Cinemnesis: Martin Arnold's memory machine.

As we watch a film, the continuous act of recognition in which we are involved is like a strip of memory unrolling beneath the images of the film itself, to form the invisible underlayer of an implicit double exposure.

- Maya Deren(1)

The following essay tracks the history of a certain machine through the recycled films of contemporary Austrian filmmaker Martin Arnold. It seeks a kind of cryptic archaeology of the memory machine, a secret passage to an impossible technology. One might locate the machine's origin in the Greek figure Mnemon, who was assigned to Achilles as a mnemic prosthesis. Classical historian Robert Graves recounts the narrative: "Thetis had warned Achilles that if he ever killed a son of Apollo, he must himself die by Apollo's hand; and a servant named Mnemon accompanied him for the sole purpose of reminding him of this."(2) Outside of the subject and auxiliary, Mnemon - like all machines, Achilles and memory itself - is destined to falter. Mnemon's inevitable lapse sealed the fate of Achilles, "who put Mnemon to death because he had failed to remind him of Thetis's words."(3) The wish for memory is that it be machinic: external, vigilant, irreproachable. The truth may be that memory is inextricably cathected in the forces of interiority, desire and identification. Mnemon was, perhaps, already too involved in Achilles's death drive.

The desire for a mechanical memory resurfaced sometime in the nineteenth century and took shape in the various apparatuses of modernity: the photograph, psychoanalysis and cinema, among others. And as the desire for the memory machine began to register in the technological archives, it became rapidly clearer that this desire was a drive - that is, its origins lay outside of the subject, removed from its center. Arnold's brief cinema of mnemic tremors returns to the site of an abandoned primordial dream, one that Sigmund Freud, among others, left unfulfilled in 1925. Arnold's cinema attempts to restore the possibility of a memory machine, a technological supplement that finds one of its origins in 1895, the year of a multiple and phantastic inception.

ANAMNESIS (1895)

In 1895, psychoanalysis and cinema provided two new views of interiority, two new anatomies of the psyche and the world. Against the screens of science and art, the two techniques - indeed techne - projected another phenomenology of the inside. Both technologies marked a departure from the disciplines that had determined the representations of the mind and the world. Both spectacles were met with a certain degree of instant resistance from the regimes of science and art. Despite their differences, the exiled practices were, however, bound by a particular focus on the mechanics, dynamics and economies of memory. Framing his "Project for a Scientific Psychology" in 1895, Freud wrote, "A psychological theory deserving any attention must furnish an explanation of 'memory.'"(4) This search for a representation of memory, what Jacques Derrida has called a "psychographic" system, seems to have initiated the first movements of psychoanalytic thought.(5)

Similarly, film offered to the public a virtually immediate memory of everyday life. Film delivered a kind of mechanical nostalgia of the mundane, a mnemic texture to the flow of everyday life - a response, perhaps, to Charles Baudelaire's call for a modernist art based on the order of memory. Siegfried Kracauer, for example, reflecting on the advent of the film medium, insists that the primordial function of the film apparatus is to "record and reveal physical reality."(6) For Kracauer, the cinema functions as an ecto-mnemonic device, a displaced and mechanical locus of memory. Its electric vigilance leaves the apparatus perpetually open, sensitive to the incidents that mark the "flow of life," a term that "denotes a kind of life which is still intimately connected, as if by an umbilical cord, with the material phenomenon from which its emotional and intellectual contents emerge."(7) Kracauer's phantastic umbilicus gives to film a corpus, a maternal as well as material origin. Cinema as Mnemosyne, the allegorical figure of memory and mother of the muses.

The practice of collecting and recollecting impressions of everyday life, interestingly enough, is a common feature of both cinema and the psyche, which share a common ancestor in an optical phenomenon first mentioned by Aristotle in "On Dreams": the persistence of vision. Noting that "affection continues in the sensory organs . . . not merely while they are actually engaged in perceiving, but even after they have ceased to do so," Aristotle speculates that "when we shift the scene of our perceptive activity, the previous affection remains."(8) This affection or sensory trace, according to Aristotle, can follow the subject into sleep and resurface in the dreamwork. In fact, for Aristotle, dreams are an elaborate fusion of bodily impressions and psychic image productions. "The dream proper is an image based on the movement of sense impressions, when it occurs during sleep, insofar as it is asleep."(9) The bodily and psychic apparatuses store impressions, memories of stimulations that "are derived from external objects or from causes within the body"; the dreamwork then replays those traces as images in a type of mnemographic cinema.(10) The line between perception and memory in dreams, Aristotle concludes, is never entirely clear.

Writing in 1960, then, avant-garde filmmaker and theorist Maya Deren was not the first to note the mnemic undertones of cinema, the uncanny sense of invisible traces or "strips" of memory unfolding alongside and beneath the surfaces of projected films. The implicit double exposure to which Deren refers, however, suggests an experience at the limits of perception, suspended between perception and projection, fantasy and phenomenality. Indeed, the phenomena of memory subtly disrupts the economy of sensation, providing a stimulation without topography, at once interior and exterior. In this sense, the presence of memory in cinema is truly implicit - that is, virtual - present, one might say, without form. It was, perhaps, a task of the avant-garde cinema, from Luis Bunuel to Hollis Frampton, to indicate the mnemographic propensity of film.

ANTI-LOGOS, OR THE CINEMA MACHINE

Why a machine? Because the work of art, so understood, is essentially productive - productive of certain truths. No one has insisted more than Proust on the following point: that the truth is produced by orders of machines which function within us, that is extracted from our impressions, hewn out of our life, delivered in a work.

- Gilles Deleuze(11)

Arnold has constructed, in his films piece touchee (1989), passage a l'acte (1993) and Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1997), a cinema machine - not simply a custom optical printer or recycling system, but a kind of mnemographic machine, an apparatus that writes and rewrites memories on the surfaces of film.(12) Arnold's cinema functions by incorporating exterior forces, an outside source of energy that presses upon the projected images. In turn, the machine exports text, forming a kind of open economy. Scott MacDonald has offered the following description of Arnold's first films:

For piece touchee (15 min.) and passage a l'acte (12 min.), Arnold used a homemade optical printer to analyze the visual motion in an 18-second shot from The Human Jungle (1954, by Joseph M. Newman) and the visual and auditory motion in a 33-second passage from To Kill a Mockingbird (1962, by Robert Mulligan).(13)

The results are a hypertension between the impulses of the original material and the rescriptive force of the new edits. On the surface, the exteriority that charges Arnold's machine can be seen as the history of film, especially of Hollywood, and its systems of representations and systemic repressions. The cinema of Hollywood, writes Arnold, "is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression."(14) Hollywood s waste returns in Arnold's cinema as fuel. On closer observation, however, the surfaces of history from which Arnold draws have been, to use Freud's phrase, "worked over": they have been already inscribed with the marks of an enunciation yet to come, with the traces of a future anterior.

The project that emerges from Arnold's work resides, on the one hand, in two traditions of the avant-garde cinema - one national, the other generic. Arnold's work certainly sustains a line of Austrian avant-garde filmmakers including Kurt Kren, Peter Kubelka, Valie Export and Mara Mattuschka, among others. It can also be located within the technique of filmmaking referred to as found-footage cinema. These artists include: Bruce Connor, Ken Jacobs, Paul Sharits, Craig Baldwin, Barbara Hammer, Matthias Mueller, Raphael Montanez Ortiz and Su Friedrich, to name several. On the other hand, Arnold's work circuits through the history of cinema itself and its secret ego: psychoanalysis.(15) Arnold's work can also be traced to another Viennese, Sigmund Freud, who had already, in 1895, begun to imagine a memory machine based first on cell tissue and later on technological prostheses or extensions.

What is truly remarkable about Arnold's machine, however, is not the presence of exteriority - after all, the photographic arts are often said to form a kind of tactile connection to the outside world but rather, the location of that exteriority. For, if Arnold's films seem to take place on the outside, seem ecstatic, seem to unleash a hypermnemic force that writes as it projects, that is because the outside has come to resemble a form of radical interiority. In Arnold's cinema there lies, "behind the intact world being represented, another not-at-all intact world" - a cinematic unconscious.(16) Thus, with each film, Arnold performs an analysis, a scene or seance, like the writing apparatus of Franz Kafka's "Penal Colony," which simultaneously produces an inscription and the site of an inscription, a text and an embodiment. Like Deren's "strips" of memory that can be seen as both pieces of memory and acts of tearing, Arnold's cinema also reproduces even as it produces. It is not a memory of cinema, but rather a cinema as memory, as memory machine. It invokes a technological elsewhere, an active cinematic unconscious. The contact with another topology, the energetic circuit that flows into and out of Arnold's cinema, establishes what Deleuze calls the machine's "transversality."

Arnold's cinema, however, is not a smooth machine. The breakdowns, short-circuits and gasps that define his cinema create a violently neurotic machine. (Neurotics, Freud reminds us, distrust their memories to a remarkable extent.) Arnold's machine stutters and twitches from the moment it is turned on. This is due, in part, to the fact that Arnold's cinema barely holds together under the strain of a constant tension between its elements. It is a machine that thematizes even as it reproduces the scene of its own breakdown, obsessively and compulsively. One such site of conflict resides in Arnold's choice of primary tools: "the optical printer," he insists, "is an apparatus that works against the camera."(17) Another site of neurosis resides in the projector.

Arnold explains:

In my films the projector is broken (or neurotic) in many ways at the same time. Sometimes it seems to stand still, the next moment it seems to flip the film outside down. With regard to the characters a similar phenomenon occurs: they clearly project a neurotic impression, although I feel that their form of neurosis would be hard to diagnose because their symptoms are changing from one moment to the next. So they seem to be hysterical, compulsive, and manic, at the same time they are stuttering and having tics, the next moment they fall immobile. So what is their symptom?

Here the projector's systemic dysfunction affects - or rather infects - the diegetic characters with a kind of technical virus, transmitted from apparatus to subject. An infection because the prosthetic structure of the memory machine makes the border between the natural and unnatural regions of the body, its internal and external organs, virtually indistinguishable. What is outside, therefore, is always also inside, while the inside circuits or orbits in the outside. This is the law of technology, as well as of the unconscious.

Arnold's films thus produce a constant flow of nervous ruptures, the result of a struggle between the host and an invading body. The foreign body or anti-body that contaminates the text can be read as the memory work itself, which comes from elsewhere, from the locus of a radical remove. The combat threatens, at every stage, to transform the apparatus from a neurotic to a psychotic machine. (Psychotics, Jean-Francois Lyotard has asserted, experience the return of the repressed from the outside. Jean-Louis Baudry has, in turn, described the cinema as an artificial psychosis.) The memory that returns from elsewhere, that carries its own discursive matter, serves as a parasitic force, at once driving and destroying the machine. Arnold: "I think that my repetitive transformations affect the basic film text like the AIDS-virus affects the immune system of the body."

The convergence of mechanical and parasitic drives in Arnold's work effects what Derrida terms "the technological condition":

There is no natural, originary body: technology has not simply added itself, from the outside or after the fact, as a foreign body. Or at least this foreign or dangerous supplement is "originarily" at work and in place in the supposedly ideal interiority of the "body and soul." It is indeed at the heart of the heart.(18)

What appears to come from the outside, then, is already at work within; the heterogeneity of the system operates both within and between bodies. And this friction, the sheer noise of heterogeneity, produces throughout Arnold's work a parasitic discourse, a parasite's discourse, elsewhere. Against the fragile surfaces of the "original" footage, "a message that is in conflict with what is actually being said wants to be expressed."(19) This is, in fact, Freud's theory of the "screen memory."

SCREEN MEMORIES (1899)

We shall then form a notion 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.

- Freud, "Screen Memories"(20)

If Freud had, in 1895, designated memory as the principal focus of a new psychological theory, then he had already begun to map the possibilities of its representation in the body. Unable to render "an apparatus capable of such complicated functioning," Freud imagines instead a type of "mnemic cell" that stores stimuli. These cells "may, after each excitation, be in a different state from before and thus afford a possibility of representing memory" (original emphasis).(21) By 1899, however, Freud had abandoned the self-sustaining biological model, opting instead for an image-based theory of memory. The "screen memory," a type of memory fragment or freeze frame that blocks or screens latent material, provides the first challenge for Freud's nascent apparatus.

Noting that memories are usually retained precisely because of their significance to the individual, Freud remarks that in the case of the screen memory, "we are met by a fact that is diametrically opposed to our expectations and cannot fail to astonish us."(22) Screen memories, which most often arise from childhood, are characterized by their banality, by their minor significance in the history of the individual. They are, however, sustained by a tremendous affective force, which in turn preserves them.

We hear that there are some people whose earliest recollections of childhood are concerned with everyday and indifferent events which could not produce any emotional effect even in children, but which are recollected (too dearly, one is inclined to say) in every detail, while approximately contemporary events, even if, on the evidence of their parents, they moved them intensely at the time, have not been retained in their memory.(23)

Freud's description of the screen memory - its capacity to displace, its obsessive attention to detail and its nervous attachment - conform uncannily to Arnold's work. Consider piece touchee a 15 minute recollection of 18 seconds; a man who appears as a father, a collective patriarch, struggles to pass through a door, enter a living room and kiss the assumed mother. It is a child's view, a primal movie scene and an umbilicus to the imaginary. The insignificance of the view is undermined by its fixation. And the seemingly innocent act that forms the nucleus of the scene - a kiss - is reworked in the spectator's imagination into a series of violent gestures and assaults.

Regarding the displacement of the scene from its larger context or flow, Arnold himself confesses to his indulgence in the sampled fragment or excerpt. Passing the original material of The Human Jungle through a computer driven analytic projector that could both decrease and accelerate the time of projection, Arnold became fixed on individual moments within the film. "At a projection speed of four frames per second the event was thrilling; every minimal movement was transformed into a small concussion."(24) Those concussions, or traumas, are, in fact, a feature of Arnold's memories of a childhood immersed in Hollywood: "In my childhood," he writes, "Hollywood's love and crime stories instilled in me great expectations of adulthood. I absolutely wanted to be a part of that exciting world. When I grew up, I was tremendously disappointed."(25)

The synthetic ambivalence of love and crime also forms the basis for Freud's case study of the screen memory, which actually represents a covert auto-analysis. Torn between sexual urges and guilt, Freud's personal screen memory is routed through a kind of pastoral fragment that submerges the violent impulse beneath a short excerpt: yellow flowers, two boys, one girl, a theft, tears and black bread. In fact, the scene is suffused, in Freud's later recovery and rewriting of it, with an aggressive, libidinal affect. The screen memory is produced as a compromise between the desire to remember and the need to suppress the unabated surge of sexuality. It follows, according to Arnold, the logic of tics, twitches and stutters:

Psychoanalysis suggests that in the case of a tic, the movement that is actually acted out is superimposed over an opposite or at least different movement, which had to be repressed as a consequence of censored wishes, ambivalences, and aggressive urges, which in their turn, though stunted to a rudiment, vainly try to overcome the manifest action.(26)

In Arnold's cinema, the ticking motion produces a hysterical inscription or scratch upon the screen's surface. And if the screen appears panoptic, a scene of total recall, the tic speaks from and to an elsewhere.

Arnold's cinema speaks relentlessly of such elsewheres. Of piece touchee, Maureen Turim writes: "its moments of celebratory jouissance are accompanied by overtones of the uncanny, a repressed tension looming somewhere between the frames, a tuche [sic] coming from some other place."(27) The articulation of another place, which makes Arnold's homes unheimlich, produces throughout Arnold's cinema the powerful effects of irony. Irony divides the subject from itself, allowing another self to rework the self from elsewhere. Freud again: "In the majority of significant and in other respects unimpeachable childhood scenes the subject sees himself in the recollection as a child, with the knowledge that this child is himself, he sees the child, however, as an observer from outside the scene would see him."(28) (In such situations, "I am," as Jacques Lacan insists, "photographed.") In fact, the other place that Turim notes is the topology of time itself: screen memories are writing tablets on which materials are inscribed retrospectively. They are palimpsests. The screen memory thus represents a transaction with the future, with a postponed subjectivity. "Whenever in a memory the subject himself appears in this way as an object among other objects, this contrast between the acting and recollecting ego may be taken as evidence that the original impression has been worked over."(29)

By "working over" impressions, at least two competing sites of enunciation, two struggling loci of subjectivity are introduced in one scene across the divide of time. In a compelling analogy, Arnold compares his work to a friend's childhood record collection.

Back then she had scratched those passages so severely that now the needle gets stuck, endlessly repeating certain grooves: "Dreamlo-lo-lo-lo-ver where are you-u-u-u...." Thus the psyche of a young girl has engraved its desires into the record - now a great document situated somewhere between the unconscious of a single person and popular culture.(30)

Like a screen memory and the record that has been re-recorded, causing its tracks to be re-routed, Arnold's work forges a topography somewhere between popular culture and the unconscious, history and memory, the subjectivity of time and its counterpoint in madness. "Yes," Freud says to himself, to his imaginary interlocutor, "You projected two sets of phantasies on to one another and made a childhood memory of them."(31)

THE MYSTIC WRITING-PAD (1925)

Everything begins with reproduction.

- Jacques Derrida(32)

In the end, the screen memory, like many of Freud's anomalous structures, can be seen as an exemplary rather than exceptional form of remembering. Remembered images and scenes, then, can be rendered as surfaces that hide the work of memory, which continues to occur in the present tense. This is why Arnold's films reveal the presence of the memory machine, the temporality of its presence; they index the past without the slightest trace of nostalgia. Passage a l'acte, for example, which translates to something like the "transition to action," describes another domestic tableau: the family meal. Like the mise-en-scene of piece touchee, the elements of passage are at once emblematic - of the institutions of family, rituals of eating, patriarchal pedagogy and gender dynamics - and absolutely formal. But the generic material that informs this scene is being worked over even as it jerks into action. In fact, the entire film represents a prolonged struggle within the memory apparatus, which appears to be reworking and resisting the eruptions of a crashing repression. The desire, apparent in the form of the original work, To Kill a Mockingbird, is to avoid, according to Arnold, "all irritation of normal human perception." Accordingly, what has been systematically excised in the castrating edits of the classical Hollywood film returns in passage as a version of the repressed: rapid shot reversals, supersonic vibrations, masturbatory gestures, paralyzed action and aural fragments.(33) The irritations are the memories themselves, the disturbances in perception that constitute the basis for postponed remembering. And like the work of memory, the reworking that passage accomplishes uncovers entirely new movements and gestures within the original footage. Arnold: "So it seems that there are even more films embedded in the original." The mechanism, however, which channels the passages of perception through the mnemic apparatus, has yet to be described.

In 1925, Freud attempted to construct a functioning model of the mnemic apparatus, a last effort to visualize the undeniably graphic properties of memory. The result was a minor study, itself a kind of brief dip, on the "Wunderblock," or "mystic writing-pad." Freud's brief treatise on memory, "A Note Upon the 'Mystic Writing-Pad,'" is notable for the reconfiguration of the mnemic metaphor from the biological idiom of the "Project" to that of writing. Thirty years later, Freud concedes the insufficiency of the biological system with regard to memory - he now situates the function of memory, or rather its representation, partially outside the individual. The revision in Freud's thinking is significant because it acknowledges that memory does not emerge from and return to the inside alone and that it does not define a closed economy. Both points are crucial to understanding the excentric logic of Arnold's cinema.

In the "Note," Freud introduces the practice of writing as an illustration of memory, likening the psychic plane to a writing surface. The surface upon which memory is preserved, "the pocket book or sheet of paper, is as it were a materialized portion of my mnemic apparatus, which I otherwise carry about with me invisible."(34) To function properly, memory requires supplementation - a form of writing or inscription. This supplementation extends the space of the subject beyond the limits of an organic body, creating a kind of technological surplus. "Metaphor as a rhetorical or didactic device," explains Derrida, "is possible here only through the solid metaphor, the 'unnatural,' historical production of a supplementary machine, added to the psychical organization in order to supplement its finitude."(35) The extension of the subject outside itself breaks the spatio-temporal continuity of the corporeal body and effects a kind of dismembering in the act of remembering.

Two types of writing are summoned by Freud. The first type is written on "a writing-surface which will preserve intact any note made upon it for an indefinite length of time."(36) A sheet of paper, for example, inscribed with ink would leave such permanent traces. "The disadvantage of this procedure is that the receptive capacity of the writing-surface is soon exhausted."(37) Since human memory possesses a seemingly unlimited capacity for receiving impressions, Freud turns next to a surface that can be erased after each inscription. A slate marked with chalk can be endlessly renewed. This system, however, cannot maintain the permanence of its inscriptions. "Thus an unlimited receptive capacity and a retention of permanent traces seem to be mutually exclusive properties in the apparatus which we use as substitutes for our memory: either the receptive surface must be renewed or the note must be destroyed."(38)

A writing instrument called the "Wunderblock" resolves Freud's dilemma. This apparatus consists of a wax slab or base, which is covered by a translucent sheet of wax, which is in turn protected by a transparent sheet of celluloid. When the transparent plastic is scratched with a stylus, the contact between the three layers forces an impression from the wax base onto the middle sheet. An image is produced. When the contact between the wax base and the translucent sheet is broken, that is, when the page is lifted away from the base, the writing vanishes and the blank surface is restored. The trace, however, remains permanently scratched into the wax. (A similar toy exists today, sometimes appearing as a Cracker-Jack prize.) In this manner, the writing space stores permanent traces while offering an infinite capacity for recording.

The system, Freud notes, only operates when the three components of the system come into contact: the external stimulus, the protective surface and the writing pad. It is at this moment that memories are created in writing. The appearance of the image is supported by the possibility of its retrieval in the future. Once the contact is broken, the machine stops and the memory work begins. Freud likens the "Wunderblock" technology to the system "Pcpt.-Cs." (Perception-Consciousness) as it operates in the human psyche.

Like the "Wunderblock," or vice-versa, the human apparatus also involves the tri-level contact between exterior forces, the perceptive filter and the unconscious. One major difference persists, however, between the analogues. While the "Wunderblock" stores the traces of its encounters with the outside, it cannot, like the human memory system, retrieve these traces at will. This is due, of course, to the fact that the "Wunderblock" possesses no will, no agency. "It is true," comments Freud, "that once the writing has been erased, the Mystic Pad cannot 'reproduce' it from within; it would be a mystic pad indeed if, like our memory, it could accomplish that."(39) And this is the fundamental difference between memory and its metaphors: all of the mnemic models proposed by Freud and others are dependent on the strict delineation between interiority and exteriority and the economic stability of stimulation and perception. Energy, in the form of stimuli, flows into the machine, where it is recorded. Those impressions cannot be reactivated from the inside but are rather dependent on another intervention. Only in the dynamic of psychic action does the unconscious counter the influx of external stimuli with its own response, a form of desire. Here, memories are not simply recorded, they are worked over, recreated, constantly reconstructed and expulsed, sent back into the orbit of the outside. Thus, while the "Wunderblock" must always remain a lifeless machine whose insides are temporarily occupied, as it were, by external operatives (hands, for example), human memory represents a contaminated apparatus that is haunted by the parasitic specters of the unconscious. This is the essential structure of the memory machine: a host apparatus that has been invaded by another figure which is neither inside nor outside the apparatus - a phantastic projection like James Clerk Maxwell's thermodynamic agent.(40)

CINEMNESIS

When you look at a strip of film you will at first see a regular sequence of frames that represent a three-dimensional space. Those are the tracks the camera left behind; the apparatus inscribed itself into the material. If you look more closely "into" the frame, you will see tracks of people and objects which were in front of the camera at the time of the recording.

- Martin Arnold(41)

By 1925, Freud was unable to develop the memory machine further, not because he lacked a supply of analogous instruments, rather, because he could not construct a metaphor for the unconscious. For it is, in the end, the unconscious that drives the operation of memory, which is itself already a machine, already a metaphor, already facilitated by the supplementation of the outside. Memory, then, is ultimately its own model, at once a subject and its reflection. It is thus not surprising that throughout his search for the exemplary psychic metaphor - microscope, telescope, photographic camera, writing instrument - Freud never seriously considered film. Given Freud's well known animosity toward film, he undoubtedly saw in the uncanny medium the reflection not of life but of psychoanalysis - the twin sibling of cinema. Freud undoubtedly perceived the cinema as a doppelganger that projected its unconscious back into the world from which it drew sustenance. As such, film could not be thought of as metaphor, only as simulacrum. Film was itself unconscious.

That film reveals the traces of the unconscious has been noted by theorists from Germaine Dulac to Walter Benjamin. But what distinguishes the presence of the unconscious in film emerges strikingly in Arnold's cinema: Arnold's cinema reads. It reads first, without grammar and thus, in Arnold's words, gets stuck in the details, obsessively reworking fragments in the attempt to discover language. It resembles Freud's notion of memory. Freud's memory system functions precisely because, even as sensations flow inward, the unconscious seeks to expand outward, to read what is being written. In a compelling manifestation of the alien nature of the unconscious, Freud describes its attempt to read the outside. "It is as though," he writes, "the unconscious stretches out feelers, through the medium of the system "Pcpt.-Cs.," towards the external world and hastily withdraws them as soon as they have sampled the excitations coming from it."(42) Accordingly, even as the external stimuli write on psychic plane, the unconscious reads and this is the secret of its technology. It reads. Of the pictographic script (Bilderschrift) that dictates memory for Freud, Derrida writes: "Bilderschrift: not an inscribed image but a figurative script, an image inviting not a simple, conscious, present perception of the thing itself assuming it exists - but a reading."(43) In a similar fashion, Arnold's cinema also reads. This is its vital aspect.

In his most recent film, Life Wastes Andy Hardy, Arnold uncovers another function of afflicted memory: its capacity for reversal. Here, the inflected passages - drawn from various moments in Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland's Hardy series - travel against the surge of time, creating in the process a sense of deep anachrony. The effects of this reversal suffuse the film with an uncanny sense of sorrow. "If piece expresses sexuality, and passage aggression," Arnold remarks, "then perhaps Andy Hardy finds melancholia." By running the soundtrack against its harmonic order, moving forward and backward in small units of aural time, Arnold scrambles the grammatical effect of music. The result is a kind of musical anagram that once again approaches a grammatology of the unconscious. Like Arnold's previous work, Andy Hardy provides an additional component of the viral machine, affect. This film feels against the order of the original feature films. It expresses a feeling that originates elsewhere, at once within and without the reworked passage of film. In this sense, Arnold's cinema represents a mnemic technology not only because it writes but because it reads and feels. Arnold's cinema opens a passage toward a thinking of the technical virus, the infected machine that seeks to reach outward and touch the scene of its own writing.

NOTES

Martin Arnold's films are distributed in the United Sates by Canyon Cinema, 2325 3rd St., ste. 338, San Francisco, CA 94107. Tel: [phone] and by the Film-Maker's Cooperative, 175 Lexington Ave., New York, NY 10016. Tel: [phone].

1. Maya Deren,"Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality," Daedalus (Winter 1960), pp. 154-55.

2. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 2 vols., (New York: Penguin, 1960), Vol. 2, p. 292.

3. Ibid.

4. Sigmund Freud, "Project for a Scientific Psychology," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, trans. and ed., 24 vols., (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), Vol. I, p. 299. All further references to the Standard Edition of Freud's writings (abbreviated SE) are by volume and page number.

5. Jacques Derrida,"Freud and the Scene of Writing," in Writing and Difference, Alan Bass, trans., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 220.

6. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 37.

7. Ibid., p. 71.

8. Aristotle, "On Dreams" in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Jonathan Barnes, ed., J. I. Beare, trans., 2 vols., (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), Vol. I, p. 731. See in this connection, Greta Snider's Flight (1996, Canyon). Constructed entirely of commemorative objects - photographs, letters, pieces of film - that have been pressed onto the surface of the film, Snider's photogrammatical work of mourning literalizes the forces of impression in the activity of recycling.

9. Ibid., p. 735.

10. Ibid., pp. 732-33.

11. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, Richard Howard, trans., (New York: George Braziller, 1972), p. 129.

12. In fact, Martin Arnold has made four additional films: a commissioned video clip don't - The Austrian Film (1996) and three 35mm advertising spots, Jesus Walking on Screen (1993), Remise (1994) and Brain Again (1994). Although Arnold shows them only on special occasions - that is, when they are contextualized - these films nonetheless display his ongoing interest in rewriting cinema.

13. Scott MacDonald, "Sp. . .Sp. . .Spaces of Inscription: An Interview with Martin Arnold," Film Quarterly Vol. 48, no. 1 (Fall 1994), p. 3.

14. Ibid., p. 7. All unreferenced citations of Arnold are from unpublished lectures and personal conversations with the filmmaker.

15. Arnold is a trained psychologist.

16. Arnold, in MacDonald, p. 11.

17. Ibid.

18. Jacques Derrida, "The Rhetoric of Drugs," Michael Israel, trans., in Points. . . Interviews, 1974-1994, Elisabeth Weber, ed., (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 244-45. In their penetrations of the "natural" body, Derrida sees drugs as both a form of technology or technique - "a technical supplement" - and a parasite. "Like any good parasite, it is at once inside and outside - the outside feeding on the inside. And with this schema of food we are very close to what, in the usual sense of the word, we call drugs, which are usually 'consumed."Deconstruction' is always attentive to this indestructible logic of parasitism. As a discourse, deconstruction is always a discourse about the parasite, itself a device parasitic on the subject of the parasite, a discourse 'on parasite' and in the logic of the 'superparasite'" (p. 234). In this sense, Arnold's work can be seen as both parasitic and deconstructive.

19. Arnold, in MacDonald, p. 11.

20. Sigmund Freud, SE, Vol. III, pp. 306-7.

21. Freud, SE, Vol. I, p. 299.

22. Freud, SE, Vol. III, p. 305.

23. Freud, SE, Vol. III, pp. 305-6.

24. Arnold, in MacDonald, p. 5.

25. Ibid., p. 7.

26. Arnold, in MacDonald, p. 11.

27. Maureen Turim, in Martin Arnold and Peter Tscherkassky, eds., Austrian Avant-Garde Cinema: 1955-1993, (Vienna: Sixpack Film, 1994), p. 30.

28. Freud, SE, Vol. III, p. 321.

29. Ibid.

30. Arnold, in MacDonald, p. 10.

31. Freud, SE, Vol. III, pp. 315.

32. Derrida, "Freud," p. 211.

33. On the subject of a cinema of exclusions, or "acinema," Jean-Francois Lyotard is extremely lucid. See "Acinema," Paisley N. Livingston, trans., Wide Angle Vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 53-9.

34. Freud, SE, Vol. XIX, p. 227.

35. Derrida, "Freud," p. 228.

36. Freud, SE, Vol. XIX, p. 227.

37. Ibid.

38. Freud, SE, Vol. XIX, pp. 227-28.

39. Freud, SE, Vol. XIX, p. 230.

40. Maxwell (1831-1879) imagined a supplemental agent who would keep the impossible machine or system running. Maxwell's demon is often seen as a kind of precursor to the unconsciousness.

41. Arnold, in MacDonald, p. 5.

42. Freud, SE, Vol. XIX, p. 231.

43. Derrida, "Freud," p. 218.

AKIRA MIZUTA LIPPIT is Assistant Professor of Film at San Francisco State University.