Since the spring, I’ve been thinking a lot about fragmentation and the representation of memory and loss in literature and film. To that end, I’m interested in pairing together the film Aftersun with the book Sorting Facts by Susan Howe. Aftersun follows Sophie as she remembers the last vacation she took with her father before he died. The film is framed through Sophie’s perspective, and I am especially interested in the use of the camera within the film and how the narrative is mediated through these fragments of film and photography as Sophie deals with her grief. Sorting Facts, through prose poetry, approaches memory through mediation, using the metaphor of film and photography to reflect on her husband's death and her grief.
I feel like the most useful framework for me is postmodernism, examining the limits of representation and linearity through these texts. Some theorists would include Foucault and Derrida for their foundational theories in postmodernism. Additionally, I think it would be helpful to tie in other theories like Walter Benjamin’s work on film and representation and Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy. If I move forward with this idea, I’d also want to explore theories on grief and loss in film and literature, which I am not super familiar with.
This idea is still in its beginning stages, and I of course have a lot of questions (not all of them need to be answered definitively). How do Aftersun and Sorting Facts tie together and contrast in their themes and the way they represent memory? What role does the camera play in both texts? Is it restrictive or illuminating to the reader/viewer? In both texts, is revisiting loss and memory a good thing? How do the subjects of the text receive closure, if at all? To what extent is the camera limited in its representation, and how much of it is distorted? How does the dual mediation of the camera as both Sophie’s camera in the film and the actual camera we view the film through affect the narrative? How do the texts play with multiplicity and fragmentation? Lots to think about!