Jeremy Newman
A sequence of stills from Living Things
B-movie clips and sequences from children’s animations remind viewers that Hollywood authors modern fairy tales. Often, these stories perpetuate antiquated, and destructive, gender roles. In fact, a sightseeing excursion to Hollywood precipitates the protagonist’s divorce. Video clips of a praying mantis and a blizzard symbolize his isolation and despair.
A psychiatrist in Shock uses insulin therapy to torment a war veteran’s wife. The Wasp Woman features a cosmetics innovation that transforms an aging woman into a deadly wasp. In The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, a surgeon stalks potential body donors for his wife’s severed head. This violence is often obscured by melodrama. Further, these films escape critical attention due to their secondary economic status and inferior production values. Living Things critiques them by situating their clips in new representational patterns. In The Persistence of Forgetting, my recently divorced protagonist watches home movies of his former life, and systematically hunts for a new mate. I link memory and loss to the human eye and movie cameras by appropriating classroom film footage.
The Persistence of Memory is the basis for my title. The filmic equivalent of his melted watches; this nonlinear film immerses viewers in timelessness. I structure this film on a Carl Jung quotation, “There are truths which belong to the future, truths which belong to the past, and truths which belong to no time,” in order to create a sense of simultaneity. Despite lamenting the past and worrying about the future, the protagonist’s true struggle is in the present moment. He’s lost in an electronic wilderness where audiovisual verisimilitude supplants authentic lived experience. As archival materials displace memory, he has an amnesiac experience, forgetting through remembering. Rather than securing a replacement by any means necessary, he can only get to know someone else and fall in love again by letting go.
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