Zapruderization
The students in Laura’s eCulture course have been studying the Internet Mapping project which generates some beautiful images of all of the ‘net’s’ hubs and links at various instants (instances?). I am struck by how luridly floristic these images are; just like the seething rampancy of a garden.
I guess you can say that the Internet has been ‘Zapruderized.’ This is a wonderful new verb that William Gibson came up with in his novel, Pattern Recognition.
Of course Gibson is talking about the infamous Zapruder film.
This home movie by Abraham Zapruder, is the only known film of the entire Kennedy assassination. *It is a silent, 8mm color record of the Kennedy motorcade just before, during, and immediately after the shooting.of the Kennedy assassination.*
Gibson is talking about the fetishization of film frames and their use as points of departure for conjectures on the conditions surrounding their provenance. The Fetish:Footage:Forum he creates in Pattern Recognition is something I totally crave and would be completely addicted to if it existed. Chris Marker’s 1982 Sans Soleil constructs his own notion of Fetish:Footage, but he finds it in filming banality, which (in his words) he seeks with “the relentlessness of a bounty hunter.”
The result is a film composed entirely of exquisitely beautiful *moments*. I was overcome when I first saw it. (BTW, there is an interesting piece of ephemera associated with Sans Soleil, that is quite open to interpretation.)
As for me, I have been feeling an intense nostalgia lately for the days of the Cold War. Things seemed so much simpler then. Multiple superpowers. America kept in some modicum of check from total world domination etc.
In fact some of my memories of that period have been “Zapruderized” in a box of super 8mm film spools that I shot in Germany, (mostly Berlin and Stuttgart), in the early 1980’s.
Berlin in those days was the epicentre of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall bisected the city like a gash between two ideologies. Earlier this year I made a post (Tuesday, April 15, 2003) to this blog describing super 8mm film stills I shot of the thriving ruderal ecologies that existed in the mine fields between the east and west sides of the Berlin Wall. I filmed hawks hunting European hares across these deadly Elyssian fields, *where no person could disturb them*.
One of the many *odd* things about the Berlin wall, was the existence of the little viewing platforms set up here and there beside the wall, so that people could look over at the other side and ponder the geopolitical universe. I remember looking over at *Communism*. It looked gray and dour. Still, there was hardly any traffic…
Looking over the Wall, (1983)
Of course 1983 was just five years after urban guerillas Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof were found dead in their cells in Stammheim prison, near Stuttgart. I had been in and out of Stuttgart several times during the mid to late 70’s , visiting my extended family and I remembered the atmosphere of hysteria that existed, particularly among the German bourgeoise around the Red Army Faction. But the RAF and especially the allied Socialist Patients Kollective,
(who promoted the idea that: mental disorders stemmed from Capitalism, and the only cure was a Marxist society.)
were definitely kind of *cool*.
Which is why they had so much covert (and overt) support from the left-wing intellectuals of the day. I mean *Jean Paul Sartre visited them in prison* (for god sake :)) (We can no longer even have *discussions* around these issues in our current post 9/11 climate, which is a sad indicator of how diminished the bandwidth of political discourse has become)
After being invited for “Kaffe und Kuchen” by an elderly (and somewhat insane) aunt, I was surprised upon arrival at her flat, to find that the view from her balcony faced the grounds of the infamous Stammheim prison, the buildings of which could be seen off in the distance. My super 8mm camera whirring, I *Zapruderized* my visit.
Aunt Johanna boarding tram in front of Stammheim Prison 1983
view of Stammheim prison 1983, from Johanna’s apartment
