Paul Elliott
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780748676392
- eISBN:
- 9780748693856
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748676392.003.0006
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Twenty Four Seven and Dead Man's Shoes share a temporal structure; both films span three distinct time frames: a distant past, that is symbolised by childhood memory and signified by degraded film ...
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Twenty Four Seven and Dead Man's Shoes share a temporal structure; both films span three distinct time frames: a distant past, that is symbolised by childhood memory and signified by degraded film stock, a more recent past that is often violent and shocking and a meaningful present that attempts to come to terms with the pain and the anguish of encysted trauma. This chapter argues that this temporality is both a structural and a thematic trope and that it feeds into, what are important elements in both works, trauma and loss. Using Freud's celebrated paper ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-through’ (Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durchar- beiten), I suggest that both films can be seen as explorations of the compulsion to continually re-enact painful events born out of repressed or inaccessible memories. For Freud, trauma that cannot be consciously remembered is doomed to be forever repeated until it is worked through in psychoanalysis or until it ceases at death. Such theory allows us not only to view Twenty Four Seven and Dead Man's Shoes as films primarily concerned with mourning and coming to terms with loss but offers us insights into the films' structure and the specific avenues of catharsis open to the director and the audience.Less
Twenty Four Seven and Dead Man's Shoes share a temporal structure; both films span three distinct time frames: a distant past, that is symbolised by childhood memory and signified by degraded film stock, a more recent past that is often violent and shocking and a meaningful present that attempts to come to terms with the pain and the anguish of encysted trauma. This chapter argues that this temporality is both a structural and a thematic trope and that it feeds into, what are important elements in both works, trauma and loss. Using Freud's celebrated paper ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working-through’ (Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durchar- beiten), I suggest that both films can be seen as explorations of the compulsion to continually re-enact painful events born out of repressed or inaccessible memories. For Freud, trauma that cannot be consciously remembered is doomed to be forever repeated until it is worked through in psychoanalysis or until it ceases at death. Such theory allows us not only to view Twenty Four Seven and Dead Man's Shoes as films primarily concerned with mourning and coming to terms with loss but offers us insights into the films' structure and the specific avenues of catharsis open to the director and the audience.
Mae G. Henderson
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780195116595
- eISBN:
- 9780199375219
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195116595.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, African-American Literature, Women's Literature
Writing against the limitations of conventional historiography and nineteenth-century slave narratives, Toni Morrison, in her novel Beloved, addresses the unspoken and unspeakable: the sexual ...
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Writing against the limitations of conventional historiography and nineteenth-century slave narratives, Toni Morrison, in her novel Beloved, addresses the unspoken and unspeakable: the sexual exploitation of black women. The author journeys to a “site of memory,” and through memory and imagination, she reconstructs from the “traces” and “remains” left behind “the unwritten interior life” of her characters. Like the author, her character Sethe must learn to speak the unspeakable in order to transform residual memories (“rememories”) of the past into narrative memory. In order to reclaim herself, Sethe must reconfigure the master’s narrative (and its inscriptions of physical, social, and scholarly dismemberment) into a counter-narrative by way of an act of reconstitutive “re-memory.” Through the fundamentally psychoanalytic process of “remembering, repeating, and working through,” Sethe reconfigures a story of infanticide into a story of motherlove. Private memory becomes the basis for a reconstructed public history, as personal past becomes historical present.Less
Writing against the limitations of conventional historiography and nineteenth-century slave narratives, Toni Morrison, in her novel Beloved, addresses the unspoken and unspeakable: the sexual exploitation of black women. The author journeys to a “site of memory,” and through memory and imagination, she reconstructs from the “traces” and “remains” left behind “the unwritten interior life” of her characters. Like the author, her character Sethe must learn to speak the unspeakable in order to transform residual memories (“rememories”) of the past into narrative memory. In order to reclaim herself, Sethe must reconfigure the master’s narrative (and its inscriptions of physical, social, and scholarly dismemberment) into a counter-narrative by way of an act of reconstitutive “re-memory.” Through the fundamentally psychoanalytic process of “remembering, repeating, and working through,” Sethe reconfigures a story of infanticide into a story of motherlove. Private memory becomes the basis for a reconstructed public history, as personal past becomes historical present.
