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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Spatial Practices: Some Thoughts on Cinema, Memory and Its Future
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2004-10-01
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2004-10-01
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Cinéma & Cie
Annette Kuhn
2004/10/01
Lancaster University
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Spatial Practices: Some Thoughts on Cinema, Memory and Its Future
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SPATIAL PRACTICES: SOME THOUGHTS ON CINEMA, MEMORY
AND ITS FUTURE *
Annette Kuhn, Lancaster University




  In a review of some of the findings of an ethno-historical study of 1930s cinema cul-
ture that I have been working on over a period of some years, a chapter on “the scenes
of cinema memory” concludes with the following remarks:

  For [the 1930s] generation, going to the pictures was the occasion for the very earliest ven-
  tures into the world beyond the home. Close to home, almost an extension of home, and yet
  not home, “the pictures” is remembered as both daring and safe. Referencing Freud, Michel
  de Certeau suggests that the back and forth (fort/da) movement and the “being there”
  (Dasein) which characterise spatial practices re-enact the child’s separation from the moth-
  er. To translate this conceit to cinema memory, it might be argued that, for the 1930s gener-
  ation, cinema constitutes a transitional object.1

  How was this discovery arrived at? Why is it important? And what might it suggest
about the peculiarities of cinema memory and about the future of cinema memory,
now that cinema – certainly in the form the 1930s generation knew it – is dead?

  First of all, it is about how place and space figure in certain kinds of memory-stories,
and about how memory works through the body, or is embodied. In his phenomeno-
logical study of remembering, Edward Casey says that place is important in remember-
ing because “it serves to situate one’s memorial life”2 in several possible ways:

  - places can act as containers of memory
  - places can be mises-en-scène for remembered events
  - memory itself is like a place that we revisit.

  Therefore memory both is a topography and has a topography. Note that I am talking
about place and not (the more abstract) space. The idea of place implies attachment,
belonging – or its absence. Attachment in turn implies a bodily relationship, or even a
merging of boundaries, between body and place.
  It surprised me to find how insistent place was in the memories of 1930s cinemago-
ers. There is plenty of variation in how place is evoked, and in how metaphors of place
organise people’s memory talk.3 But emerging from all the variation is an overall sense,
above all in accounts of childhood cinemagoing, of a navigation of mental topographies
of familiar remembered territory. My contention is that this “topographical memory
talk” offers clues to the ways in which cinema memory works as a distinctive form of
cultural memory. One key feature is the prevalence of the discursive “walking tour” in

­18                                                                 CINEMA & Cie, no. 5, Fall 2004
                          SPATIAL PRACTICES: SOME THOUGHTS ON CINEMA, MEMORY AND ITS FUTURE

informants’ early cinemagoing memories: a retelling of journeys to the pictures, always
made on foot, often with very precise details of street names and landmarks. This is an
embodied and kinetic memory – a reliving of the experience of moving through space,
or rather through a very particular and familiar set of places.

  There are five aspects of this kind of memory talk that make it distinctive:

  - the starting place for the memory-journey is usually the family house, the home;
  - the journey is highly goal-directed, its destination being the neighbourhood picture
    house;
  - there is a sense that the same journey is/was frequently and repeatedly made, com-
    bined with
  - a sense of its ordinariness, everydayness;
  - an implicit return home is part of the journey.

   Underlying this sense of repeated movement away from home and back again, and of
the quotidianness of the journey’s topography, is a sense of fort/da, a trying out of sepa-
ration in a psychical, emotional and physical space of belonging, security.4 This is why
I contend that in 1930s cinemagoers’ place-memories, cinema figures as an extension of
home.
   It is significant, I think, that these memories are always of a particular sort of cinema –
the neighbourhood picture house, invariably remembered as modest and accessible
(“one on every street corner,” as a number of informants put it). This is another aspect of
their home-like quality (I shall return to the question of different types of cinema below).
It is worth noting, however, that memories of going to the pictures are more pervasive
and lengthier in the telling than are memories of being at the pictures. Going-to and
being-at memories also differ markedly in both content and timbre. I shall return to this
point as well.
   When I wrote that cinema constitutes a transitional object for the 1930s generation,
this was not a particularly deep thought, nor a very considered conclusion. But I have
since taken the opportunity look at some discussions of transitional objects and popu-
lar culture which suggest that the idea might be worth exploring in greater depth.
Transitional objects (and, more broadly, transitional phenomena) is a concept devel-
oped by D.W. Winnicott, the foremost representative of the British Independent tradi-
tion of object-relations theory in psychoanalysis.
   Transitional objects are the ubiquitous first possessions of infants and young chil-
dren (a blanket, a teddy, etc) that belong at once to the child and to the outside world,
occupying an intermediate position between fantasy and reality, the place of imagina-
tion. Winnicott famously said: “No human being is free from the strain of relating outer
and inner reality,”5 and transitional objects and transitional phenomena help negotiate
that relationship. They inhabit what Winnicott called an “intermediate zone” between
inner psychical reality and the external world, keeping the two separate but related.
Importantly, they are precisely material objects, things: they have a physical existence
but are pressed into the service of inner reality. They are at once part of the subject and
not the subject.
   Winnicott uses the term “transitional space” to refer to this third area, this interme-
diate zone or space inhabited by transitional phenomena: his spatial metaphors are, I

                                                                                           ­19
ANNETTE KUHN

think, significant. His earliest writings on transitional objects link them wholly to
childhood and developmental issues, in particular with the activity of play, whose
defining characteristics he regards as:

  -   preoccupation, near-withdrawal
  -   activity is “outside the individual but not the external world”
  -   objects/phenomena are drawn from the external world and pressed to an inner
      reality agenda.

  It is clear from some of Winnicott’s later writings, however, that he thinks transitional
phenomena have a structural aspect as well: in particular, he explores the relationship
between transitional phenomena and how adults experience and relate to culture. For
present purposes, I am interested in both developmental and structural aspects.

  -   Developmental. Winnicott links transitional objects and associated behaviours in
      infants and young children with processes of separation. For Winnicott, this
      means separation from the mother, but I would broaden this out to include sepa-
      ration from a mother-associated place-object, the home. In either case, this is part
      of a process of development of self in distinction from the outside world, and
      serves as a bridge between the familiar and the unfamiliar, thus facilitating the
      child’s acceptance of the new.
  -   Structural. The dynamic equilibrium of inner and outer reality is not confined to
      the transitional objects of childhood, but continues in adult life. We continue re-
      enacting play and other transitional processes throughout life in relation with our
      “adult” transitional phenomena. These phenomena are identified by Winnicott as
      culture in general (“There is a direct development from transitional phenomena to
      playing […] to cultural experiences”), and art and religion in particular. Here the
      tension lies between living in the everyday, inhabiting ordinary consciousness,
      and leaving it; and a key issue is how we manage the transition between the two.
      Christopher Bollas has talked about the experience of transitional phenomena in
      adult life in terms (borrowed from Bruce Berenson via Marion Milner) of the aes-
      thetic moment: “An occasion when time becomes space for the subject. We are
      stopped, held in reverie, to be released, eventually back into time proper.”6 Others
      refer to “the ebb and flow of losing and refinding oneself personally and endlessly
      in space-time.”7

  As I have noted, place-memory or topographical memory is pervasive in 1930s cin-
emagoers’ talk. An embodied form of memory discourse, place-memory re-enacts sepa-
ration and the interaction of inner and outer worlds in terms of the remembered expe-
rience of bodily movement through space and to and from particular places – in this
instance home and the picture house. It is in this sense that the cinema building, the
place, functions as a transitional object in the Winnicottian sense.
  But what happens inside the cinema? The remembered walk to this place is a process
of enacting and of restating belonging to a place-object that is both outside home and
like home: this is the locality, the neighbourhood. What happens inside the cinema is
rather different: it is the virtual experiencing of other, unfamiliar places. There are in
fact two levels involved in the experience/memory of being inside the cinema: being in

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                           SPATIAL PRACTICES: SOME THOUGHTS ON CINEMA, MEMORY AND ITS FUTURE

the cinema building, the auditorium; and “being in” the world on the screen.
Significantly, informants’ memories of this aspect of “going to the pictures” are rela-
tively few in number. They are also either (a) unanchored in space and/or time (memo-
ries of isolated images or scenes from films, for example; usually frightening or funny
ones); or (b) often rueful stories about the speaker’s failure to understand or properly
negotiate the difference between ordinary space and time and space and time in the cin-
ema (for example, stories of sitting through several performances, losing track of time
and getting into trouble with worried parents). Or else they might be (c) narratives
about the transition from the everyday world to the world of the cinema (repeatedly
expressed in terms of being transported to ‘another world’) and crucially back again.
  In all these stories, the experience of being in the cinema is remembered first of all as
being outside ordinary time and space:

  Standing in the street queuing in pleasant anticipation of what the next couple of hours had
  to offer, as the lights dimmed and the screen lit up away we went transported into a world of
  fantasy.8

  And also as involving an involuntary, passive journey – informants repeatedly talk
about being “transported” or “carried away:”

  It’s like being in another world… And then when I come out, I’m a bit, you know, kind of ooh!
  A bit, eh, carried away. And, eh, then I come down to earth eventually.9

  A handful of memories of this kind even evoke the epiphanic quality that marks the
aesthetic moment:

  Oh it was great! Cause the life, the cinema life then it was everything!10

  I indicated above that two distinct types of picture house emerge in 1930s cinemago-
ers’ memories, and noted that the neighbourhood or street corner picture house is asso-
ciated particularly with place-memory and with negotiation of home/outside world
issues. The other sort of cinema is remembered as a place that, in its own right, is just as
separate from the everyday as the world inside the cinema. This type of cinema embod-
ies, in memory, some or all of the following qualities:

  a) it is one of the new 1930s supercinemas, or “dream palaces;”
  b) it is reached not on foot but by other means of transport, and is beyond the neigh-
      bourhood – in other towns, perhaps, or in the city centre;
  c) the decor and general ambience of the place is exotic and other-worldly;
  d) it is associated with memories of courtship or romance – that is, with adolescence
      and adulthood as opposed to childhood.
  This, I believe, could have some bearing on how we might speculate about the future
of cinema memory – by which I mean how (and indeed if) cinema might figure today
in transitional processes, in negotiations of inner and outer realities, and therefore how
today’s cinemagoers and consumers of films might remember these things in years to
come.


                                                                                              ­21
ANNETTE KUHN

  Questions to consider in this content include:

  - Does cinema, and do films, figure at all today as transitional phenomena? If so, how?
  - How does this involve issues of place and/or space?
  - How does this involve the body?

  In approaching these questions, we clearly need to take into account the impact of
changes in how films and cinema are delivered to the consumer, and how and where
these are consumed and used. But it goes beyond this, I believe. Transitional processes
are not transhistorical: reality perception and experience of the outer-inner relation-
ship are historically and culturally variable. For people in the west, for example, the
contemporary emphasis on shifting boundaries (of both inner and outer worlds) as
opposed to stable structures should perhaps be borne in mind. It is also worth stating
that transitional phenomena, particularly but not exclusively as experienced or
remembered in adulthood, can have a collective dimension and so become part of a gen-
erational memory bank.
  To conclude, then: here are some features of present-day cinema that might be rele-
vant to a discussion about the future of cinema memory:

      1. There are far fewer cinema buildings than there were in the 1930s, in real terms
      admission is far more expensive, and the frequency of cinema attendance per per-
      son is much lower now than it was in the 1930s.
      2. Films are widely consumed in venues other than cinemas, for example:

      Roger Silverstone has written about television texts and of the television set itself
      as transitional objects;11
      video and DVD permit repeated viewings of films, allowing the viewer to pause,
      skim, and so on: the film text itself thus becomes a different sort of object – one of
      mastery, perhaps, rather than of subjection.

      3. Today many forms of entertainment are available, many of them new: for the
      1930s generation, cinema was the “main attraction;” now it is one among many
      and is not usually regarded as cutting edge in the way it was in the 1930s.
      4. New modes of delivery of films and new technologies for their delivery make
      possible a range of different bodily relationships with the physical or the material
      means of consuming film texts. To the extent that these are potentially more tac-
      tile, more immediate, the relationship between films and viewers perhaps
      becomes more like that between toys and their users.
      5. The consumption of films and cinema today involves distinctive modes of
      sociability and relationships to places. For example, home consumption and the
      attendant organisation of domestic space has implications for the negotiation of
      separation issues (bedroom culture, etc.). On the other hand, going out to see a
      film in a cinema today is perhaps more like 1930s cinemagoers’ relationship to cin-
      emas in the second category – those remembered as other, placeless or distant, out-
      side the everyday.



­22
                             SPATIAL PRACTICES: SOME THOUGHTS ON CINEMA, MEMORY AND ITS FUTURE

* This essay is based on a talk given at Colloquium for Screen Studies, “Cinema - Dead or
   Alive?,” Senate House, University of London (February 14, 2003).
1 Annette Kuhn, An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002),
   p. 36. The de Certeau reference is from: Michel De Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien. 1. Arts
   de faire (Paris: Union Générale d’Edition, 1980); trans. The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley:
   University of California Press, 1984).
2 Edward Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
   University Press, 1987), pp. 183-184. Emphasis in original.
3 For details, see A. Kuhn, op. cit., Chapter 2.
4 Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, in Pelican Freud Library, Vol. 11
   (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984); see also Anni Bergman, “From Mother to the World
   Outside: The Use of Space During the Separation-individuation Phase,” in Simon A. Grolnick,
   Leonard S. Barkin (eds.), Between Reality and Fantasy: Winnicott’s Concepts of Transitional
   Objects and Phenomena (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1995), pp. 147-165.
5 D.W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” in Through Pediatrics
   to Psychoanalysis: Collected Papers (London: Karnac Book, 2002).
6 Christopher Bollas, “The Aesthetic Moment and the Search for Transformation,” in Peter L.
   Rudnytsky (ed.), Transitional Objects and Potential Spaces: Literary Uses of D.W. Winnicott
   (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 40-49. The quotation is from p. 48.
7 Gilbert Rose, “The Creativity of Everyday Life,” in S. A. Grolnick, L. S. Barkin (eds.), op. cit., pp.
   347-62. The quotation is from p. 355
8 Cinema Culture in 1930s Britain Archive (hereafter CCINTB) 95-232-1, Raymond Aspden,
   Lancashire, to Valentina Bold, n.d. 1995.
9 CCINTB T95-158, Tessa Amelan, Manchester, 28 May 1995.
10 CCINTB T94-12, Thomas McGoran, Glasgow, 30 November 1994. For further examples see A.
   Kuhn, op. cit., Chapter 9.
11 Roger Silverstone, Television and Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 1994).




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