Notes from J West’s book on La Jetee
To blink is to foreclose vision.
To create a break in seeing.
To impose a gap in vision.
In the structures of seeing and not seeing lies the kernel of the idea of memory of what we remember and what we forget demonstrates how remembering and forgetting are not oppositional acts but two sides of the same coin.
Forgetting is not an abandonment of the past but permission to elaborate, to reconstruct differently, to mix up the syntax.
Memory and Cinema are both comprised of an unstable set of associations. The choreography of memory. Stories going back to the past are always full of warning. An aberrant desire that meets punishment. (Orpheus, Oedipus, Vertigo).
But… To know the past and to unearth its radical contradiction is a necessary orientation for the future.
Kristen Buckley 