Spielberg to produce documentary series on WTC rebuilding

The re-building of the Twin Towers has already generated a great deal of controversy -- what the design should look like; what sort of structure it ought to be; what the memorial component might entail; whether or not to rebuild at all; whose design ought to prevail, etc. etc. Now, Hollywood director Steven Spielberg will be following the reconstruction process in a new TV documentary series. The structure, previously called "Freedom Tower" (some other time, I will reserve a post just for this name!), is slated to be completed in 2013, so stay tuned for further posts on this front. I've included a few recent YouTube videos that illustrate the current state of the site (second video includes rather Hollywood-esque soundtrack):





From: BBC News

Spielberg to make Ground Zero doc

Oscar-winning director Steven Spielberg is to produce a TV documentary series on the rebuilding of New York's World Trade Center, to be shown in 2011.

Rebuilding Ground Zero will chronicle the engineering and building of the skyscraper being built on the site of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers.

It will also pay tribute to those who died in the 11 September 2001 attacks.

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg said the series would tell "a compelling story of remembrance and renewal".

He said Spielberg's involvement as executive producer would ensure "the story will be brought to life for people around the world for generations to come".

The Science Channel series will use 3D, time-lapse cameras, computer modelling techniques and other methods to chart the construction of One World Trade Center.

Formerly known as the Freedom Tower, the 1,776 foot (541 meter) skyscraper will be the tallest building in the US.

Work on the building officially began in 2006 and is scheduled to be completed in 2013.

Rebuilding Ground Zero will be produced by the Science Channel, a division of the Discovery network.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/8460887.stm

Published: 2010/01/15 10:39:06 GMT

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On Teaching Memory

As I stated in the initial post to this blog, I am teaching an honors seminar on memory this semester (which begins on Monday). At my institution, only first-year honors students may register for the class, but it is later opened to all honors-eligible undergraduates. There are three seminars offered this semester, on a variety of topics. Professors may choose to teach the course one day a week for the entire semester, or two days per week, with the class ending at midterm. Due to the thematic nature of our class, I chose to offer the seminar twice a week. The class is only a one credit hour course, and we will have just two hours per week together. Still, I am absolutely thrilled to be teaching this class (in fact, I volunteered to do so).

I have just completed the course syllabus, and I would like to share that document with anyone who might be interested. Please feel free to comment, suggest additional readings, or share pedagogical insights if you have taught any of these, or similar, texts. I'd be more than happy to read your remarks and respond to them here.

One of the challenges I encountered in planning the syllabus was the sheer volume of material that is available out there regarding memory and amnesia. We always have to choose texts carefully for classes we'll be teaching, but especially when the course is going to be so brief. As I state in the course description, I opted to focus less on the traumatic historical events themselves -- that is, what happened -- and more on how those events were (and are) remembered, both by survivors and subsequent generations. Interestingly, I thought I would dedicate a rather large portion of the class to the Spanish Civil War, because that is what my research is in. However, in the end, the syllabus kind of took on its own life, and we'll spend a decent amount of time on 9-11. Perhaps, this is only natural. I just received a copy of Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers, and I also re-watched Man on Wire over break.

In any case, I'll be reporting on the class from time to time here. Students may also have the opportunity to post articles and commentary on this blog.

Book on Art and Memory

Contemporary Art and Memory
Images of Recollection and Remembrance
Joan Gibbons

I.B. Tauris, January 2008
ISBN: 978-1-84511-619-4, ISBN10: 1-84511-619-4,
6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches, 344 pages, 30 b/w illus.,

Description: Contemporary Art and Memory is the first accessible survey book to explore the subject of memory as it appears in its many guises in contemporary art. Looking at both personal and public memory, Gibbons explores art as autobiography, the memory as trace, the role of the archive, revisionist memory and postmemory, as well as the absence of memory in oblivion.

Grounding her discussion in historical precedents, Gibbons explores the work of a wide range of international artists including Yinka Shonibare MBE, Doris Salcedo, Keith Piper, Jeremy Deller, Judy Chicago, Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Christian Boltanski, Janet Cardiff, Bill Fontana, Pierre Huyghe, Susan Hiller, Japanese photographer Miyako Ishiuchi and new media artist George Legrady. Contemporary Art and Memory will be indispensable to all those concerned with the ways in which artists represent and remember the past.

Joan Gibbons is Senior Lecturer at the University of Central England in Birmingham and Course Director, MA Contemporary Curatorial Practice. She is the author of Art and Advertising (I.B.Tauris).

Documentary Film: "Man on Wire"

I recently had the opportunity to see Man on Wire (2008, dir. James Marsh) for a second time, the award-winning documentary film which chronicles the exploits of Philippe Petit, who walked between the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974.

As a child, I was fascinated with stories of daredevil acts, like the guy who rode over Niagara Falls in a barrel and came out alive, or Harry Houdini's exploits to break out of chains underwater. I am not old enough to remember Philippe Petit's stunning, illegal high-wire act, but I was able to visit the Twin Towers just one year before 9-11 (though I never went inside). It truly boggles the mind to contemplate what it meant to walk, essentially on air, not once, not twice, but eight times back and forth in the two hundred or so feet between the towers. And to lie down, and look down, as Petit did!

Perhaps the most extraordinary feat of Man on Wire is the complete omission of any direct reference to 9-11. While the director has stated that he did not include 9-11 on purpose -- "Why burden this beautiful story with the ugliness of that?" -- a 2008 review of the film in the Times Online (U.K.), questioned whether this film about a high-wire daredevil may actually be the "best 9/11 work of art so far" (see "Is Man on Wire the most poignant 9/11 film?"). Again, what is not stated, or what remains silent, is a powerful driving force of this film. We will discuss this movie further here after we view it for class.

Documentary Film - "A Generation Apart" (1984)

I am in the final stages of planning for the honors seminar course on memory and historical trauma that I am teaching this semester. One of the films I have been considering is "A Generation Apart," which was originally produced in 1984, but re-released on DVD in 2007. If I do end up using this film in class, I will do so in conjunction with a discussion of postmemory. I am really surprised that I did not come across this film earlier, during research for my dissertation (I'm sure I must have read about it, though I never saw it). The film is not a documentary masterpiece, but I do believe it is a valuable text with which to look at the particular challenges facing second-generation descendants of Holocaust survivors (and perhaps, by extension, descendants of other historical traumas). Director Jack Fisher interviews his parents, Auschwitz survivors, and his older brother Joe in an attempt to understand how the direct, lived experience of the Holocaust, as well as its intergenerational transmission, have affected his family. A Generation Apart also includes poignant interviews between the director's friend Shelley and her mother Mary, who survived Bergen-Belsen. There are obvious moments of tension between parents and children, and between the siblings as well. Of particular note is the segment in which the Fisher brothers address one another regarding the importance of the Shoah in their everyday lives.

Contained Memory Conference (New Zealand)

This just in. . .

Contained Memory Conference 2010

The conference seeks to bring together multidisciplinary perspectives in a discourse on contained memory. While memory is understood to be integral to the constitution of the self, it works in concert with external repositories of memory ranging from personal mnemonic objects to collective, social, and public memory residing in community traditions, artifacts in museums, and archives, including electronic and other recording systems. Memory is embodied in intergenerational rituals and practices and intangible forms of storytelling, song, and performance, as well as in natural elements and the physical memory forms of monuments and memorials.

Although there are distinct ways of thinking about or containing memory, the edges of containment are porous, enabling encounters between different expressions of memory. By encompassing a wide variety of ways of conceiving memory through different cultural and theoretical orientations and disciplinary backgrounds, it is hoped this conference can build a nexus of contained memories. Papers may originate from a variety of knowledge sources including (but not limited to): anthropology, archeology, art history/criticism, communication studies, cultural studies, customary knowledge, ethnography, film/video studies, fine/visual art, history, geography, landscape architecture, literary theory, material culture studies, memory studies, museum studies, musicology, neuroscience, neuropsychology, performance/theatre, philosophy, photography, psychoanalysis, psychology, rhetorical studies, sociology, and visual culture studies.

Possible Contained Memory sessions:
The Land / Earth / Landscape

— The expression of memory in personified land and landscape features; cultural erasure and renaissance
— Diaspora: the threat of memory loss following migration and the preservation of intergenerational memory expressed physically through photographs, diaries, and artifacts, and the intangible or ephemeral qualities of dance, theatre, and songs from “home”
— Sites of trauma
— Genealogy / whakapapa
Containing public memory

—Museums, records, archives, memorials, oral histories and mnemonic devices
—Transmission, preservation, mutability of memory
Rituals of memory

— Enacting / performing of memory “acts”
— Mimetic performance
— Narratives, mythology / folklore, and cosmologies
Site / Space / Time

— Bodily memory expressed through performance and ritual
— Interaction between the present and the past
Memory and the senses

— Phenomenology of the senses
— Music / sound
Autobiography

— Externalization of personal memory in art forms
The human mind

— The nature of memory and the definition of self; cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology
— Psychoanalysis; forgetting as a means of suppressing trauma or facilitating cultural destruction, annihilation, or oblivion
— Trauma, dementia, the mutability and fragility of memory
— The mind and digital memory

Because of the geographic location of the conference it is envisaged that some papers will respond to contained memory in Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific.

Conference Venue:
Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa, Tongarewa
55 Cable Street
Wellington 6011, New Zealand
+64 4 381 7000
www.tepapa.govt.nz

Abstracts due: 30 April 2010

The Disappeared - Novel on the Cambodian Genocide

From: The New York Times

January 10, 2010

Love in the Time of Genocide
By DALIA SOFER

THE DISAPPEARED

By Kim Echlin

235 pp. Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic. Paper, $14

Kim Echlin’s novel “The Disappeared” contains many elements that might doom a lesser book: the deaths of multiple characters (among them the narrator’s baby); an unabashedly effusive love story; a mix of first- and second-person narration; and, as a setting, the bones and ashes of the Cambodian genocide, which claimed approximately 1.7 million lives between 1975 and 1979. Yet the book manages to be spellbinding.

When the narrator, Anne Greves, first meets Serey, the Cambodian man who will remain the object of her desire and unflinching love for decades to come, she is a 16-year-old high school student in Montreal who frequents smoky blues clubs in the company of older girls. Serey, a math student five years her senior and the long-haired, exotic lead singer of a band called No Exit, catches her attention. The two talk, then kiss, and the rest, as they say, is history — though in this case it is truly history: a love story spanning decades and geographies, involving some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.

Absence is an initial magnet between the two. For Serey, who is in exile in Canada because the borders of Cambodia have closed, the absence is that of his family, from whom he has had no word for four years. Hanging on to their photograph and to the final, yellowed telegram from his father, Serey carries “a survivor’s pinprick of despair” in his eyes. That his band is called No Exit is no coincidence — Sartre’s play of that name, of course, supplied us with the saying “Hell is other people.” For Anne, the absence is that of her mother, who was crushed by a truck on an icy road when Anne was 2, and also the emotional absence of her kind but inattentive father, an engineer and maker of medical prosthetics, with a penchant for calm and order. “He believed that if he worked hard enough I could be shaped like a mechanical limb,” Anne says. But this turbulent teenager is anything but mechanical, and the sexual desire and eventual love she feels for Serey is raw and unfettered. “I never felt any forbiddenness of race or language or law,” she says. “Everything was animal sensation and music.”

The Cambodian border eventually opens and Serey leaves Montreal — and Anne — to find his family. Eleven years later, believing she has spotted him on television at a political rally, Anne buys a ticket to Phnom Penh and sets out to find him. And she does.

There is something of Marguerite Duras in these pages, something of the lust between the young Western girl and the Asian man that drove novels like “The Lover” and “The North China Lover.” But while Duras focuses mostly on desire, Echlin focuses on absolute love — physical desire coupled with the need to know ­everything about the beloved, to follow him even to the grave and beyond. For Anne, knowing Serey means trying to understand Cambodia, with all its dire secrets. As Serey says to Anne’s father during a brief, uncongenial meeting, “My country is my skin.”

Echlin captures the beauty and horror of Cambodia in equal measure. “The smell of the River Bassac,” Anne says, describing her first day in Phnom Penh, “meltwaters from distant mountains tangled into humid air and garlic and night jasmine and cooking oil and male sweat and female wetness. Corruption loves the darkness.” Of the killing fields, she writes: “Depressions in the earth overgrown with grass. Stupas of skulls and bones. The sky.” And later: “We watched two small boys catching frogs in the gullies of the fields, running past paddy and sugar palm and cloth and bone. The grass had done its work.” Most memorable is the lingering stench of death: “People startle at cigarette smoke and rotting garbage and gasoline,” Echlin writes, “surrogate odors of torture and dead bodies and bombs. A bad smell makes them jump.”

It is fitting, then, that when Anne presses Serey to reveal his nightmares, or to say what he has been doing in Phnom Penh, he deflects her with a compliment: “You smell so good.” Despite their love, these two are still foreign to each other. Borders persist. Boundaries can be stretched only so far. Anne, not of Cambodia, does not carry its smell. She is both savior and outsider, at once revered and reproached. The same can be said of the foreign aid workers, who speak of democracy but are impotent to change anything. “Foreigners come and bark but everything just keeps going the same way,” Serey says.

Worse still are the backpackers, who “drifted through Phnom Penh, explored sex and skulls and temples, talked about going to the beaches in the south for New Year’s.” Much has been said of the banality of evil. Here we are made to think of the banality of indifference.

But if Echlin makes note of the indifferent, her novel is anything but. Love and death pulsate through its pages, interlaced. When Anne speaks of her first kiss with Serey, she writes, “I remember . . . the touch of your hand against my skull.” Not her head — her skull. In Anne Greves’s world, everything is felt to the bone, even love. Her most tender memory of her father involves the study of anatomy, “his strong fingers tracing the lines of muscles and bones on my small foot.” In Phnom Penh, the traced bones become all too real: she meets a man whose job is to count the dead, opening mass graves to “release the bones.” And she befriends a woman called Grandmother Fertilizer, who during the Pol Pot era made fertilizer from human ashes.

It is amid such decay that Anne and Serey conceive their baby girl, who arrives into the world stillborn (this information is revealed early on) — another addition to the list of the disappeared: mothers, fathers, former leaders, all vanish into the “line between life and death.” Later, addressing Serey, Anne says, “I am afraid you will disappear and no one will remember your name.”

This novel is her memorial to him, and to the “nameless missing.” The second-­person narrative is apt here, as it is a very specific “you” — the “you” of song lyrics. In Montreal, Serey sang to Anne of love and longing. This novel is Anne’s song to him.

Briefly, near the book’s middle, Echlin loses this specific “you” and slips into the generic instead, directly asking the reader to imagine the horrors of Cambodia. This device is distracting, turning a mesmerizing ballad into a history lesson. On a few other occasions the prose loses some of its control, the list of atrocities sounding like a United Nations manifesto.

But these faults detract little from this exquisite novel. Early on, when a young Anne complains to her father about having no mother, he tells her, “Think of yourself as a solitaire, . . . the philosopher’s stone.” And like the philosopher’s stone, she creates alchemy. She permits what has been unsaid to be said, and what has been nameless to be named at last.

Dalia Sofer is the author of the novel “The Septembers of Shiraz.”