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“We Must be Still and Still Moving:”

Reimaging and Reimagining the Past in

Adam Thorpe’s Still

Ece Aykol

Abstract

This essay focuses on the role analog still and moving images play in the reconstruction of the past in the British author Adam Thorpe’s ekphrastic novel, Still (1995). The interdependence of these two modes of images for remembering will serve as a metaphor for the ways in which the twentieth century relies on visual representations of both memory and history for reimagining and recalling the past. Of particular concern to this essay is the self-proclaimed historians of the postmemory generation, who search for the past not only in places of memory, but in what Alison Landsberg calls “tranferential spaces” such as the movies.

Résumé

Cet article analyse le rôle que jouent les images analogiques (fixes et mobiles) dans la reconstruction du passé dans Still (1995), un roman ekphrastique de l’auteur britannique Adam Thorpe. L’interdépendance de ces deux types d’image dans la fonction mémorielle renvoie métaphoriquement à la manière dont le XXe siècle s’appuie sur les représentations visuelles de la mémoire aussi bien que de l’histoire dans ses tentatives de faire revivre le passé. De façon plus spécifique, l’article se penche sur le travail des historiens qui se proclament spécialistes de la génération “post-mémoire”, qui cherchent les traces du passé non pas dans les lieux de mémoire mais dans ce qu’Alison Landsberg appelle les “espaces transférentiels” comme par exemple les films.

Keywords

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This essay focuses on the role analog still and moving images play in the reconstruction of the past in the British author Adam Thorpe’s ekphrastic novel Still (1995), a narrative that feigns to be a film written with words. The interdependence of still and moving images for remembering serve as a metaphor in the novel for the ways in which the “postmemory” generation is dependent on visual representations of both memory and history for reimagining and recalling the past. “Postmemory,” according to Marianne Hirsch, “describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right” (Hirsch “The Generation of Postmemory” 103). Photography is a medium central to facilitating this form of “transgenerational transmission of trauma” (Ibid.). In Still, I consider the protagonist Ricky a member of the postmemory generation for he is merely an infant during WW II and therefore oblivious to the historical events unfolding around him. He is dependent on the family photographs, which initiate the “postmemorial work [that] strives to reactivate and reembody more distant social/national and archival/cultural memorial structures by reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression” (112). I propose to view his film project as the furthering of “postmemorial work.” It capitalizes on the medium’s ability to appeal to the masses and promises a collective postmemory experience.

How works of fiction remember the past is a concern central to Thorpe’s oeuvre. When Thorpe published his debut novel Ulverton in 1992 to critical acclaim, authors such as John Fowles, John Banville, and Hilary Mantel praised the novel for its ability to engage readers with the demanding task of piecing together the history of an imaginary rural town from a series of narrative voices from the past that unearth the history of Ulverton from the time of Cromwell to the late 1980s. According to Ingrid Gunby, Ulverton is a challenging text due to the fact that “the novel’s twelve sections, and their disparate, irreconcilable voice, resist the reader’s attempts to construct from them a whole and harmonious history, offering instead a national narrative in fragments—a history in rags” (“History in Rags” 49). For Gunby, the novel’s idea of history, of rural England, and more specifically, of South Country (as the actual location behind the imaginary geography of Ulverton), should be interpreted in light of Thorpe’s own definition of history in the postmodern moment as the act of “putting things up against each other” and creating “a collage of the things of the past or contemporary things” (“I Don’t See” Interview). This also suggests that Thorpe is not interested in reinforcing Ulverton/South Country as “what Pierre Nora calls a lieu de mémoire—a site where, as a defense against the corrosive impact of a critical awareness of historical change and consistency, a society’s sense of identity, tradition, and continuity ‘crystallizes and secretes itself’” (Nora qtd. in “History in Rags” 49). Rather, the novel, “by introducing a different kind of history, a different mode of memory, into the nostalgic national lieu de mémoire of the South Country, seeks to destabilize the inward and backward-looking version of Englishness that this memory-site sustains—an Englishness based on a fantasy of a settled, classless, and conflict-free rural society” (51). In Thorpe’s fictional rendition of South Country, a long history of violence and corruption often resurface in spite of the passing of time and the natural erosion of memory.

In his memoir On Silbury Hill (2014), which The Guardian’s Paul Farley described as “a rich and There is a time for the evening under starlight,

A time for the evening under lamplight (The evening with the photograph album.)

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evocative book of place,” Thorpe once again reconstructs history and personal memories set within the same geography, yet this time he focuses on an actual UNESCO World Heritage Site, the prehistoric artificial chalk mound Silbury Hill located in the county of Wiltshire. The memoir is similar to Ulverton in that it is “a gathering, a layering, and Thorpe is at any moment liable to range backwards and forwards across decades and millennia” (“On Silbury Hill Review”). He explores the relationship between place and personal memory, while mourning the deterioration of this bond in the face of globalization and scientific inquiry; Silbury Hill’s UNESCO World Heritage Site status has made it “global” and for this reason “[s]he is no longer properly local” (On Silbury Hill 17). The visitors are not permitted to freely traverse the site and have to admire it from a distance, which also serves as an apt metaphor for the author’s estrangement from his sister and England herself (18). What was once “a hill of memories” has now become “a fragile museum exhibit: all she lacks is a glass case” (Ibid). Contrary to Ulverton, Silbury Hill infused with nostalgia, now resembles a lieu de mémoire, which according to Nora, “occurs at the same time that an immense and intimate fund of memory disappears, surviving only as a reconstituted object beneath the gaze of critical history” (12). The mound has come to stand for “a loss of communal innocence and belonging” (On Silbury Hill 18-19).

In this essay I will focus on Still, Thorpe’s second novel, and argue that it is in this text that the author shifts his attention away from place (the primary focus of Ulverton and On Silbury Hill) towards the still and moving images rendered verbally as the realm where memories, be they personal or national, may be located. My reading of the novel will thus continue to engage with Nora’s concept of lieu de mémoire, in particular because of his assertion that “[m]odern memory…relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image” (13). Even though the geography in which Still is set is primarily South Country of the first half of the twentieth century and occasionally the United States where the main character Ricky Thornby lives in the present, the past is deposited and archived in still and moving images and will be reconstructed in Ricky’s imaginary film. In this sense, the idea of history in Thorpe’s second novel aspires to continuity and cohesiveness inherent in film as the means through which the fragments of the past can be patched together instead of being yet another narrative where history appears disjointed.

My reading of the verbal representation of visual media as a textual site of remembrance is also based on the affinity the Ancient Greeks established between ekphrasis and memory (Yates 42) and late twentieth-century interpretations of ekphrasis as a rhetorical device that challenges medium specificity. More specifically, I subscribe to W.J.T. Mitchell’s argument that, in ekphrastic texts, rather than being “antithetical modalities” (542), categories such as diegesis/ekphrasis, history/memory, and time/space are co-dependent and their relationship is “one of complex interaction, interdependence, and interpenetration” (544). The destabilization of binaries central to ekphrasis studies in contemporary discourse also underlies Nora’s age of the lieux de

mémoire, where history and memory are barely distinct categories (Nora 13).

In Still the ekphrastic art object central to the narrative are photographs and fragments of analog home movies. Ricky is an unsuccessful English film director and retired film professor who taught European cinema at a mediocre college in Houston, Texas. His grand project in the final days of the millennium is to weave together from these pieces of film and still images a 12-hour long epic movie about his maternal ancestors, the Trevelyans. His film is intended to span from the end of the nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century, with a particular emphasis on the two World Wars’ destructive impact on his family, on Britain, and the world at large.

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what D.N. Rodowick calls the “ineluctable linear drive of filmic temporality” (52). Movement inherent to the medium ensures that the snapshots of the past encapsulated in the still images are dissolved into a narrative of history. The need to transform still images into film can be understood by recalling the distinction Roland Barthes makes between the photograph and cinema in Camera Lucida. For Barthes, one of the limitations of the photographic image, when compared to cinema, is the fact of its fullness and its “totality” (89). It is “crammed: no room, nothing can be added to it” (Ibid.). It lacks “protensity” (90) and is, therefore, devoid of a future that is held down by “a strange stasis” (91). The cinema, on the other hand, is “simply ‘normal,’ like life” because it is “protensive” (90). In Still, Ricky is in pursuit of the images’ capacity for protensity, that is, the continuity of the sensation and emotion held captive within each still. By restoring each still into the temporal order it was once a part of, Ricky hopes to bring back to life what the photographs have immobilized, and in doing so, he wants to achieve historical accuracy regarding the myths built around his ancestral history. This stems from a desire to reconcile with, in particular, the trauma of the Great War that he believes continues to debilitate England and is also “responsible for [Ricky’s] personal misery and his artistic impotence” (Gunby “Melancholic Englishness in Thorpe’s Still” 110-111).1

Limitations specific to family photographs noted in various interpretations of the genre also reveal why photographs are destined to become a film in Still. For instance, according to Marianne Hirsch, a family photograph “immobilizes the flow of family life into a series of snapshots; it perpetuates familial myths while seeming merely to record actual moments in family history” (Family Frames 7). Jo Spence and Patricia Holland describe family photographs as images that “operate at [the] junction between personal memory and social history, between public myth and personal unconscious” (13). In Still, the still images are trapped within a similar temporal in-betweenness Hirsch, Spence, and Holland attribute to family photographs. Ricky tries to overcome this temporal ambivalence by releasing the family stills from stasis and by subjecting them to

stillness, this time to be understood as both continuity and, since the film has not been completed, as that which

is yet to happen. In essence, he wants to eliminate what Hirsch calls “the space of contradiction [photography installs] between the myth of the ideal family and the lived reality of family life” (8).

The inadequacy of photographs for accurately representing the past and the hope vested in filmic temporality to satisfy the desire to re-live history and to revoke mistakes that have led to tragedy and global atrocities is a theme also explored in W.G. Sebald’s masterpiece Austerlitz (2001). Traumatized and therefore unable to remember his history, Austerlitz travels across Europe, returns to Prague, the city of his childhood, and pieces together his past from these places, the strangers he eavesdrops on, and from his nanny whom he reconnects with. He learns that he was a Kindertransport and that his mother disappeared from history upon entering Terezin concentration camp. However, neither still images nor an actual documentary film fulfill Austerlitz’s wish to both reconnect with and undo the past. A photograph depicting him as a little boy and another one of his mother performing on stage fail to garner an emotional response from Austerlitz. These two photographs contradict Hirsch’s claim that family photographs “diminish distance, bridge separation, and facilitate identification and affiliation” (“The Generation of Postmemory” 116). Austerlitz’s only other hope is thus to catch a glimpse of his mother in the Nazi propaganda film Terezin: A Documentary Film from

the Jewish Settlement Area, which equally disappoints him; no matter how many times he watches the film

1  In her reading of Still, Ingrid Gunby interprets Ricky’s “film” through the prism of the cinematic metaphors in Freud’s “Screen Memories,” which discusses all memories as being “subject to revision.” Gunby argues that Ricky’s film, like Freud’s conception of memory, is in essence a revisionist and reconstructed projection of the past conflated with the events and experiences of the remembering subject’s present life (“Melancholic Englishness in Thorpe’s Still’ 111-112).

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in slow motion and enlarges each frame, he is unable to identify his mother among the hundreds of fleeting images. Thorpe’s Ricky, on the other hand, persists in his naïve optimism until the very end and believes in the potential of his “film” (if it is ever completed) to overturn the traumatic events of his own past and of history at large, and to bring back his beloved great-uncle William Trevelyan killed in World War I and his kind-hearted great-aunt Agatha, who died of influenza.

The title of Thorpe’s novel clearly evokes the push and pull between photographic stasis and filmic temporality, and I would argue that, T.S. Eliot’s use of the word “still” in its dual meaning notably in Murder in

the Cathedral and “East Coker” haunts the entire narrative. Ricky himself evokes Eliot when he proclaims that

he knows by heart The Waste Land (Still 444) and admits to being merely “the Second Grip” in comparison to the other great modernists, including James Joyce and the directors Carl Theodor Dryer, Robert Bresson, and Andrei Tarkovsky (18).2

In Murder in the Cathedral, the re-occurring image of the wheel is the ekphrastic object—both static and moving. It is thought to bring change and progress, yet the movement is cyclical; it moves forward only to return to the beginning. Its rim turns, yet its hub remains static; it is thus still yet still moving.3 And in “East

Coker,” Eliot builds a temporal paradox suggestive of an oscillation between stasis and movement with the line “We must be still and still moving.” The inseparability of life from death and regeneration is also implied in the poem’s first line “In my beginning is my end,” and in the final line, “In my end is my beginning.” In this never-ending and ever-turning cycle called life, “Old men” are advised to be explorers of not only “the intense moment/ Isolated, with no before and after/ But a lifetime burning in every moment/ And not the lifetime of one man only/ But of old stones that cannot be deciphered” (Eliot 129). Ricky, at age 59, takes on a similar challenge and after spending “[t]he evening with the photograph album” (Ibid.) commits to deciphering via film each isolated moment together with its before and after.4

One of the chapters, which reads like the description of a scene yet to be filmed, reinforces the spectral presence of Eliot in Still. It unfolds from “Still 5: maid looking blank in front of big house,” a photograph presumably taken after Ricky’s great–great Uncle Kenneth introduces to his niece Agatha and the maid, Milly, a zoetrope, or as he chooses to call it, “the Wheel of Life” (Thorpe 173). The ekphrastic description of the photograph itself— a paragraph at the end of the chapter— provides no evidence in regards to the events that preceded the still image. It describes the setting it was taken in, how (based on Ricky’s speculative interpretation of the photograph) Milly “had blinked,” and how the other maid Lily’s “left hand twitched” in spite of the instructions to stand still (178).

The preceding lengthy diegetic narrative, on the other hand, details the events leading up to this still and provides a social and historical context. It is the Edwardian era and Uncle Kenneth is wearing mismatching spats, a food-stained jacket, and smells foul. The scene’s point of view is also established: “We’re looking at him from the back” (171) and a mirror in the mise-en-scène doubles Uncle Kenneth’s image (172). This shot

2 In a recent interview, Thorpe declares that Still, “‘my film in words’… is a kind of homage to Bresson and Tarkovsky” (“History in shatter-marks” 195). He admits that it is these two directors who “inspired me to think about the passage of time in a work” (194). In addition to their mastery in slowing down and hence making time visible with unabashedly long shots, recalling Bresson’s definition of cinema (or “cinematography” as he prefers to call the medium) as a form of “writing with images in movement and with sounds,” (Still 431) also explains why Thorpe calls Still his “film in words.”

3 Joseph Frank’s The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (1963) and Murray Krieger’s Ekphrasis: The Illusion

of the Natural Sign (1992) inform my reading of Eliot’s work.

4 Due to space constraints, I am unable to discuss in this essay Samuel Beckett who has no doubt also inspired Thorpe’s Still. Both in Still (1973) and Stirrings Still (1988), like Eliot, Beckett consistently evokes the temporal complexities of the word still while tackling the fickleness of memory, aging, and what James E. Robinson identifies as “the living-dying rhythm” (347).

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and a shot of Agatha crosscuts to the great-uncle William as a boy—Kenneth’s sibling—who is expelled from Randle College, and then back to Milly, who will later transform into the “maid looking blank.” In the near future, Giles, William’s sibling and Ricky’s grandfather, will rape her and she will bear a child out of wedlock and will become Ricky’s grandmother. Once the characters are introduced and Ricky’s personal connection to this “scene” is established, the depth of field is expanded to also include a local and global historical context.

Let me tell you there’s quite a lot of authentically-costumed people out there on the street and there’s even a horse and dust-cart coming up soon and you haven’t noticed clop-clops, the gigs and landaus and stuff, the two vintage motor cars that have already rattled passed, have you? And beyond that there’s more, there’s the whole of London, there’s the countryside with rakes and no motorways, there’s sea with 1913 ships and boats on and there’s China and India and America and stuff, everyone of them looking as they are supposed to look now, then. (175) While Eliot and Uncle Kenneth’s respective Wheels of Life spin to connect the end to the beginning, Ricky’s stills unfold into a narrative that progresses and bridges “then” with “now.” It reminds us of World War I, merely a year away. It alludes to the vastness of the British Empire, and Ricky’s own life as an expatriate in the United States. And finally, in the present moment of the narrative, another layer of history is added, for Ricky stands in the very room this photograph was taken accompanied by the room’s current tenant, a violinist who survived Auschwitz. (172)

In scenes/chapters similar to this, Ricky seems to emulate Eliot who sought for and located his ancestral past in East Coker and rendered this experience in the eponymous poem. Ricky fashions himself as the self-proclaimed family historian committed to uncovering his ancestral history held static in the stills. In fact, his ambition to be a historian is implicated in his maternal ancestors’ last name identical to one of the most revered British historians, G.M. Trevelyan, and in his own last name “Thornby,” which assonates with the prominent internationalist historian Arnold J. Toynbee. While G.M. Trevelyan is remembered as the national historian of England and a pagan with an aversion to urban development and modernity (Vincent), Arnold J. Toynbee was an anti-imperialist intellectual who captured in his work the West’s destructive influence on the East and the forces behind the rise and fall of world empires (Hall). These historians Ricky Thornby’s character gestures towards reveals Thorpe’s agenda in this novel to bring to the foreground the issues of who writes history and how it is written. It is, however, important to note that in Still re-writing the past is not about regurgitating grand narratives of history. In fact, the aim seems to be quite the opposite; Ricky informs the reader that he grew up in a household wherein the only history book available was his father’s copy of The Percy Anecdotes, which, we are told, the latter treated like a Bible (Thorpe 10).

John Timbs, in his Preface to the 1868 edition claims that “the PERCY ANECDOTES were specially intended for family circles of readers, the compilers [Mr. Thomas Byerley and Mr. Joseph Clinton Robertson] have sought to invest their narratives with a domestic interest and character, and thus to add to the happiness of home and local attachments” (v). Anecdotes, according to Lionel Gossman, “have always stood in a close relation to the longer, more elaborate narratives of history, sometimes in a supportive role, as examples and illustrations, sometimes in a challenging role, as the repressed of history—‘la petite histoire’” (143). Timbs’ definition is similar; quoting Dr. Johnson, who himself borrows from Cicero, he says that an anecdote is “something yet unpublished; secret history” (iii). Ricky’s stills are akin to an anecdote, i.e., “petite histoire,” as opposed to framing a grand narrative of history. Gossman’s elaboration on the Oxford English Dictionary

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definition of anecdote as “the narrative of a detached incident, or of a single event, told as being in itself interesting” (148) also reinforces the likeness of still images and anecdotes I am proposing. Gossman’s comparison of this definition to Roland Barthes’ interpretation of fait-divers in the latter’s essay entitled “The Structure of Fait-Divers” is also interesting and relevant to my reading of the photographs in Still. Here Barthes describes fait-divers in terms similar to that of his interpretation of the photograph in Camera

Lucida. According Barthes, this form of journalistic writing is “without duration or context, it constitutes an

immediate, total being, which refers, formally at least, to nothing implicit; in this it is related to the short story and the tale, and no longer to the novel” (Barthes 187).

Photographs, as they are posited in Still, can be interpreted along the same lines; like fait-divers, they are merely snapshots of history. The novel Still read as film, and Ricky’s film in the making, which stem from photographs, on the other hand, promise a narrative that would be grand in scope yet would also be a revised version of the lives Ricky’s ancestors lived from the end of the nineteenth into the twentieth century. His intention is to transform snapshots of family history from anecdotes into an epic narrative. In this process of re-imagining and re-imaging the suffering and pain that characterizes the twentieth century, photographs form the basis of a number of film sequences that Ricky develops.

For instance, “Still One: Streadnam, 1920,” which becomes a part of the first reel, features Streadnam, a merciless staff member at Randle College, the school Ricky himself and his beloved great-uncle William attended. When this still image transforms into moving images, Streadnam’s history re-surfaces and through him the violent imperial history of Britain is reenacted. Prior to his position at Randle College, Streadnam is a cruel military officer in India during the colonial years. This younger version of himself is captured in a scene punching an untouchable multiple times and Streadnam subsequently tripping over and permanently injuring his spine (98). In Ricky’s film sequence, this past, clearly invisible in the still image, is connected to Streadnam’s uncompromising status at Randle College and his continued loyalty to the college’s evil headmaster “Mr. Boulter the Master, the Headman, the Chief, the Caesar, disgorged by his school, Big Cunt Caesar hailed by his consuls, by the mob, by the triumphant order splayed before him to the far-flung gates of his conquest” (103). In short, Streadnam, in Ricky’s film, is a pion who himself inflicts pain while applauding a leader, who clearly stands for all the deranged leaders responsible for the horrors of the twentieth century.

Still Number Two: a school photograph taken on the steps of Randle College, in Ricky’s film, highlights Mr. Boulter. He is indeed as vile as he is implicated to be in Still Number One. A homophobe and champion of ultra conservative ethics and aesthetics, he considers nudity in art as depravity (181-182). Another “sequence” from the first reel, which again emerges from a photograph, features the half-Jewish housemaster Mr. Philips, who protects Ricky’s great-uncle from being punished by the arithmetic teacher, Holloway-Purse (125) who has “eyes invented by casting directors of concentration camp movies. These eyes of his are before their time” (107). This sequence unfolds into a brief history of fascist terror in Europe from pre-World War I to post-World War II, and into the final decades of the century, with a reference to the civil war in Bosnia.

In this particular segment, Ricky reveals his father’s affiliation with the British Union of Fascists led by Oswald Mosley (117-8) as well as the fascist regime of Streadnam, Mr. Boulter, and Mr. Holloway-Purse5

at Randle College. Under their leadership, William the “degenerate” artist and the half-Jew Mr. Philips are naturally discriminated against and assaulted (125). Zooming in on Mr. Philips’ eyes in the photograph taken 5 Holloway-Purse’s name is probably meant to evoke Holloway Prison, where Oswald Mosley and his wife Diana were imprisoned between 1940-1943.

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in 1910, Ricky sees a reflection of the events of the future: the image of Dr. Mengele, the brutal Nazi physician of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the iconic image of the Romany girl Settela (124) who perished in the same camp, and the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina (125). Ricky’s film enables the stills to unfold into this horrifying narrative. He is filled with rage, guilt, and shame and admits regretfully,

That’s our century for Christ’s sake. It’s not prehistory, it’s not the time of the dinosaurs or the Crusades or the invention of the steam-press, I was up and walking. I was arsing about with my mother’s pinny as Dr Mengele padded up to her. The Romany girl, I mean. Whoever she was. (124)

The epic film thus aspires to deliver a story the stills fall short of telling; it confronts the postmemory generation with their families’ intended or unintended complicity in crimes against humanity. As a lieu de mémoire it promises to give voice to what may be forgotten if not preserved audio-visually and verbally.

Thomas Elsaesser, in his essay entitled “One Train May Be Hiding Another: History, Memory, Identity, and the Visual Image,”6 discusses a number of films (both fiction and documentary) produced in the Netherlands

in the 1980s and 90s, which offer interesting perspectives on how electronic and audio-visual media contribute to the contemporary discourse on memory. Elsaesser identifies these films as lieux de mémoire and makes a case for why they should be studied in the same way that “more solidly physical monuments” (69) are studied. He says, “By marking what is personal about the past, by bearing witness and giving testimony such films add a new dimension to memory, connecting the speaking subject to both temporality and morality, creating ‘pockets of meaning,’ in the sense that one can speak, in guerilla war, of ‘pockets of resistance’” (64).

One of the films he discusses as a lieu de mémoire is Settela: Gezicht van het Verleden [Settela: Face

of the Past] (1994) by Cherry Duyns—the story of “the Romany” girl, Settela, also remembered in Still. The

film’s success lies in its ability to masterfully reveal the true identity of this girl who, for decades after World War II, was misidentified as Jewish based on a single still image, which depicts her looking into the camera from a cattle truck presumed to be on its way to Auschwitz. Duyns’ documentary shows that the Germans, eager to record their activities, were in fact filming this transportation, and the photograph of The Girl (het meisje) as it turns out is a still taken from this film.7 Based on the evidence contained within the image, it becomes clear

that Settela was a Sinti, who most likely perished in Bergen Belsen. As Elsaesser explains, Duyns’ film reveals how “one image’s symbolic force may obscure another reality” (70) and why it is important to remember that while certain truths may be read into an iconic still image, when transformed into (or, in this case, returned to) film and “reinserted into the flow of history…sequence and consequence” (Ibid.) a more complete and accurate history can be narrated.

Adam Thorpe’s Still, published several years prior to Elsaesser’s article, confronts the reader with how history may indeed be obliterated when it is built upon still images lacking in sufficient context and packed perhaps too neatly in a photograph album one browses through in the evening. It is to circumvent such limitations associated with still images that Still posits film as an alternative medium through which we can 6  This essay was first published in Josef Delau et al (eds), The Low Countries: Arts and Society in Flanders

and the Netherlands – A Yearbook, 1996-1997. In this article, I refer to the reprinted version in Topologies of Trauma: Essays on the Limit of Knowledge and Memory (2002).

7 The journalist Aad Wagenaar’s research gathered the facts depicted in the documentary. His Settela: het

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journey into our own and others’ memories and histories. The function of film as a lieu de mémoire in Still is in this sense also on a par with what Alison Landsberg calls “transferential spaces,” that is, spaces “in which people are invited to enter into experiential relationships with events through which they themselves did not live,” and acquire, through mass media forms like film, “prosthetic memories,” which are “not organically based” and instead “by means of a wide range of cultural technologies…become part of one’s personal archive of experience” (66).

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Press, 1997. Print.

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Fiction of History. Ed. Alexander Lyon Macfie. New York: Routledge, 2015. 193-205. Print.

---. On Silbury Hill. Dorset: Little Toller Books, 2014. Print.

---. “I Don’t See Much Point in Writing a Novel Unless the Reader Works.” Interview with Sabine Hagenauer. March 1996. 9 October 2007 http://webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/artic96/hagenau/3_96.html>.

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Ece Aykol is an Assistant Professor of English at the City University of New York’s La Guardia Community

College. She received her doctorate from the Graduate Center, CUNY and taught at Virginia Commonwealth University’s English Department before returning to CUNY. Her research and teaching focus on the contemporary novel and all forms of images. Her primary areas of interest are memory and word/image studies. She has presented and published on Orhan Pamuk and delivered papers on Pat Barker, W.G. Sebald, and Sam Taylor-Wood.

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