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Popular Culture Review
those ways of seeing
those piled-up preconceptions, that spiritual
dust and grime with which my eyes have covered it, is able to present it in
all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love (15).
With reference to the idea of preservation in which this assertion is
lodged, one might argue that Bazin mobilizes the concept of celluloid
memory as a superior, and more ethical alternative to subjective memory,
steeped as the latter is in the cosmetic modifications of our individual
recollections. For a vivid enactment of the principle at the core of Bazin’s
commemorative theory, consider this lengthy excerpt from Don DeLillo’s
Americana (1971):
I took the camera from my lap, raised it to my eye, leaned out the
window a bit, and trained it on the ladies as if I were shooting. One of
them saw me and immediately nudged her companion but without taking
her eyes off the camera. They waved. One by one the others reacted.
They all smiled and waved. They seemed supremely happy. Maybe they
sensed that they were waving at themselves, waving in the hope that
someday if evidence is demanded of their passage through time, demanded
by their own doubts, a moment might be recalled when they stood in a
dazzhng plaza in the sun and were registered on the transparent plastic
ribbon; and thirty years away, on that day when proof is needed, it could
be hoped that their film is being projected on a screen somewhere, and
there they stand, verified, in chemical reincarnation, waving at their own
old age, smiling their reassurance to the decades, a race of eternal pilgrims
in a marketplace in the dusty sunlight, seven arms extended in a fabulous
salute and to the forgetfulness of being. What better proof (if proof is
ever needed) that they have truly been ahve? Their happiness, I think,
was made of this, the anticipation of incontestable evidence, and had
nothing to do with the present moment, which would pass with all the
others into whatever is the opposite of eternity” (254).
The characters in DeLillo’s novel, as the narrator makes clear, seem to derive
their sense of rapture from their (mistaken) behef that they are being captured on
film or, to use Laura Mulvey’s phrase, “fossilized on celluloid” (24). If the
photographic image can be said to have a substance, a body, it is precisely this
engraving of fossiliferous signs which verify memory in “chemical reincarnation.”
Though Bazin’s thesis has always invited opposition, it has become particularly
shaky in the current chmate where, as Matthews contends, “the digitization of the
image threatens to cut the umbihcal cord between photograph and referent on which