Lewis analyzes the idea of modernity and reflects on the question if modernity is our past.

Analyzing At the Foot of the Flatiron (1903, American Mutoscope and Biograph Co.) movie, Lewis asks why "many, if not most of the people in their short passage through the camera's frame, look at the camera, and some times more than once" (Lewis, 2006, p.113), and connects it to "the forming of a new subjectivity in relationship to this 'new' technology of the moving image" (Ibid.) This comment can be connected with (though, not fully, because of the difference in time and relation to the camera) to State Funeral (Loznitsa, 2019) documentary movie, constructed out of archival 1953 footage of Joseph Stalin's funeral. The documentary features ordinary people, who came to Stalin's coffin or monuments (in different cities), to commemorate, but their reactions are so broad, including their reactions to the camera - from discontent to freezing to awkward laugh or enhancing of the crying. This is an interesting material to observe and analyze different people's reactions to the camera, taking into account that 1953 is just in the middle between 1903, when people did not know at all how to react to the camera, whether to look at it or not, and recent times, when people are so used to cameras, that, as Lewis states either ignore them or use pre-developed cultural strategies to interact with them.

Lewis also states that the idea that it's possible "with film and video [to] recall a past moment and have it stand in for a 'real' collective memory" is false. How can this idea refer to State Funeral, and moreover, to the difference between that film and the film Great Mourning (1953), made from the same corpus of archival footage, though using slightly different parts of it to create/keep an iconic view on Stalin from 1953, in contrast to more alive, ridiculous and honest look of Loznitsa. Which of these films we can refer to as an example of "collective memory"? Does it matter which one is more popular and seen by the greater amount of people? Does the nationality and citizenship of these people matter, knowing that Loznitsa's film had issues with film distribution in Russia, and Great Mourning was shown by federal tv-channels? Can we compose "collective memory" of that event only via comparing these two films, or it can be done from each one separately, or it can be done only from the whole corpus of texts (of different mediums) about it, or the "collective memory" would be different for each social group?

So, this essay touches the broad question of what is modernity, and how can it be in the past, together with general questions about cultural direction of certain eras towards the future or the past.

#history #architecture #modernism #movie #memory #modernity