The Cinema of Hal Hartley by Steven Rybin

Author:Steven Rybin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, PER004020, Performing Arts/Film & Video/Guides & Reviews
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

Oh God, could she bear it, this past which was gone down the abyss? Could she bear, that it had ever been!…There was a shadowy unreal Ursula, a whole shadow-play of an unreal life…. What was this decree that she should ‘remember’! Why not a bath of pure oblivion, a new birth, without any recollections or blemish of a past life. (1971: 399)

Yet this desire for a new life is not easily come by as Ursula, tormented by her memory of home, illustrates. And Sofia shows only too well that it takes no small amount of effort to give up one’s hurtful memories of the past. But give them up she does. It is forgetting, not forgiveness, which leads to redemption in Amateur, for ‘a living thing can be healthy, strong and fruitful only when bounded by a horizon’ (Nietzsche 1999: 63). Thomas’s ‘eventually’ marks this horizon, and it is a horizon whose ‘fundamental mood’ – prior to his death – is cheerfulness, of confidence in the future even – perhaps especially – when that future is uncertain.

On the Verge

In The Forgetting (2003), David Shenk records a touching anecdote about Ralph Waldo Emerson who – aged seventy-six and suffering from severe memory loss as a result of advancing dementia – gave the same paper on ‘Memory’ he first presented twenty-two years prior. Shenk notes that Emerson’s choice of material was sharply ironic: in the context of his own failing memory, Emerson spoke the following words on his subject:

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