Page 217 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 217
summary
which almost in a manner of aesthetics of home movies differed from the
ideologically marked “reality” of the political and economic context of so-
cieties with the one political Party rule. So another well remembered ado-
lescent character was Milos Forman‘s Black Peter (Cerný Petr – 1964). For-
man made a point on incomplete identity also in his film A Blonde in Love
(Lásky jedné plavovlásky – 1965). Of course, we shouldn’t miss also Andrzej
Wayda‘s Innocent Sorcerers (Niewinni czarodzieje – 1960), which deals with
the topic of the “alienated youth” and ads quite daringly, considering the
times and the catholic socialist environment of Poland, an anthological ex-
plicit erotic sequence of a strip poker game. Ingmar Bergman‘s film, which
addressed the young proletarian frustrations, and at the same time brought
up a new focus on female characters, Summer with Monika (Sommaren med
Monika – 1953) should be “classified” as an early case among such films.
On the other hand a giant of the European modernist cinema Michelan-
gelo Antonioni with his sophisticated, doubting, intellectual communica-
tion loosing characters, who seem psychologically and socially deprived of
the sense of identity, is in a class of his own. Characters in his films are ap-
proaching the limit of the constitution of subjectivity through desire in the
psychoanalytical terms, as they seem to be without an idea of the true ob-
ject of their desire, of course, apart from Antonioni’s own manifested de-
sire to see through the eye of the camera, what is very difficult to see other-
wise. Following the trace of identity as a topic in the European modernist
cinema, we could of course go on and on citing and analysing many films,
which were shot in the period also in Great Britain within the movement of
free cinema, and of course in Germany within the Young German Cinema.
Nowadays we must often specify what we mean exactly when we talk
about memory: do we mean the memory, which we keep in our brains or
do we mean some digital data, which is stored on a hard drive somewhere
in cyber space? Although in probably all languages the figure of speech “I
remember” is still widely used, it is meant increasingly more often as an
inscription into a memory, which is uttered in some recollection residing
somewhere “outside” of our brains. In our digital era, when implications of
such an assumption have become obvious, we should look back to under-
stand the genealogy of this state of affairs, and to be able to analyse a struc-
tural composition of our so-called post-modern reality. The complexity of
meanings regarding the notions of memory has become more complicated
and yet simpler at the same time from the beginnings of the development
of the first photography and then film, as it entered human history and the
215
which almost in a manner of aesthetics of home movies differed from the
ideologically marked “reality” of the political and economic context of so-
cieties with the one political Party rule. So another well remembered ado-
lescent character was Milos Forman‘s Black Peter (Cerný Petr – 1964). For-
man made a point on incomplete identity also in his film A Blonde in Love
(Lásky jedné plavovlásky – 1965). Of course, we shouldn’t miss also Andrzej
Wayda‘s Innocent Sorcerers (Niewinni czarodzieje – 1960), which deals with
the topic of the “alienated youth” and ads quite daringly, considering the
times and the catholic socialist environment of Poland, an anthological ex-
plicit erotic sequence of a strip poker game. Ingmar Bergman‘s film, which
addressed the young proletarian frustrations, and at the same time brought
up a new focus on female characters, Summer with Monika (Sommaren med
Monika – 1953) should be “classified” as an early case among such films.
On the other hand a giant of the European modernist cinema Michelan-
gelo Antonioni with his sophisticated, doubting, intellectual communica-
tion loosing characters, who seem psychologically and socially deprived of
the sense of identity, is in a class of his own. Characters in his films are ap-
proaching the limit of the constitution of subjectivity through desire in the
psychoanalytical terms, as they seem to be without an idea of the true ob-
ject of their desire, of course, apart from Antonioni’s own manifested de-
sire to see through the eye of the camera, what is very difficult to see other-
wise. Following the trace of identity as a topic in the European modernist
cinema, we could of course go on and on citing and analysing many films,
which were shot in the period also in Great Britain within the movement of
free cinema, and of course in Germany within the Young German Cinema.
Nowadays we must often specify what we mean exactly when we talk
about memory: do we mean the memory, which we keep in our brains or
do we mean some digital data, which is stored on a hard drive somewhere
in cyber space? Although in probably all languages the figure of speech “I
remember” is still widely used, it is meant increasingly more often as an
inscription into a memory, which is uttered in some recollection residing
somewhere “outside” of our brains. In our digital era, when implications of
such an assumption have become obvious, we should look back to under-
stand the genealogy of this state of affairs, and to be able to analyse a struc-
tural composition of our so-called post-modern reality. The complexity of
meanings regarding the notions of memory has become more complicated
and yet simpler at the same time from the beginnings of the development
of the first photography and then film, as it entered human history and the
215
