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  • Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of ‘Camera Lucida’, ‘La Jetée’, ‘Sans soleil’, and ‘Hiroshima mon amour’ by Carol Mavor
  • Max Silverman
Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of ‘Camera Lucida’, ‘La Jetée’, ‘Sans soleil’, and ‘Hiroshima mon amour’. By Carol Mavor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. xvi + 198 pp., ill.

Carol Mavor does not write conventional works of art and literary criticism. Yet (or perhaps because of this) she can open up image and text in fascinating ways. This book is a poetic exploration of works by Roland Barthes, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais through the colours black and blue. Like a bruise or wound, these colours are the outer manifestations of an inner trauma or passion that both signal and betray the power of that inner secret. Marcel Proust’s ‘madeleine’ and Barthes’s ‘punctum’ are at the heart of this journey, or Nicholas Abraham’s ‘kernel’, which is buried inside the shell of words and images that designate it. In her pursuit of the hidden secrets of black and blue, Mavor defies genres as her writing weaves together autobiography and cultural analysis, the personal and the political. Images lead to other images (or words), words metamorphose into other words (or images) (Marker’s La Jetée becomes ‘là, j’étais’), and black and blue are made to speak in multiple voices that link culture to the affective life and the life of the psyche. This is a surrealist journey through two colours: the writing is defiantly non-rational, but the poetic ‘logic’ of similarities and differences and correspondences and absences open up culture and the unconscious in illuminating ways. The associations at the beginning between Guy Green’s film A Patch of Blue (1965), Tony Morrison’s text The Bluest Eye (1970), Vladimir Nabokov’s blue butterflies, and paintings by Mark Rothko and Francis Bacon establish the rhythm of condensation and displacement of meaning that resonates through the work as a whole. Mavor is particularly adept at pursuing associations while respecting the limits of meaning and the pain of loss. Her treatment of questions of race in two photographs in Barthes’s La Chambre claire subtly teases out the hidden ideological content of Barthes’s comments on those parts of the photos that act as the points of ‘punctum’ for him, without losing sight of the affective and unsayable in the photos that ‘pricked’ Barthes in the first place; the discussion of the multiple ‘madeleines’, linking Proust’s À la Recherche with Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Marker’s La Jetée, and taking in spirals, trees, time, sensuality, devotion, and so on, treads a fine line between cultural meaning and the Real; the black and blue triggers for reflections on Mavor’s own childhood and on her mother suffering from Alzheimer’s are recognized as both doors of perception opening on to the kernel and, inevitably, constituent parts of the shell that covers it up. The tension between seeing and not seeing in Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (or Freud’s ‘fort/da’) is perhaps the perfect metaphor for this double-edged journey. Once one is attuned to Mavor’s style (perhaps not everybody’s cup of tea), Black and Blue will be seen as a moving dramatization of the art of memory and forgetting and a Proustian and surrealist refiguring of post-war French culture. I was moved. [End Page 130]

Max Silverman
University of Leeds
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