Thin Ice by Karyn Sandlos
In my
mid-thirties I realized I had slipped past a childhood I had ignored and not
understood (Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family, 1982:22).
Beginnings
can be awkward, because they ask us to do things before we know how. I read
somewhere that that we can’t learn our personal histories off by heart. Memory
is fickle; it doesn’t fade with time, it shape shifts. And although memory is a
central preoccupation in Philip Hoffman’s work, his first film, On the Pond, suggests that telling
personal stories requires a certain degree of amnesia. In 1978, while a student
at
Memory, the
thirst for presence…(Octavio
Paz, A Tree Within, 1988:151)
In On the Pond, Hoffman brings the
truth-making apparatuses of the still and moving image to bear on that most
colloquial of historic documents: the family anecdote. The film opens with a
series of black and white stills, underscored by a family’s exclamations of delight.
A number of voices proffer the details of time and place. There is the cottage
and the pond. There are the children going fishing in summer and skating in
winter. The photographs are animated by the usual snippets of commentary: “Oh, that’s a good one of you!” “Do you remember when we…?” “I wish I knew you better then…” Amidst the
convivial clamor of the soundtrack, a daughter’s wish to have known her mother
better then captures my attention, for she speaks with the quiet resignation of
one who has arrived too late. In this moment, the family’s exuberance for the
factual details of a past life together belies the tones and shadows of their
shared recollections. Through fleeting disclosures they tell stories of longing
through a past—or at least a version of the past—that might temper all that is
unbearable about the present.
I often
wonder whether I have any actual memories of my own childhood, or whether
access to a past that I have lived through is made possible only by the stories
of others. And there are few things I find more frustrating than being left to
my own failed recollections. Lost keys, forgotten directions, and misplaced
bits of information are the hints that trying too hard to remember makes us forget. Perhaps most images are like tools that relieve
us of this kind of difficulty, by giving shape to a past that is largely made
up of traces, impulses, flashes of colour, and
fragments in need of a structure. Tell me a story that will help me forget what
I want from a past that is lost to me. Images aren’t lies exactly, but they may
work like screens that shield us from the discards of our lives. To preserve
the past, to give meaning to these fragments, is at
once the work of a magician and the practice of an embalmer. With a wish to give
order to the refractory pull of desire, the archive snatches memory from the
flow of time.
On the map
of history, perhaps the water stain is memory. (Anne
Michaels, Fugitive Pieces, 1996:137).
But even
anesthesia can be administered in uneven doses. On the Pond cuts between family
photographs and the recurring scene of a boy playing hockey on a frozen pond;
the clamor of the domestic drama and the stillness of a frozen landscape.
Apart from the puck-chasing antics of a German Shepherd,
the boy plays alone. At night, backlit by the windows of the cottage, his
father prepares the ice with buckets of water. With the toss of a bucket,
bleeding through the darkness, there appears a vanishing image of water coating
ice. The water will be solid by morning, but first it leaves a stain. While
most stains have a material presence, this one lifts off of the emulsion of the
film and lingers in the mind with a haunting intractability. It is there and
not there at the same time. Amidst images of landscape and childhood that
beckon with a nostalgia that is echoed in the words of Hoffman’s older sister
when she intones “Oh, I want to go back,” traces of uncertainty pierce through
ordered time. If there is a true picture of the past, it must be like these
fleeting glimpses, when they surface like a photograph that could easily have
been discarded, or returned from the lab stamped ‘print no charge.' In On the Pond, these are moments when,
just as the negative image gives birth to the positive print, amnesia gives
memory its contours.
To
articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it
really was. It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of
danger. (Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 1955:255).
In On the Pond there is a strange image of
the back of Hoffman’s mother’s head, framed by a figure in motion on the left,
and the small face of a very young Hoffman in the lower right hand corner. The voiceover tells us that this photograph
was taken on Thanksgiving Day, when Hoffman’s mother was “feeling lousy.” While
the emotional tone of the day is admitted, Hoffman’s effort to cheer his mother
up becomes the focus of this conversation. But the seconds of silence that
surround the tiny image of a child’s smiling face tear at the delicate suturing
between meaning and image, between memory and the psychic cost of bringing the
past to light. The family gathers in an act of forgetting. It is not the
picture itself that leaves a stain, but the layers of affect and meaning that
linger unresolved in the silence that follows their conversation about a day
that is lost to them. Forgotten, perhaps, but not gone. The image is as
permanent and imperfect as the conflicts it serves to disguise, and it glances
off the viewer with the tug of retrospective desire. This is, as Benjamin might
have put it, a moment of recognition in which the past flashes up as an image,
never to be seen again.
If only I
had a photograph, so that people could see who I was. (Caryl Phillips, The Nature of Blood, 1997:195).
On the Pond is a study in still and moving
images, and the flow of the past through preserved moments in time. Pictures of
home and family are intercut with photographs of
Hoffman’s hockey team, as the silence of the pond is broken by the clamor of an
audience, a coach’s obsessive words of encouragement, and the encroaching chant
of Ca-na-da! Ca-na-da! A
young Hoffman surveys a collection of trophies alongside team photographs that
herald his departure from the family. Through a labored series of pushups, he measures
his stamina against the ice. Photographs of Hoffman’s own childhood provide a
measure of the distance between home and the world, and the small rituals of
the pond reveal their larger purpose: Hoffman gains strength in order to leave,
and distance so that he may one day return.
It is no
accident that many of us become fascinated by our family
histories
long after we have left home. For years after my own leaving, I asked my family
not to pose for photographs at our annual reunions. I stopped taking pictures
when I realized that we didn’t know how not to perform in front of a camera.
Not posing became more awkward than posing. Perhaps this was my way of trying
to call attention to a certain distance of my own; to manipulate the
conventional time of family portraits as a way of trying to live outside the
ordered traditions of home and family. And it may be that going home requires
this measure of distance, this lapse of memory, that most pictures afford us.
If absence clears a path for our return, a little amnesia may be the price of
presence. Like trying to hold light between two hands.
As in
childhood we live sweeping close to the sky, and now what dawn is this. (Ann Carson, Autobiography of Red, 1998:54).
It is
possible that the process of making a personal film relies more on memory
lapses than it does on memory. My own first film began as a disparate
collection of stories that were contained in mental images. These were stories
that I had been told about my childhood, repetitively, over time, until I was
old enough to wonder where the stories ended and my own experience began. The
images I had shot didn’t lend themselves to an easy or obvious ordering, and so
I experimented with one version and then another, wondering all the while why I
felt compelled to tell stories that I had been told; stories that seemed to
fill in the spaces where memory failed me. There was a period in which mastery
over the film’s unfolding gave way to a strange sense of disorientation. The
film began to unmake the maker, like a dream that was nudging me forward in
search of artifacts, vestiges, echos.
Toward the end of On the Pond,
Hoffman, now in his twenties, reclines on a bed flipping the pages of an old
hockey album. Next to the bed, a projector reel rotates and a turntable
revolves. The film has ended and the
music has stopped, but the silence is disturbed by the skip of the needle and
the incessant hum of the projector. If memories are like water staining ice,
then the best replicas of memory must glimmer even as they disappear. The
problem is, we make films when we wake to the knowledge that we have been
sleeping, but we also make films in order to help us sleep better. And if we
do, in fact, sleep through much of our childhoods, it is not just the familiar
that we reach for later on, but the urgent flashes of ourselves that can’t be
explained, or understood, or fully retrieved. Hoffman glances intently at the
camera as he moves off of the bed, leaving the photo album behind. Emerging
from the cottage, he makes his way back to the pond.