Against Oblivion
“Right now a moment is fleeting by!”
—Paul Cézanne
“Memory demands an image.”
—Bertrand Russell
“I don’t make movies about my life. I live my life like a movie.”
—Lana Del Rey
How often has a film or artwork been praised for capturing or visually demonstrating the ineffable? But what about the indelible, that which lays claws on us, refuses to let go, and continues to alternately haunt and inspire? To restate the oft-said: cinema is inherently imbued with ghosts and phantasms as much as fantasies—projections from one person’s mind to that of another. We can revisit and debate all we want the aesthetic and psychoanalytic theories about film’s abilities to resuscitate the past, to animate a moment locked in time, and to replay it over and over again, but one thing remains certain and is still somehow contentious: the role of our subjectivity. “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag’s famous 1964 essay, has lost none of its relevance, calling as it does upon our senses to revitalize our own existence via art, rather than primarily interpreting the content of that art. Sontag’s advice is for the artist as much as for the critic, and a notion both totally romantic and exceedingly pertinent—more than welcome in an age of fractured identity politics, cynicism, and psychic exhaustion. We know that content can shift with the context (fixity is perhaps the most elusive of all things these days), but what about those unforgettable details that locate a common denominator—that of simply being human and living one’s life?
Two of 2018’s most affecting films, British artist Richard Billingham’s impressive and Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi’s semi-posthumous diary film cum sinuous and generous love letter, , both explicitly draw from and depict indelible moments from the filmmakers’ respective lives. had a long gestation period: the project was announced several years back during a fundraising campaign, and taking as its starting point Billingham’s celebrated and iconic YBA photographs from the ’90s. Gianikian, on the other hand, compiled and completed his film in a hot flash of emotion, working through (or despite) the grief of having lost Angela, his partner in life and in work, who died in late February, as he undoubtedly wanted to remain near her, close to her image, loyal to their mutual, engaged mission as artists, and especially to hear her voice again. It was imperative to keep going, no matter what. The two films could not be more different both stylistically and in terms of content, yet both affirm strong, personal voices, displaying the porous boundaries of autobiography in cinema where life and art intersect and overlap. This may be a well-worn genre, but these films are full of vivacity, poignancy, resilience, reckoning, and melancholy.
