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13 Utopian Legacies Memory, Mediation, Cinema JohanneVilleneuve Roland Barthes stressed the extent to which “reading”a photograph “is implicitly , in a repressed manner, a contract with what ceased to exist, a contract with death.”1 Ever since the emergence of a culture of moving images with the invention of the film projector, the question is whether life has sealed this “contract with death”drawn up by photography. The flow of life seems to loom from the dimension of mortality itself, and death, from the utopian dimension of an invaluable presence. Photographs, as Ron Burnett more recently reminded us, do not perfectly correspond to what is generally called an image: “images cannot claim the autonomy of photographs. Images can never be separated from vision and subjectivity (in other words, photographs can be put into an archive while images cannot). . . . Images operate within the realms of perception and thought, conscious and unconscious.”2 In addition to the moving images of cinema, photography itself is currently swept up in the whirlwind of novelty and advertisement. The speed with which it circulates no longer confines it to a mere archival role. Archives themselves—in the sense of documentary evidence, records, and chronicles, as well as the institutions charged with housing them—have been set in motion, blending into the images of our lives and filling our dreams. Though images remain just that, we are now so saturated with them that even our lives are defined by the speed of their circulation, by the certain illumination and impression that they endlessly afford. In this way, our surroundings lead us to confuse image and photograph, everyday aspirations and clichés. 193 In his movie, Level Five, French filmmaker Chris Marker incorporates archival footage from the turn of the century, in which a reckless flying man is shown leaping from the top of the Eiffel Tower. Temporarily pausing the film, Marker freezes one particular image: that of the man’s gaze, as he realizes he can no longer turn back and must jump, now that he is caught on film. This visual reciprocity between viewer and flying man is the means by which the archive suddenly takes wing in the flow of time, thereby disclosing the subjective power of the image: as their eyes meet, the flying man is shot by the being-to-come (that other-in-time), while that gaze is simultaneously transformed into his archive and image. Much as the butterfly only spreads its wings with the death of the chrysalis, this reciprocity makes visible at last how much the viewer owes his or her own becoming to that death. The being-to-come recognizes in the man of the past the sacrifice of the present. In their film, Chronicle of a Genocide Foretold, Danièle Lacourse and Yvan Patry thread their way through the events of the Rwandan genocide. Their chronicle is all the more disturbing for allowing survivors and witnesses their say upon returning to the site of the events, much as Claude Lanzmann did for the Holocaust. But unlike Lanzmann, who chose deliberately not to present archival images, the producers had no archives to speak of at their disposal.3 Indeed, the film shows indiscriminately events preceding the genocide with those in its aftermath and those during. It is well and truly a “chronicle.” Although the producers are careful to help viewers with the chronology of events, it is impossible to differentiate, on a material basis, between archive and film itself. The chronicle, which is itself shot in video, confounds images chosen by the producers with amateur video taken by a Belgian soldier with the peacekeeping forces of the United Nations (UN). Such a leveling effect, made possible by the medium of video, has important consequences for the memory of the events and their mediation. First of all, this leveling effect allows us to understand how little what are called “archives” or records, in the realm of images, have to do with the material aspect of images alone. This material aspect has continued to change over the course of the twentieth century, as filmstrips themselves are prone to aging and erasure. Meanwhile, the technology of the medium has continued to progress: just think of the various applications and transformations of color, of film and television pigmentation, of the speed and efficacy of the equipment, of the improvements in sound technology—all of which allow us to date images and stamp them with the seal of the age. Until now, wear and...

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