Maria Stepanova’s mostly autobiographical tome In Memory of Memory charts her attempt to reconstruct her family’s scattered history after the death of a reclusive aunt, whose lifelong diaries she comes to inherit. Through these diaries, plus photo albums, postcards, letters and souvenirs dating back through generations of life in Russia, Stepanova assembles – over the course of five hundred pages – a personalised version of history, and continuously battles with the act of doing so. She writes that whilst her assembled “fragments of memory and pieces of the old world did create a whole, a unity of a particular sort,” this unity was in places “flawed and empty, consisting mostly of cracks and gaps, no better and no worse than any single person who has ever lived her term and survived…” She struggles, throughout the course of her exploration, to reconcile the imagined wills and wishes of her ancestors with her subsequent manipulation of their collective memory in the service of a newly constructed and ultimately unreliable narrative.
In contextualising her process, Stepanova refers to Jacques Rancière’s essay 'Figures of History', in which he makes the argument that “the artists duty is to show ‘what can’t be seen, what lies beneath the visible.’” She notes Rancière’s contrasting of ‘document’ – i.e. “any record of an event that aims to be exhaustive, to tell history, to make ‘a memory official’” – with his alternate conception of a ‘monument’, which Stepanova outlines with a direct quote:
[A monument is] that which preserves memory through its very being, that which speaks directly, through the fact that it was not intended to speak ¬– the layout of a territory that testifies to the past activity of human beings better than any chronicle of their endeavours; a household object, a piece of fabric, a piece of pottery, a stele, a pattern painted on a chest or a contract between two people we know nothing about…
Whilst Stepanova’s quotation ends here, Rancière’s original text continues:
…and which reveals an everyday way of being, a business practice, a sense of the love or of the death inscribed there, for itself, without anyone thinking of future historians.
For the artists working in the cel animation industry, this sense of an everyday business practice is pertinent – the creation they took part in, the traces of which would come to define their working life, were ultimately part of a financial undertaking. Hannah Frank sees this overlap of creation and capitalism as key to understanding the reality of cel animation as an artform, and the social, historical, economic and personal context of this collective creative force. In the second chapter of Frame by Frame, titled ‘A View of the World,’ Frank argues precisely this, stating that “the animated cartoon offers not a reality sui generis but in fact a view of our own world.” She orients this position firstly through an engagement with Dudley Andrew’s 2005 monograph What Cinema Is!, in which he “describes an encounter with the ghost of [André] Bazin” through markings left in Bazin’s copy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Imaginaire (1940). Andrew recounts the traces: underlinings, marginalia, and, nestled in the middle of the book, a sheet of notes. Frank asks us to consider whether the sense of contact which Andrew feels comes simply from the handling of a physical object. “Would this encounter have seemed as haunted if Andrew had been examining the book page by page on microfilm?” She wonders if perhaps “a photographic reproduction would have led Andrew to think that Bazin’s jottings were in pen and ink, not pencil, or caused him to worry that he could not distinguish between a line in the margin and a hair in the gate of the contact printer.”
Frank ties into this discussion Walter Benjamin’s sense of the ‘aura’ as he defines it in ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, writing that Andrew “invests the inanimate object ‘with the ability to look back’ at him, to examine him just as he examines it.” Theodor Adorno, writing to Benjamin during the draft stage of his essay on Baudelaire, enquired after this auratic subjectivity: “Is not the aura invariably a trace of a forgotten human moment in the thing, and is it not directly connected, precisely by virtue of this forgetting, with what you call experience?” Frank acknowledges the fact that Benjamin disagreed – he felt that the aura could be found even in “organic objects untouched by human hands” – but she remains with and works alongside Adorno's question regardless, stating her belief that it is this sense of lost moments, of forgotten human labour, which intrudes into the recieved image, reaching from the well of the past into the frame of the present and connecting the interior landscape of the animated cartoon with the exterior world in which it was generated. For Frank, viewing the animated cartoon as a photographic medium, and its constituent elements as photographs – as images on surfaces – is not only a way “to find the world that has been cropped out of the frame,” but doing so also allows us to “find the world within the image, to study the windowpane as well as the view beyond it.”