The film »Interior Memories« is composed of four elements. First, there are some interiors, or better: there were some interiors, or »cases for private persons,« as Benjamin called them, from the period between 1900 and 1938. These interiors and their worlds of things harbor all of the signs we need to draw conclusions about the existences and ways of life of their inhabitants – the latter need not be present. The bourgeois private sphere of those days is made up of the whole of all things collected in the interior. Just as this »phantasmagorical« living space met its end at the latest with the Second World War, the interiors on which the film is based are only visible here in the form of photographs. Photography, the 19th-century imaging mechanism, is at the same time an eloquent witness to the historicizing power of this century and its offshoots. Photos are per se history-writing artifacts; they record and store one-time manifestations of things and humans; they are historicizing traces of - as Barthes put it incisively – »avoir-été-là«, having been there. In this way, the images frozen in time enable the inhabitants of the interiors to ensure their precarious existence in the history of space.

The gaze we follow in the film is itself subject to a technical apparatus, is once again a camera’s eye view, which scans the photos from unusually close up in a panoramic sweep. Thus, with this third element, the interior and its photographic manifestation are transferred into a cinematic manifestation, subject to a cinematic gaze, which transforms the photos, or better, the photographed interiors, into a cinematic landscape. The physical space, the individual room, experiences an expansion indebted exclusively to a quasi-analytical motion. Calling this a “landscape” is appropriate since I, as viewer of the film, pursue a singular attentiveness, which constructs from the referentiality of the photography an aesthetic structure. Martin Seel has made some apt observations in this regard, which precisely fit the images created by Arye Wachsmuth.1 In watching the panorama of interior details flowing by, I find myself inalienably in the midst of these fragments: »Whoever finds himself to this extent ›in the midst‹ of an abundance of manifestations – for him, there can no longer be a center from which a stable order underlying these manifestations might be ascertained. «Second, landscapes are »spaces that can neither be immediately comprehended nor traversed«. And, third: »All that is there and is happening there exceeds [...] all possibility of understanding and explanation.« This means that I am only capable of identifying these interior elements chronicled with such phenomenological precision in a schematic fashion, to orbit them like phantoms of my imagination; I see ghostly ornaments, furniture, wallpaper, pictures on the wall, which in their indistinctness refer less to themselves as things than to a very different quality of their manifestation, namely the quality of comprising an »interior landscape« for purely aesthetic perception. This is a landscape that unfolds out of the texture of the photographic emulsion and which I perceive more as material, as nature, than as symbol. It’s not the historicization of a material, of the interior, that is being advanced here, but rather the materialization of a history – cinematic material, cinematic materialism, which, as Marx would agree, allows the historical to arise from within itself.

A fourth element, which overlays and extends the cinematic in the first element, consists of spoken text and music (Mahler’s »Kindertotenlieder«), which keep pace with the movements of the camera. Auguste Blanqui, author of the text fragment, called it a »cosmological speculation.« Walter Benjamin incorporated it into his notes for his »Arcades Project,« emphasizing that he found the connections between this text, written in prison, and Baudelaire and Nietzsche to be remarkably »strange«.2 The theme of the text is »eternal recurrence.« In Blanqui’s cosmic plan, all of the endless stars have a kind of doppelgänger function for our life here on Earth. »What I am writing at this moment in a dungeon in Fort du Taureau, I have already written once and I will be writing for all eternity sitting at a desk with a pen, fully clothed, under very similar circumstances« on other stars. There are ten thousand different editions of the same scene. »Always and everywhere, this drama in the terrestrial camp, the same decor in the same narrow scene, a raucous humanity, self-righteous in its size, which believes that it is the universe and lives in its prison as if in an infinite realm … endlessly, the universe repeats itself, scratching impatiently at the ground.«

In the film by Arye Wachsmuth, this great outer world of the cosmos with its laws comes up against the small inner world of the middle-class Jewish apartments, both themes held together by the eternal recurrence of the small in the large. There is no progress. Everything has always been there, is there now, and will always be there. »Eternity plays the same performances repeatedly and imperturbably in the endlessness of the stars.« With this anti-Messianic baggage in tow, let us stagger back, or better, forward, to the images, the cinematic landscapes. The historical materialism of the image fragments is now open to a completely different interpretation. Perhaps the images are so out of focus because they show telescopic photos taken from stars far away, on which, simultaneously with our present, other interiors are being decorated in turn, whose inhabitants again leave behind only things as clues, in order to likewise be extinguished by an industrial death machine. And this is not going to happen; it has already happened thousands of times and will recur until infinity. History is present and future. There is no progress. That is the signal of the recurrence of the same.

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

 

---