Joan Retallack, Memnoir  
(The Post-Apollo Press, 2004)
Jeremy James Thompson

     

RE:view 

I watch hundreds of movies, sometimes up to twelve a week. I go to movie theaters, & maybe you do too. With Memnoir in mind, I now go self-conscious down the dark aisles. At the movies, I rarely consider what's going on behind me. I'm more inclined to fear the killer, hold back tears, &/or snicker at someone's clowning around. Maybe we laugh at the same jokes. Maybe we join the chorus of gasps, startled by a sudden shift in expectation, prompted by the cinematic magic of an angle change (i.e. camera #2 just before she screams).

This demonstration of language, this Memnoir, often compels me to talk about the massification of audience: how we all go in & come out, witnesses, sometimes feeling complicit, sometimes at odds. What I learn from my role in the movie-watching scenario is that many people watch movies, & since there are more people than movies, it follows that there are more types of people than types of movies. Furthermore, within the movie-watching scenario, there are many movies to watch, bracketed by a seemingly shared understanding that there are many types of movies, but less types of movies than movies. The movie-making & movie-watching scenarios depend on the religious social desire to claim only things categorical, or to make things otherwise categorical as such. Often, in the movie-watching scenario, the proliferation of meaning is an incision that can only be made by the audience, the audience being anyone, but only one. But, not to worry, those taking part in the movie-making scenario have taken this into account, often pre-perforating select scenes, readymade to open wide into a particular world of exact emotion(s). Incidentally, the Dada movie-making scenario often entails an impenetrable screen (from either side). Incidentally, incidents occur, but never incidentally. Right?

In the Dada Noir people just keep smoking. A woman asks for help with elevator buttons because there are no buttons like elevator buttons. There's at least one incident of people smoking in the wrong office. The movie ends while he's out buying cigarettes.

i.e. the box contained but the squirming matrix of habitual
value-laden self-perpetuating practice (aka can-o-worms)
all but invisible until something dramatic but goes awry is
in fact but the continuous present of and or of either or
experience of e.g. history

Cue: it means what the movie is like. I mean movie syntax; all the cuts mixed & matched make memory make sense (?). Everything makes sense so long as someone remembers it e.g. history i.e. genocide is just a cloud shaped like a mushroom. Before you knew it you have memories. Remembered? I think Retallack suggests that movies make sense*.

*You make sense. When you say things, you make sense. Once you make sense, people talk about that. That makes sense. You make sense and then that sense makes sense. I get a sense of what you're saying. You say things, & I get the sense of what you're saying. Saying makes sense. That makes sense. This makes no sense if you can't make sense of it. Only you can make sense, since your senses do the making. You see what I mean.

//   Advance   //