As a time-based media form, stop motion is a special case of animation film. It shares formal, spatial, material, and temporal cinematic features and techniques with non-animated film, and it can work with objects, places, and things that are often where memories are located. As in live-action film, these objects and spaces can be accessed outside the film experience; we can hold them in our hands, enter a room that has been filmed in, and share them with others. Pierre Nora’s (1989, 19) concept of “sites of memory” is significant in this context because it has three aspects: material, functional, and symbolic; and this suggests memory is rooted in experiential, visible, and tangible phenomena, in environment, gesture, image, and object. Creators of stop motion can work with a range of real-world objects, materials, and textures that can be physical mementos or placeholders of a memory for the artist of a subject or figure in the film’s diegetic world. When animated, objects can depict what is unseen, but felt and remembered in human consciousness. After a survey of key concepts from memory studies relevant to animation as moving image, I explore concepts from Classic Greek rhetoric of oratory persuasion to then map their ars memorativa onto contemporary media analogies. Then, I examine films with implicit and explicit themes of memory, from the Quay Brothers and Hiraki Sawa, to develop phenomenological and heuristic approaches for how these films function. I demonstrate how they present relational actants—in effect, how things in stop motion can visually present dream memory in the formers’, and in the latter’s, eradicated memory in the diegetic presence of a living human protagonist. The aim is to offer an analytical framework of memory studies for this animation technique and to reveal how the artists’ animation of matter can act as a performative vehicle and reified intermediary for experiences of individual cultural memory, and for the loss or recall of these.
Memory studies and theory have engaged extensively with literature, visual arts, photography, documentary, and narrative film, with a growing interest in media and materiality. In the relatively new field of animation scholarship, similar to the early days of film and media studies, few authors work in a single, discrete discipline, as research and writing on animation can and does draw on many other fields of knowledge. At the outset of her Memory and Culture, Astrid Erll (2011, 1) observes that “memory is a topic that integrates disparate elements like no other [and it is] a sociocultural phenomenon.” Animation studies, theory, and aesthetics also have remarkable interdisciplinary range for similar reasons. In the introduction to their expansive, multidisciplinary Handbook of Memory Studies, one of a number of such collections, Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen (2016, 2) describe the field as an “archipelagos of memory,” an apt metaphor for the lengthening, interlinking chain of formerly discrete disciplines; yet they also suggest that “this creative variety of perspectives has implied, to some extent, a theoretical isolationism, most often underpinned by disciplinary conventions” (1). This was once the case with animation, but it is also expanding with a solid critical base into many fields. Yet in a scoping exercise, I have found very little critical writing on the topic of animation and memory, which is somewhat surprising. Not least as a time-based media form that works with artistic materials, animation can transmute the unseen raw material of human nature, memory, and experience into visual imagery.
There seem to be as many potential areas for memory studies to examine as there are individual and shared expressions of memory, and a recent spate of collections and publications attest to this, from the historically arranged key works of the Collective Memory Reader (2011) to others specific to anthropology, politics, language, or film.László Munteán, Liedeke Plate, and Anneke Smelik’s recent Materialising Memory in Art and Popular Culture (2017) delectably begins with Marcel Proust’s madeleine and deals specifically with matter, stuff and things, and entanglements—two topics I will return to. Tota and Hagen (2016, 1–2) offer that “the field . . . is continually refocusing and reinventing itself . . . [and] varies from country to country both in regard to their historical development, empirical focus and conceptual framework.” They suggest there are “multiple pathways in how to approach the study of memory in terms of grammar and vocabularies, methodologies and at what level research is located (micro, meso, macro, national, international, transnational, network),” as well as ask how individuals, organizations, collectives, generations, and societies “come to experience, use and debate memory” (2). They also comment on “technologies [that] mediate meaning and experience of past and future memories” (2); as it is a set of techniques and principles that work with, and within, the technologies of film and digital media, animation can present a broad and inclusive continuum of representation and mediation, from stop-motion real-world objects, physical environments, and photographic documentation to mimetic or abstract frame-by-frame artistry.
It is worth asking the question of what and where memories “are.” Alon Confino (1997, 1386) observes the notion of memory in cultural, historical, political, and social studies “has been used to denote very different things, which nonetheless share a topical common denominator: the ways in which people construct a sense of the past . . . [and] to denote the representation of the past and the making of it into a shared cultural knowledge of successive generations.” Approaches to social and collective memory, and audience memory (including anamnesis), include a range of external aspects that generate a collective mind, such as material and symbolic (influence, immaterial, social, and cultural); public memory and cultural trauma (ethics), as well as ethnic, generational, and national groups. These external aspects are something animation filmmakers can circumvent or modify through a range of styles, materials, and techniques that remove visual evidence of national, ethnic, or gendered membership, and the form, though it can work with photographs and pixilation of humans, can diverge from representations of individual or groups of human beings.
While history, and histories, like autobiography can be based on memories, Maurice Halbwachs regarded “history as dead memory, a way of preserving pasts to which we no longer have an ‘organic’ experiential relation” (quoted in Lentin 2010, 24), and thus he demarcated memory from history, as does Pierre Nora (1989, 9), who distinguishes history that belongs “to everyone and no one,” from “memory [that] takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images and objects.” Others see memory and history in a dialectical relationship, or argue for an understanding and contextualization of historical and political contingencies because “the historical analysis of interpretations produces interpretations on its own” (Feindt et al. 2014, 41); more often than not, history is “written by the winners.” As stop-motion animation can work with tangible cultural and material objects to satisfy the concreteness Nora sets out for memory, Marita Sturken’s implication of cultural memory in power dynamics is relevant. What she terms “technologies of memory [are] . . . produced through objects, images, and representations. These are . . . not vessels of memory in which memory passively resides so much as objects through which memories are shared, produced, and given meaning” (1997, 9). But history is important, and memory studies also have a history.
In terms of how memory is recorded and shared, Jacques Le Goff (1992) determined five periods that are also developments toward technical processes. Astrid Erll summarizes these in Memory and Culture as follows: (1) ethnic memory (oral transmission without writing); (2) “the ‘rise of memory, from orality to writing, from prehistory and antiquity’”—commemoration and documentary recording; (3) the Middle Ages—“medieval memory ‘in equilibrium’ between orality and writing”; (4) “the ‘progress of written and figured memory from the Renaissance to the present’” from the printing press to archives, libraries, and museums (shared identities across nations); and (5) “the ‘contemporary evolutions in memory’” (Erll 2011, 116–17; in-text citations from Le Goff 1992, 51–99). In the last 150 years electronic sound and photochemical images, and their digital progressions, introduced new technologies for expression, transmission, and interpretation of memory. To ask a central question here with regard to analog recording, and even more so with regard to digital technologies, I paraphrase Confino (2006, 180): How can we evaluate, control, and verify the importance of evidence? He points out that this is not possible without a “systematic study of reception” (180). And much debated, too, is the reception of evidence and its inte...