Think about a narrative which is a carousel. It’s a variation on the familiar circular or cyclical narrative whose end mirrors or repeats the beginning - like nothing has changed, like it was inevitable - because that simple circularity isn’t going to work for us. There isn’t a single, repeatable circuit we can tread, either in the Box or in the resulting wallpaper. Graham made a carousel, a series of images which cannot return to its beginning, since there is none. He wanted boredom, he wanted same-old, same-old. But that’s more of a conveyor belt, really. We, on the other hand, need horses. We need to move vertically as well as being part of a rotating whole, so that each element of the narrative can shift in its relation to the others, equal and unhindered by fixed associations.
Robbe-Grillet’s L'Année Dernière à Marienbad visualises this idea. Characters' costumes change with the camera angle, suggesting that memory is being checked, re-worked, corrected. They repeat phrases, as does the narrator, who sometimes is and sometimes doesn't seem to be the male protagonist we see. Seyrig's unnamed character performs gestures and movements at the instruction of the narrator, repeats them in a series of recurring locations, wearing different clothes and surrounded by different - or more or fewer - mansion occupants. At one point she laughs, and her laugh is echoed by/repeated by/transferred into the mouth of another female, one of the human objects (these objects are not people, but props, or furniture). Seyrig's character's utterance is circular, coming out of her mouth and then into her ear via another person's mouth, ready to be laughed once more, in later scenes. There is a sense that these human objects are stuck like ghosts in loops of time, destined to repeat their words and gestures forever, perhaps inflecting differently next time, perhaps not. As in Robbe-Grillet's novels, the reader/viewer is unable to locate the beginning of this film’s narrative. The opening narration - "once more I advance through these corridors" - gives the impression that this is not the speaker's first time here, yet describes in great detail the architectural features and decor of the room as if on a first visit, or in an act of memorising, the type of memorising one might do in a place which cannot be returned to. This opening sequence is evocative of the 'memory-palace' or 'method of loci' technique of remembering, which might imply that the narrator is engaging with a self-constructed memory aid rather than materially inhabiting a place. Equally, given Albertazzi's (also unnamed) character's repeated command to Seyrig's character - "remember" - we could also suppose that this describing of the surroundings is a series of orders: just as he tells her how to position herself, how close she should be to him and where she was last year, so he commands her to remember these rooms and halls, the stucco and the columns, the mirrors and the garden, perhaps as a trigger for the other things she is being directed to remember. It brings to mind a scene in Layton’s The Imposter in which Frederic Bourdin claims that his 'sister' was complicit in his imposture, because she taught him all the names of the family he was about to deceive, repeating the words "you remember" with each photograph she showed him. Layton shot the whole of this documentary in standard interview style - with the subjects looking off-frame at an unseen interviewer - except for the interviews with Bourdin in which he invariably looks straight into the camera, straight at us. Resnais and Robbe-Grillet have Albertazzi's character looking into the camera too, just a few times, at moments when it seems the viewer is required to take up his role as accomplice. And you’re complicit with me, too. I made Sand House Hotel, transporting us into stolen images, giving them a temporality that the photographer hadn’t intended. But they, and you, are now implicated in my narrative. Ignorance is no defence. They have been “grafted onto other… corpses,”[1] by both of us. But this box is not ours to inflict linear temporality upon, as we might have to do with moving image. “All the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time.”[2] Anyway, I’d be misleading both of us if I pretended that I’m still thinking about the Box itself, the concrete object with its yellowed papers. I’m too far down the wormhole, seduced by the imagery the Box has prompted me to find. This is no longer a story. [1] Reynolds, L. (2006) ‘Outside the Archive: The World in Fragments’. Ghosting: The Role of the Archive within Contemporary Artists’ Film and Video. Edited by Jane Connarty and Josephine Lanyon. Bristol: Taylor Brothers, p.16 [2] Sebald, W. G., (2001). Austerlitz. Penguin, London. p.257
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