AUTOPSIES: THE AFTERLIFE OF DEAD OBJECTS

William Basinski, experimental composer from New York City, explores through sound the reverberations of memory and the nature of time. 

His work, ‘The Disintegration Loops’, paid serendipitous homage to the demise of physical tape when in 2005 he set about re-recording some analogue tape loops he had produced twenty years earlier. As the melodies were transferred from analogue to digital, he realised that the tape itself was disintegrating. As the iron oxide particles turned to dust, they dropped onto the tape machine, chipping away tiny sonorous sections from the sweeping pastoral soundscapes contained therein. By the end of each piece, the tape’s body had been stripped to a clear plastic skeleton. 

Basinski continued to record the sound of this decay to produce six meandering loops of haunting sound. Each loop begins brightly, warmly, before becoming a muddled melody, fading into fragmented distortion, static, or quiet. Some of the loops decline within fifteen minutes, whilst others fade for more than an hour. The loops play like accidental improvisation, irregular sound patterns created by the decline of matter over time. 

The story goes that he finished his re-recording in September 2001, at the time that the Twin Towers came down. From his Brooklyn rooftop, he watched the smoke of downtown Manhattan whilst listening to his played back loops, hearing and viewing the ruins of both sound and space. 

The demise of the tape loops marks the beginning of a new musical document, while the notes themselves, scattered and divided by the simultaneous processes of physical ageing and technological renewal, produce an ethereal haze in which personal memories might also be effaced. Silence is engraved where symphony once was. 

Though his ‘Disintegration Loops’ embody an analogue death, there remains something eternal about the sound of their heaving last breaths. 

 
Hannah Gregory
Autopsies Group Participant, London Consortium 2010-11

Read more on 'The Disintegration Loops' here.

These photographs, taken in August 2010 in Paris, show a row of buildings awaiting demolition. Until recently, these provided accommodation for housing, a hotel, shops and workshops. The empty shops and the almost entirely abandoned apartments will soon be bulldozed to make way for a large new structure.

The project to redevelop the buildings between numbers 1 and 9 rue Bichat and 43-45b rue du Faubourg du Temple in the 10th arrondissement of Paris has been planned for some time. The council of the 10th arrondissement approved the project on 9 May 2006.  

Presenting a technical report to the council, Sylvie Scherer described the buildings proposed for demolition as of 'mediocre quality'. Some of the buildings already had been condemned dangerous. Cracks were visible in floor boards and on ceilings and the wooden structure was judged fragile and full of woodworm. Inhabitants of the buildings also risked lead poisoning, according to the technical report.

The council proposed to demolish the existing buildings and build a new structure to house 80 subsidised flats, a creche, gardens and an underground garage. Space would also be allocated for the insulation of shops on rue Bichat. The council approved unanimously the project, which had projected cost of 21,228,000 euros in 2006. [1]

The development was due to begin in 2008 and be completed in 2010, but the process has taken somewhat longer than originally planned. Most of the tenants of the existing apartments and shops only moved out in July 2010, and demolition work had not commenced in September 2010.

The likely demolition of the rue Bichat buildings led a Paris history blog to place the area on its list of urban heritage in danger. The blog believes the Bichat buildings represent an important part of nineteenth-century working class history, and that the building at 45 rue du Faubourg du Temple dates from the eighteenth century.

Judging by the recent exodus of tenants from the buildings, it seems the preservationists' pleas to preserve the area have fallen on deaf ears. In my view, the real problem is not the demolition of the crumbling buildings but the fact local businesses have been forced to move out of the area. The restaurants and cafes in rue Bichat were bustling centres of the community, and the little shops provided specialist services to locals. The artisanal shops offered knowledge to their customers that is almost impossible to find in large chain stores. At a time when ironmongers, electrical bazars and shoe repairers are vanishing from our streets, it seems unlikely that any of these local businesses will return to the area, even if new premises are provided for them several years down the line in the redevelopment.
 
Jacob Paskins


[1] Mairie du 10e arrondissement, Compte rendu du conseil d'arrondissement en date du 9 mai 2006, pp. 16-18.

Image above: Rover 100 (1960)

Modernity has brought with it cars which can reasonably be expected to start and stop upon demand and can be owned and operated by the non-mechanically minded. One of the developments which made this possible was the widespread introduction in the 1970s of electronic ignition which now provides the ‘spark’ to internal combustion engines in all modern cars. Prior to this, engines were fired by a ‘distributor’, which was the means of routing high-voltage from the ignition to the sparking-plugs in the right firing order.

At the heart of the distributor is the ‘dead-object’ which has focused my attention this month: the Lucas 45D Distributor Rotor Arm [see image below]. It is a small cylindrical moulding about the size of a wine-cork and made of plastic and brass. During the 1960s, a rotor arm could be obtained new for about 5 shillings (25 pence). They are now available from specialist dealers to owners of old cars for £5 to £10. Although technically obsolescent, this tiny component is essential to keep an old car running.

The manufacturer of the rotor arm was the Lucas Electrical Company, founded by Joseph Lucas in Birmingham in 1872, the same year that the petrol engine was first patented and a decade or more before the introduction of the first motor-car. In spite of its dominant market-share for over a century in electrical components for motor vehicles, the Lucas company had a poor reputation for the reliability of their light bulbs and other electrical car accessories. For this reason, the company was known among British motorists as ‘The Prince of Darkness’ and spawned a host of rueful jokes among customers about the dependability of their products. (Sample: ‘Lucas, the inventor of the intermittent windscreen wiper’).

‘My’ dead-object (the Lucas 45D rotor arm) qualified incontrovertibly as deceased on a recent visit to France in my 1960 Rover 100. It failed on a country road not far from Alençon as dusk was falling one Sunday evening last month. In Lucas tradition, the rotor arm gave no hint of impending failure. It just stopped sending current to the sparking-plugs and the engine died instantly. Trying to trace the fault was vexing and unproductive as night fell and dinner in Bayeux looked increasingly unlikely. It is now that the Deus ex machina intervenes. A French registered Jaguar E-Type Coupé c. 1964 pulled up beside our stricken Rover. The owner transpired to be British and, within minutes, had not only diagnosed the fault but produced from his tool-kit a spare 1960s Lucas 45D rotor arm which was fitted and fired the engine into life immediately. As I write this, it still seems to me to be a very improbable story that a fifty-year old obsolete British electrical component should find its way to a roadside in rural France on a Sunday evening at the precise moment that it was needed.

All of this set me thinking about the role played by Jaguar E-Types in films. They are invariably driven by heroes who save situations or put wrongs to right. Cool operators including Sean Connery in Thunderball (1965) and Michael Caine in The Italian Job (1969) drive E-Types. The car makes an appearance in The Big Sleep (1978), The Odessa File (1974) as well as featuring in contemporary episodes of The Saint and The Avengers TV series. An E-type Jaguar is also one of the stars of Just Jaecken’s Emmanuelle (1974). [Source: Internet Movie Cars Database]

Rover 100 cars play a very different role, often as background vehicles in street-scenes to evoke the 1960s period, as in Quadrophenia (1979) where ‘Sting’, who plays a bell-boy at a Brighton hotel, unloads luggage from a Rover 100 driven by a dapper hotel guest [see IMCDb]. The Rover represents professional, middle-class, well-heeled middle Britain in the 1960s [see Rover P4 videos] and was driven typically by doctors, solicitors and bank managers [1]  It epitomised a set of values and a way of life which may be said to have disappeared in the years following the events of May 1968 in Paris and their international repercussions. Film appearances include The League of Gentlemen (1959) and The Spy who came in from the Cold (1965) as well as providing the authentic period back-drop for recent films (An Education, 2009) and for the TV series Agatha Christie’s Marple.

So there they were by the side of a French country road. The E-Type Jaguar driven by the hero who solved all our problems and vanished into the night, and the Rover 100, with its stately image and erratic British electrics. And deep in the heart of the broken-down Rover was a dead-object: a Lucas 45D rotor arm manufactured in Birmingham England 50 years ago by ‘The Prince of Darkness’.


Simon Rothon

Magnificent Maps is an exhibition of old and rare maps, dating from the 1400s to the present day. The exhibition is organised in a series of spaces, each representing different rooms in which maps would have been originally viewed. We journey through a palace’s gallery, audience chamber, bedchamber and cabinet, a secretary of state’s room, a merchant’s house, and a schoolroom. Each of these map-rooms contains a range of different maps, with differing geography, scales, perspectives, and colours which transport viewers around the world as they trace their fingers across the glass frames. It is interesting that so many of the map-rooms are domestic; maps too can be domestic objects, like so many of the ‘dead objects’ the autopsies group is researching.
 
Thinking about the status of these old maps as dead objects provokes many questions. Given that the depiction of the world that they present is now regarded as incorrect, what use can they now have? They are not accurate representations of the world, and not useful in the way that a modern map is, so are ‘out of use’ in a way resembling our other dead objects. But the maps are so beautiful and intricate that they are still in use today as art objects (as well as windows onto the worlds that created them). Indeed, the exhibition explains that in their original form, many of the maps on display were art objects, filling galleries and stored in curio cabinets.[1] So the old maps are dead objects in one sense, but remain in use in another.
 
My favourite maps in the exhibition included one of the world’s smallest maps, engraved on a tiny German coin from 1773, and the world’s largest atlas (1.75 x 2.31m when open – taller than me!) which was made for Charles II in 1660. It’s still in an amazing condition. Another favourite was a 1551 map of Rome by Leonardo Bufalini which depicts ancient and contemporary Rome together on the same map, using different shadings to demonstrate the change in the city over time. So the map represents three dimensions, and movement in space and time. The Frau Mauro World Map, originating from around 1450, which forms the main advertising image for the exhibition[2], is distinctive in its complete lack of correspondence with our understanding of the shape of the continents today. The continents blur together unrecognisably, and are ‘upside down’ compared to usual maps made in the Northern hemisphere. The Garden of Eden appears in a separate small globe in the lower right corner of the sheet, unusual for the time, as Eden normally featured within the world itself. The exhibition’s accompanying book explains that ‘Frau Mauro could find no evidence for the existence of the Garden of Eden on Earth, and so he daringly places it just outside the world outline.’[3] 

These continuing different perspectives and representations of the world make the exhibition a transportive and dislocating visit. Unfailingly, the visitors (myself included) would approach each map, try to make sense of it and its relationship to modern day maps, and then begin pouring over it identifying places we recognised and retracing journeys with our fingers. The fun in this seemed to come from precisely the fact that the maps represented the world in a very different shape than we understand today.  It is interesting to think about the exhibition’s map-rooms in the context of film theorist Giuliana Bruno’s work. Bruno writes that ‘[m]aps on a wall transform the wall itself, turning it into a permeable surface that can be entered in different ways and travelled through.’ [4]  Map-rooms enabled their original inhabitants to journey through them, travelling the world from their homes. Today, the exhibition’s recreated map-rooms are filled with tourists who have travelled across the world to London, only to find themselves transported again by the maps, tracing their journeys on them, and pointing out home.

Stephanie Fuller


References

1. Peter Barber and Tom Harper, Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art (London: The British Library, 2010), p. 9
2. The British Library exhibition held a copy, dating from 1804, of this map by William Frazer
3. Magnificent Maps, p. 52
4. Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (New York: Verso, 2002), p. 275
 
Photo: British Library Magnificent Maps promotional material.

School of Advanced Study
‘Memory, Empire and Technology’ Summer School
29 June – 3 July 2010

The summer school programme was designed to explore the three themes of memory, empire and technology through five days of seminars and events that encompassed film, archives, photography, music and history.

The first seminar, led by Dr Akane Kawakami, investigated the roles of the aeroplane and the telephone in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The discussion focussed on the reception of these technologies in nineteenth century society; in particular, the group became fascinated by the assimilation of these objects into the canon of the everyday through the language associated with them. Symbolic language threatens the new and exotic by awarding it a historic pedigree that makes even the most exciting of technologies seem banal. The technological wonder that was the aeroplane did not inspire the same excitement when it became merely a ‘flying ship.’ Human experience, as well as language, has irrevocably changed the connection we have with certain technologies, and with one another. The telephone disembodies the human voice, and forces us to recognise death every time we take a call. The plane, afforded a prominent role in the conflicts of both twentieth and twenty-first centuries, has borne a breakdown in its semiotic system. Does a plane mean death, or merely a holiday? This uncertainty plagues our relationship with all technologies and our own perceptions and memories. Do we doubt ourselves, or the instruments that enable us to remember?

It is interesting that our talk of technology should always bring us back to death. Found-footage filmmaker Yervant Gianikian suggests that silver nitrate film smells like a rotting corpse: while film preserves the light and shade of the living, providing an afterlife for countless forgotten objects, it is itself in a constant state of decomposition. Robert Lumley’s session on found-footage filmmaking addressed the methodologies and practices of Gianikian and his partner Angels Ricci Lucchi, and described the ways that the filmmakers ‘recycled’ footage to provide a shared public memory. One of the problems they faced, especially when working with film from the early 1900s, was its fragile state and tendency to disintegrate – a sad and rather beautiful reminder that film, too, can lose its memory (described by the filmmakers as a ‘state of chemical amnesia’). I wonder whose memory the film projects before us? In the Hills there is Peace, for example, reveals the cinematography of some soldier in the Dolomite Mountains, dead and long buried, perhaps beneath the snow. Are the flickering ghosts of his comrades his memories? The imprint of the film’s tarnished memory? Or the public memory of the filmmakers and those who view ‘their’ film? Throughout the seminar I struggled with the notion that the indexicality of these films authenticated them, or made them real as objects. The reframing, reediting and tinting of the original films highlighted the representative, unreal quality of the films and the staged process of their projection. Perhaps the question I would really like to ask is ‘who’s film is it, anyway?’

A workshop organised by Junko Theresa Mikuriya gave us the chance to create and develop our own images on film (or in this case, photographic paper). Working from a dark room in Bethnal Green, we were instructed to make our own pin-hole cameras, use them to capture images, and finally develop them. My images – all three were of bikes locked-up next to the road – enunciated the passing of light through, around and between my chosen objects. In negative form, these images preserve moments in time that are solidly rendered in light and yet remain utterly intangible.

A more tangible and physical experience came for me in what was the highlight of the week: a Routemaster bus tour around London. Led by the driver and conductor (and assisted by Prof. Derek Keene) the tour began in Bethnal Green and ended in Archway, taking in Shoreditch, Liverpool Street, Monument, London bridge, Tower bridge, Aldgate, Mile End, Stratford, Walthamstow and Tottenham Hale along the way. My first reaction on boarding the bus was to exclaim ‘Look at the wind-down windows!’ (a reaction repeated by others). The Routemaster bus, we were told, was decommissioned five years ago, with the last one built in 1968. The driver described the buses as ‘very popular objects’ – I immediately thought back to our first Autopsies meetings and furiously wondered ‘did we say a bus could be an object?’ Constructed around an aircraft fuselage, the bus was lighter than most subsequent designs and remained an iconic signifier of London, along with phone boxes and hackney cabs.

All comfortable in our seats, we were issued with tickets by the conductor. He used a Gibson ticket machine with a numeric fare wheel (this was switched to an alphabetic fare wheel in the eighties). In his bag, the conductor would carry a cardboard or Bakelite clipboard, with his fare charts on side and timetable on the other. He would also carry a single key to fit all the locks on the bus.

The tour was designed to show to us the changing topography of London, from its Roman beginnings to the contemporary addition of the Olympic Park at Stratford. The building work and regeneration taking place throughout the city was overwhelming, with offices, homes and railways under construction at every turn of the corner. However, many desolate and derelict spaces still existed. Indeterminate spaces, with no use, filled the gaps between the new and the already-established. What, asked our bus driver, would become of the fringe sites around the Olympic Park and the City? What kind of cultural assimilation, evidenced in the shop fronts along the more suburban roads leading out toward Essex, would take place in these dead spaces?

The bus continued to wind its way through the London traffic and densely populated streets. As other bus drivers beeped their horns in appreciation, it was all anyone could do but smile at the excited tourists and nostalgic Londoners who waved as the Routemaster, obsolete technology of yesterday, drove by once more.

Rebecca Harrison

As I browsed through images of typewriters on the internet, I became aware of a trend in typewriter autopsying that gave new life to the sum of the machine’s parts. Typewriter keys are turned into fashion accessories: bracelets, earrings, necklaces are all available to make or buy. I wonder if anyone has typewriter buttons? Do people make typewriter-key jewellery as mementoes of their much-loved, but now dead, machines? If this is the case, our nostalgia for obsolete technologies has acquired a distinctly Victorian taste. Is it akin to keeping a lock of the departed’s hair around one’s neck? We must surely mourn the hundreds of typewriters whose ‘shift’ keys appear in the image above, like teeth scattered in an unmarked grave.

The image ‘Shift Keys’ was taken by Amy K. Buthod, of the University of Oklahoma, at Freemont flea market in Seattle. The Autopsies Group would like to thank Amy for the use of her image (both on our website and business cards).


Rebecca Harrison

Every summer 'Il Cinema Ritrovato' film festival in Bologna brings together films recovered from the archives of Europe and beyond and presents an audience of film scholars, archivists, enthusiasts, and local Bolognesi a programme of some of the most surprising, strange and exciting films made since the inception of cinema. Why is this festival so important? Exactly because it recovers films thought too damaged, lost or too obscure to be of interest and screens them in the best possible condition.

Moving between the festival's three cinemas as well as the giant screen erected in the Piazza Maggiore for evening screenings, I sampled the festival's different programmes seeing John Ford's silent films, Stanley Donen's musicals, restored colour films, the adventurous women of silent
cinema, and a programme of films from the 1910s that spanned travel films, science films and the grand dramatic displays of Alberto Capellani's Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Miserables.

As is always the way with film festivals, I couldn't see it all, missing as many films as I saw. My discoveries, however, made me forget the things I couldn't see. Highlights included John Ford's Three Bad Men (1926) screened in Bologna's Piazza Maggiore to a new score composed by Timothy
Brock and performed by the Orchestra del Teatro Communale di Bologna. Ford's tale of the Dakota land rush of 1877 was revitalised by a score that had me jumping out of my chair with excitement in the film's most climactic scenes, while its stunning cinematography inspired a new love affair with the western that was only compounded by the following day's restored cinerama screening of Delmer Daves' Jubal (1956), starring a roll call of great leading men, Glenn Ford, Rod Steiger, Ernest Borgnine and Charles Bronson. The first time I had ever seen a film in all its cinerama glory, I was quite dumbfounded by the wide expanses of the American West spread before me. Finally, one of the greatest pleasures of the festival was the programme of Stanley Donen musicals, and particularly Its Always Fair Weather (1955) featuring Gene Kelly tap dancing in roller skates. A sentimental plot about the reunion of three war buddies ten years after they are demobilised is of little consequence in a film that has Gene Kelly, Dan Daily, Michael Kidd, and Cyd Charisse dancing their way through the bars, boxing rings, and streets of New York.

As important as a festival like 'Il Cinema Ritrovato' is for the scholarly appreciation and study of films from the world's archives, for me at least, it is the festival's ability to reignite some of the pure joys of cinema-going that really sets it apart from other festivals. Live scores, cinerama, and the joy of discovery make it not just another week sat inside dark theatres, when others would be enyoying the Italian sunshine, but a week that reminds you of the excitement of the cinematic experience.

Karolina Kendall-Bush

Autopsies group member Jann Matlock talks about motels in film noir and B-movie thrillers in a special episode of Studio 360 on the 50th anniversary of Psycho, broadcast on Public Radio across America this weekend. Listen to her interview here, and the full programme on the Studio 360 website.

Image above: still frame from motel sequence in Alice in the Cities (dir. Wim Wenders, 1974).
Image below: motel in Without Warning (dir. Arnold Leven, 1952).