Appendix G
Quotations – Memory Trace
The Memory trace weblog has been developed from November 2004 onwards as an online research journal and choreographic notebook, recording the development of each of the forty two sections of work comprising the Memory Pool cycle. The weblog includes quotations, digital stills and writing on process, and can be viewed as supporting material to the Memory Pool cycle, documenting the process of creation from initial ideas to screenings.
The weblog is accessible to view online at http://www.shiftwork.org.uk/memorytrace
P.O.V.2 (Jan. ‘05):
Film with its close-ups reveals the most hidden parts in our polyphonous life, and teaches us to see the intricate visual details of life as one reads an orchestral score.
(Balazs in Tredell, 2002, p.35)
A Gift from the Gods (Feb. ‘05):
... a certain combination of unquestionably personal talents, a gist from the fairies, and a moment in history.
(Bazin in Tredell, 2002, p.122)
Cyclograph1 (Feb. ‘05)
Gilbreth’s researches most adamantly illustrate that the scientific analysis of time involves an unrelenting search for its representation in visual terms - visual terms that exceed the capacity of the naked eye.
(Doane, 2002, p.6)
Event of a Caught Fall2 (Feb. ‘05):
The close-up has not only widened our vision of life, it has also deepened it.
(Balazs in Tredell, 2002, p.34)
Knotwork (Feb. ‘05):
The close-up thus functions as a means of what the Russian Formalist critics called ‘ostranenie’ or ‘defamiliarisation’, in which art strips the scales of familiarity from the eyes to make us look at the world afresh.
(Tredell, 2002, p.34/35)
Magical Thinking (Feb. ‘05):
The mind develops memory ideas and imaginative ideas; in the moving pictures they become reality.
(Münsterberg in Tredell, 2002, p.21)
Connective Tissue2 (Mar. ‘05)
It is perhaps no longer appropriate to analyse video dance within stage dance criteria: a whole new set of appraisal techniques need to be developed to take into account the role of the televisual apparatus in the determination and construction of movement.
(Dodds, 2001, p.125)
Connective Tissue1 (March ‘05):
The cinema...is not exclusively human. Its subject matter is the infinite flux of invisible phenomena - those ever-changing patterns of physical existence whose flow may include human manifestations but need not climax in them.'
(Kracauer in Tredell, 2002, p.89/90)
Proprioceptive2 (June ‘05):
I was going on bodily memory of my movements...rather than visible form.
(Massumi, 2002, p.178/9)
Connective Tissue3 (Feb. ‘06):
Dance for the camera has liberated dance from the theater and given it a new and different proscenium, that of the film screen or television monitor.
(Rosenberg, undated, www.dvpg.net/essays.html, p.9/10)
Screenings3 (Feb. ‘06):
Previewing a film - with all these different people looking at it - helps to reveal the film as a dimensional thing, which in turn kicks off different ideas. It's a psychic component that you pick up from people sitting there taking it in for the first time.
(Murch in Koppelman, 2005, p.17)
Spiro1 (March ‘06):
I think art is the expression of the internal physiology of the artist.
(Brakhage in McPherson, 2001, p. 124)
Connective Tissue4 (March ‘06):
A work of art is a skin for an idea.
(Deren cited in Jackson in Nichols, 2001, p.56)
Duet Form1 (March ‘06):
What still inspires me most is the capacity of cinema to create new, magical realities by the most simple means, with a mixture of imagination and ingenuity in about equal parts.
(Deren in McPherson, 2005, p.206)
Screenings4 (May ‘06):
The filmmaker looks at his works and shows them to some friends or perhaps even a large audience, and begins to see that they hold up, that they have a form of integrity. And this happens much to the artist's surprise.
(Brakhage, 1989, p.162)
April/May (May ‘06):
The natural landscape is the raw material of the human psyche.
(Viola, 1998, p.253)
Connective Tissue4: Early June/Early July: (Jul.06)
Instead of trying to invent a plot that moves, use the movement of wind, or water, children, people, elevators, balls, etc, as a poem might celebrate these.
(Deren in McPherson, 2005, p.17/18)
Coda (July’06):
Creativity consists in a logical, imaginative extension of a known reality. The more limited the information, the more inevitable the necessity of its imaginative extension.
(Deren in Nichols, 2001, Appendix, p.16)