Re-Viva la Revolución! Part 2

See Part 1 if you missed it.

Mediatized Conflict and Post-Memory

In Old Borders, New Technologies I examined the notion that the small, sparsely populated pastoral region of Northern Ireland with its few focalized urban centres provided an ideal laboratory for experiments in social control upon which the security systems now so ubiquitous throughout the UK and beyond were modelled. The idea that these larger constructs in conjunction with media reportage corral populations and determine group behaviours – and, importantly, perceptions of communities and behaviours – provides the broader backdrop for this discussion on specific encounters with the mediatization of conflicted pasts.

Mediation and self-removal are common methods of coping (or not) with the unthinkable, and yet unthinkable events are so ubiquitous on daily and 24-hour news broadcasting and social media feeds that desensitization to the sounds and images of war seems increasingly common. As Susan Sontag discussed at length in 2004 before social media as we know it in 2020 was a notion, ‘[w]ars are now also living room sights and sounds’.¹ Since at least the USA’s twentieth-century war in Vietnam, conflicts of varying scales have been a daily television feature in much of the world with the result that ‘the understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of these images’.² This has been additionally facilitated by the widespread appropriation of archival film, television, stills and sound recordings incorporated into cultural production, particularly moving image fictions where the imagined is anchored by the indexicality of the ‘real’ or documentary materials.

That the past can be so effectively preserved by a wide range of documentation methods means that access to historical events is facilitated equally effectively for future generations. Not only are stories and lived experiences passed on and carried in the bodies and memories of experiencers’ progeny, the ‘archival impulse’ identified by Hal Foster and examined by Marianne Hirsch emerges in artists who explore the need to do something – and do something different – with the artefacts that get stored away. What Hirsch discusses as ‘reparative’ engagements with the archive chime with my readings of Good Vibrations and No as films that, like the art Hirsch analyses, ‘function as correctives and additions, rather than counters, to the historical archive, attempting to undo the ruptures caused by war and genocide.’³ As postmemory films speaking to generations too young to remember or not yet living during the 1980s when the films are largely set, Good Vibrations and No use the attraction to vintage nostalgia (specifically with the media of vinyl records and Betacam television, respectively) to their advantages to lure those curious about those times while also using those times themselves to tell the stories as hybrid biopic and compilation films. These ideas will be looked at in greater detail in a later section informed by closer reading of relevant writing by Hirsch and Laura Mulvey.

Turning to thoughts around cultural and communal memory being shaped by mediated experience, José van Dijck (quoting John Thompson) points out that ‘[w]hat makes mediated experience today differ from lived experience two hundred years ago is the fact that individuals need no longer share a common locale to pursue commonality; the growing availability of mediated experience creates “new opportunities, new options, new arenas for self-experimentation.”’⁴ Sontag also discusses this shift: ‘Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half’s worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists’ (p. 16). Returning to this research in 2020 six months after the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 in the UK, mediated experience and the rapid circulation of information around the world has never felt more acute. I can’t help but think of friends’ babies born in the past year and will they be the oldest of the COVID-19 postmemory generation? It has also become a period of reflection, of looking back, and I have unfinished business with my inquiry into the post- and re- prefixes.

In comparatively examining scenes in which artefacts from media archives establish the methods of remediating the past and in which violence is reimagined through absent presence in the films Good Vibrations and No, I want to explore the ‘re’ prefix and the potential affectivity of the politicized aesthetics involved in conflict-themed archive-based films. The relation between the ‘real-life’ footage and the contemporary fiction footage integral to their narratives shows that what was already a mediatized representation of events unfolding before many cameras at various times in different places has become re-mediatized in new sequencing and contexts. Given that the images of real-life events are archival, and that every finished film is itself an archival document of its own production (the editing process involves acts of inclusion and exclusion; films have and are physical/analogue and virtual/digital forms of storage, and so on), the appropriated materials become re-archivized in these film documents. Furthermore, the images have often been appropriated and re-enacted from actual scenarios, meaning that acts of reappropriation involving re/membering (acts of recall through re-embodying) the past given the memories which are retold through fictionalized, narrativized, acted/performed reimag/in/ings. I will demonstrate what I mean here in the comparative discussions of illustrative elements from the films in the sections to follow.

Although Good Vibrations and No are being discussed here as films that re-image and reimagine the past, it is important to acknowledge that their narratives align with self-serving male protagonists, namely Belfast mainstay and the proclaimed godfather of punk in Northern Ireland, Terri Hooley (Richard Dormer), and René Saavedra (Gael García Bernal), the fictional former exile and amalgam of the advertising executives who were charged with designing the No campaign’s television promotions in 1988. As the films show, these are scenarios and characters not without their problems, including their inability to see the anxieties caused by their schemes, schemes which epitomize prevailing social issues around trauma, inequality, shared space, truth and transitional justice. Indeed, the recording, remembering and imagining of events in Belfast and Santiago in these periods are blended in the films in ways that reveal media manipulation of historical accounts and social understandings.

Close analysis of sequences in which archival television images are merged into the film story space and where the films’ diegeses are shaped around the archives reveal the real’s integration with remembered and reimagined events, which in these films is indicative of the ways mediatized narratives and mythologies can represent, become, criticize and contribute to collective post/memory. Although the washed-out brownish colouring achieved in the Digital Intermediate processing evokes the period setting, the contemporary digitally filmed footage in Good Vibrations is distinct from the digitized 16mm archival material of different qualities and colour grades which was horizontally cropped to fit the 2.35:1 aspect ratio – this treatment of the archives alone is evocative of selective, narrowed, re-presented and reframed memories.

Whereas the archive in Good Vibrations illustrates the backdrop to its fictionalizing of Hooley’s creative memory-telling, the archival material throughout No leads the aesthetic and narrative decisions. In further contrast, period-specific 1980s Ikegami colour television cameras were used in filming, keeping the film’s U-Matic footage consistent with the Betacam archival footage, meaning that when no recognizable actors are in shot it is difficult to distinguish between archive and contemporary fiction. While it could be assumed that this consistency produces an impression of verisimilitude, disjunctive editing and excessive sun flares in No instead draw attention to the film’s artifice in imagining a less smooth impression of a past whose view of the future was too glaringly bright, presented in a meaningfully narrow 1.40:1 aspect ratio. The frequent blurring and shallow focus further emphasize Saavedra’s and the No campaign’s narrowly focused views while anamorphic lenses and soft focus in the widescreen Good Vibrations reflect Hooley’s ambitious yet skewed ‘big picture’ attitude conveyed in acts of subjective memory-telling throughout the film often fuelled by his frequent intoxication. As such, both films play with ways of seeing the past, begging examination of how they do this, and to what effects.

 

1 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 16.

2 Sontag, p. 19.

3 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), pp. 227–8.

4 José van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 19; John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), p. 233.

Part 3

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