on the move. Her war was a tale of travel and many stories.

In 1944 she was living in Dresden. I could remember her memories of leaving Dresden the morning of the night of the first bombings, I agonised with her over her decision. My sister was two and they needed to cross a front to leave. The Soviets were close. As an exile from the Soviet Union she needed to flee westwards towards British and American sectors. But the apartment was comfortable and she was tired of moving. She felt compelled to leave anyway. She was walking across fields and forests outside Dresden on February 13, 1945, with a knapsack on her back and my sister in her arms. She watched the planes fly over and then the orange glow on the horizon that was Dresden burning. The horror and beauty of the glow indelibly marked her memory. She always said that her guardian angel spoke to her and made her leave. I heard the angel. I had returned for her. I looked at the streets with her gaze and together we were glad that Frauenkirche had been restored with symbolic burnt stones as a memorial to that night. We puzzled at the presence of performers clad in Saxon baroque clothes and then I realised it was for the benefit of the tourists.

My experience of Dresden in March 2007 was overlaid and doubled by my projected feelings of displacement and connection with place. Hirsch (1996: 664) says "the deep sense of displacement suffered by the children of exile, the elegiac aura of the memory of a place to which one cannot return, creates in my experience, a strange sense of plenitude rather than a feeling of absence: I've sometimes felt that there were too many stories, too much affect, even as at other times I've been unable to fill in the gaps and the absences". Hirsch then refers to the words of Nadine Fresco to describe the plight of those who come after the children of exile and asks, "What are the aesthetic shapes of postmemory?" - a question I sought to answer through my video and photography narrative practice. My raw material comprised the streetscapes and places in front of me and an old home movie shot in 1940 in Berlin showing my mother as a twenty year old woman, a woman I knew and never met save in my imagination as I snuggled in her lap as a child listening to stories of a traumatic yet vibrant past always mourning my belated arrival.

Bakhtin (1981) coined the term heteroglossia to refer to the set of dialogic relations a text can set up whereby centripetal and centrifugal forces of meaning are brought into play so that the unitary forces of a narrative are disrupted by social and historical multiplicity creating multiple narrator voices. Places in Germany, particularly the old pre-WW2 East are heteroglossic (Bakhtin, 1981) because it difficult for an outsider cognisant of the Holocaust images and the Second World War to look at them without overlaying the black mirror of this other. This realisation is displaced, transferred and belated. Places are read against past narratives of modernisation and fascism. Yet before the horrors of Second World War photographs, other narrative voices existed and these still clamour to be heard. In the old east, in cities like Dresden, reminders of the Holocaust, the fire bombings of February 1945 and the Soviet occupation remain. I wanted to exporess these hetoroglossic tensions in my video and photography.

I shot the image of the Frauenkirche below with the crane in the foreground to disrupt the narrative. Photography is connection of memory and postmemory according to Hirsch (1996). According to Barthes "the photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here" (Barthes, 1981: 80). The blackened stone visible in the photograph are a deliberate memorial to the Frauenkirche, which was there prior to the fire bombings.

The story of Dresden continues to be constantly overlaid with new narratives and voices. The cranes add an echo of constructivism and expressionism that is read against 21^st century postmodernism as well as postmemory images of the bombed out remains of the church. The cranes evoke further memories of images of bombed out streetscapes that in turn are material traces of the horrors of the Second World War that in turn are read against the Iron Curtain and the socialist grand narrative of industrialisation. What did meant for new forms like video art and low-resolution mobile phone anti-photography? My arrival in Dresden felt belated: the East is no longer, the Berlin Wall torn down. Yet the ghosts remain filling the centre with a melancholic optimism. Dresden was no longer vicarious existing only in my imaginings but a real material place and presence filled with gaps.

Baroque Gold, Rose and Pink

I took video with my mobile phone in Dresden of the square outside Frauenkirche and output it as an image sequence. The images were tiny (160 X 120 pixels) but created interesting aesthetic effects when blown up and printed in A1 size.  There is also a strong element of non-photorealism in the low resolution aesthetic that challenges the notion of photography as indexical traces. The three images were part of a group exhibition in Melbourne, Australia, August 2007 titled An Order of Magnitude, which celebrated the possibilities and constraints of the mobile phone camera. The mobile phone is a ubiquitous communications device that has become an extension of the self, capable of capturing ephemeral everyday narratives and non-narratives in all their glorious heteroglossia.

The three images below are of performers dressed in Saxon Baroque clothes. The clothes refer to a time before the Holocaust, indeed to the time before Germany, as a national entity existed. The Baroque clad figures disrupt the place imbuing it with an ambience of nostalgia that startles. Yet the figures are commonplace, they're there everyday. The images are of the banal: a show for tourists adding an element of hyper-reality that is almost Disney like. The viewer is positioned to read these images against the Baroque past. The Saxon Baroque costumes place the past tense almost as a character in the narrative of Dresden, overlaying the postmemory traumas with a deeper past, beyond the horrors and guilt of the holocaust and the Cold War. The costumes have a further effect: people read the contemporary dressed figures against the ones dressed in Saxon Baroque. This has the effect of blurring gender - the females dressed in pants against a Baroque contextualisation of this place tend to be read as male figures in the three images.

The visual aesthetics and compositions are reminiscent of impressionism, with its emphasis on capturing light through colour blocks and the use of blurs. The photographs use distance for resolution. The further one stands back, the clearer the composition - the overall picture. Low-resolution aesthetics add layers to the meanings and metaphors viewers can take from the images. (Indeed, at the exhibition people commented in the guest book that these photographs reminded them of Degas, Manet and Monet.) This provides another discourse against which the images may be read. Centripetal and centrifugal forces are in play in the three photographs as historical epochs compete to suggest dominant readings for the images. Voices of postmemory compete with older voices from the epochs of nineteenth century impressionism and seventeenth century baroque within a discourse of nostalgia.

Baroque Gold

 

Baroque Rose                         

Baroque Pink

Displaced One

Displaced One is a single channel video that responds to the tradition of memorialisation in fine art specifically the gap between memory and postmemory. Christian Boltanski is an artist who works within this tradition challenging the implied connection between photography and truth. He seeks a post-Holocaust aesthetic that includes an absent and belated past through setting up ambiguities between images and implications connecting them to Holocaust narratives. For example, the memento mori Altar to the Lycee Chases is a work that explores memory and cultural spaces. The subjects are French children who are alive as adults but their childhoods are no more. Texts comprising his installations become intertextual referring to each other and inviting the viewer to read them against each other.

The Displaced One use intertextuality and a narrator voice that leaves gaps for the viewer through editing the old and new together. The work is a montage of decaying colour film footage shot in Berlin in 1940 that was digitised and mobile phone footage I shot in Dresden.  Bal (2006) observes that interruptions and gaps characterise video installation. In this work I sought to disrupt the narrative flow in the home movie by running part of the action in reverse, part in slow motion and part at normal speed. Time is disrupted through editing that emphasises gaps in the narrative flow of images. I used a three-part structure as a narrative device to mimic the three-act structure so ubiquitous in Hollywood movies but I subverted it to tease narrative expectations of viewers. The mimesis of three acts is deliberately incomplete.

Displaced One opens with a man walking backwards in slow motion up a set of steps to a door. I used a traditional and clichéd technique of a cross dissolve to the next scene where two people walk out of the door into a street in part setting up an expectation that something is about to happen and that we will follow one of the characters. I tricked this expectation with a dissolve to a pan of a square in Dresden that did not provide an obvious narrator point of view. The dissolve as a narrative cinematic device typically connotes the passing of time between the shots or scenes. The viewer's expectation to see the woman again did not materialise; rather the viewer was presented with an absence. The soundtrack is an accompanied male voice singing Moscow Nights: a reference to migration and homesickness. The song gives the piece linearity. Nonetheless, questions are raised: why does the man walk backwards in order to meet his companion? Where are they going? His return from his point of origin triggers a sense of having seen this before. It is already a replay, a remembering of a prior event.

After his return, the man walks out into the street with his companion, a woman. They appear to go separate ways. The focus remains on the woman. The relationship between them is ambiguous - are they lovers? Are they family? Are they friends?  Where were they going? Did they go together? I deliberately left their relationship for the viewer to resolve using a narrative device described by Umberto Eco (1979) as 'ghost chapters' in his famous analysis of A Most Parisian Episode by Alphonse Allais.

In the third part I videoed a square in Dresden using a circular motion to give a 360-degree pan viewpoint then I disrupted the flow with an upward and backward movement. The visual semiotic draws substantially on film noir. This part is partially homage to the techniques devised by Hitchcock (for example Vertigo) to signify moments of psychological unease or disturbance. Another gap is created through the interruption of this vision sequence raising further questions - is this where the woman went? Did the man accompany her? There are two figures in the square walking together with a certain degree of intimacy. But the viewer never gets close enough to establish whether these figures are the man and the woman yet the invitation to make this connection is there. A closer inspection reveals the error of this imaginative leap. The two figures are placed in the middle ground and the camera soon leaves them to their perambulations. So, through whose eyes are we seeing the action? The characters are absent physically and temporally. Again I have used the 'ghost chapter' as a narrative device leaving the text open for the viewer to complete. or not.

In a typical gallery installation the video would be viewed as a loop. Viewers would see the image sequence from when they enter the exhibition space. The only narrative device that operates as an obvious marker of time (denoting a beginning, middle and end) is the song.  'Ghost chapters', interruptions and gaps suggest belatedness, displacement and a sense that imagination plays a critical part in acts of remembering. This is what a postmemory aesthetic may look like with the narrative begun becoming absent in a place that still remains intact. The screenshots below can be viewed as a storyboard of Displaced One.

                    

                      

                         

Screenshots from Displaced One

Elbe Tunnel

Elbe Tunnel is a single channel that was part of the Order of Magnitude exhibition. It was shot on a mobile phone camera as I walked along the old tunnel under the Elbe River in Hamburg. The tunnel dates from 1911 and has a modernist almost Bauhaus feel. The tunnel featured in the Odessa File, a movie about a Nazi conspiracy. Hamburg was also the place of extensive fire bombing by the Allies in 1943. Hamburg is a city that also figured in my mother's tales of her war. She had close family friends who perished in these bombings. (My mother used to tease Allied piltots from the RAF and RAAF that while she was on the ground dodging bombs she silently cheered them on.) Sebald wrote a description of the bombing from multiple perspectives using a unitary voice combining the accounts of eyewitnesses in Hamburg with those of individual bomber pilots and the official accounts of the RAF and the US Airforce. According to Presner, Sebald places himself temporally outside of the firebombings. He states that Sebald's memories of the Second World War are not based on direct personal experience but rather as "shadows cast by retrospectively encountered images that were contemporaneous with the beginnings of his own life" (Presner, 2004: 352). This is postmemory. The Elbe Tunnel is a place imbued with ambiguity - it is at the same time a symbol of German modernist aspirations and a memorial to the awful consequences of these aspirations.

The figure in red in Elbe Tunnel is a deliberate reference to the girt in red in Thomas Keneally's novel Schindler's Ark that was later made into a film by Speilberg called Schindler's List. The girl in red was narrative device that countered the tendency to depersonalise and make anonymous the victims of the Holocaust. A grey clad figure is never as memorable or inconspicuous as one in red. While viewers may not consciously make the connection between the red clad figure in my video with Keneally's symbol, the splash of red against mainly sepia like tones in Elbe Tunnel draws the eye and opens a dialogue regarding the significance of the figure.

The locomotion of the figures - human and machines - was interrupted through editing cuts and slow motion to emphasise the artificiality of place and to suggest gaps in the action and time frame. The coherence of a single in camera shot is thereby disrupted and changed to create the illusion that something else is going on in the tunnel other than people crossing a river along a subterranean road. The keyhole mask suggests a certain voyeurism that creates discomfort, if not suspense. It also positions the viewer in a first person perspective so that the action is seen through the viewer's eyes.  The soundtrack of the raw video was treated with shredding software and manipulated to create the impression of auditory hallucinations with spoken words being telescoped and elongated for the soundscape of Elbe Tunnel. The close-up of the back view of the figure, which can be seen in the fourth screenshot below, adds an air of menace.

Because of the cycling nature of the video nothing is ever resolved in terms of narrative structure. The text remains open. The viewer is invited to add the narration and to attribute motives and intentions to the figures and their own part in the story that is always belated. A place of identification for viewers is provided through the narrative structure of Elbe Tunnel so they can imaginatively add their own cultural postmemory if they so choose.

Screenshots from Elbe Tunnel

Lifts

Lifts is a single channel split screen video of footage I shot using my mobile phone of the lifts at the old Elbe tunnel. It was part of Order of Magnitude. Vertical public transport is the focus of this work. The lifts were a celebration of modernism and machines. The lifts and tunnel are examples of a modernist utopia. They are emblematic signs of an industrial age where the dominant discourses of modernism, optimism and progress prevailed. The lifts conjure memories of a time when people believed they would be saved and transported into a new age, a workers' paradise created through industrialisation and automation. The creed was upheld by Taylor's famous time and motion studies.

The lifts provide a means of descending to a subterranean tunnel under a large river that stands as a counterpoint to a bridge. The subterranean road (the tunnel) has different rules of engagement from a terrestrial road: people inhabit the place differently. It is an ideal world, a subterranean utopia where pedestrians, bicycles and cars coexist peacefully, showing each other respect. Yet the lifts are belated: they are functioning relics of modernist dreams of a better society.

The screen is split into a grid so that no single image sequence is dominant thus disrupting the tendency of the screen to show things from one viewpoint at any given point in time. In this way Lifts sets up a visual heteroglossia through using multiple focal points. No one point of view is privileged. The soundscape complements the mechanical motion. I used repetition using one sequence as a motif to provide a visual consistency and to remind the viewer that the action is banal: lifts go up and down; cars and bicycles drive in and out. The lifts are an anachronism with the operator directing the flow of motion and opening and closing the lift doors - an intertextual aside to the lifts in prestigious department stores that had operators and a nostalgic reminder of a time when machines required greater human assistance. (Some of us born in the middle of last century remember such lifts from our childhoods and the mystique and vicarious frisson of shopping with our mothers on days when we should have been at school.) The footage of the Elbe River shot from a ferry functions as a locative device - reminder of the world above.

I designed the screen to have gaps so that the sense of having the complete picture is always deferred and never realised. Sequences displace each other. One sequence moves around tantalisingly and we see it doubled and reversed for a while (see third screenshot). Connections are there to be made yet they slip leaving literal and metaphorical gaps. The work invites the viewer to mediate upon time and motion as a machine. The soundscape enhances the visuals and is a further enticement to contemplate the Zen of time and motion in the here and now and to let go of postmemory imaginings. The work creates a contradiction and seeks to question linear notions of time through a mediation of place and emplaced cyclical vertical motion.

Screen shots from Lifts

Epilogue

Postmemory is dependant on the possibility of a story and imaginative reconstructions. It has a strong connection to an imagined place. In this paper I have presented my explorations of my places of postmemory and what the aesthetic shapes of postmemory might be through reference my creative practice. I have deliberately used loops, gaps and interruptions as narrative strategies in my video to conjure a sense of vicariousness, belatedness and displacement. Video art allows for the subversion of traditional narrative structures in a way that encourages the interrogation of memory sequences and the relationship between time, actual events and remembered events.  I have sought to engage the viewer to think with feeling and to feel with thought to fill in the gaps reflexively.