Glacial Errata, No. 8

One: If We Don’t, Remember Me

One of my favorite web-based projects from the before days, when the Internet wasn’t total garbage, was Gustaf Mantel’s “If We Don’t, Remember Me”: a tumblr blog of expertly edited gifs from art-house films. Each gif is remarkably subtle, sometimes seamlessly looping a small gesture, sometimes a seemingly static image that abruptly comes to life, sometimes just the barest motion to remind you it’s a gif. They’re beautiful, endlessly fascinating, and remarkably soothing.

Two: Kiss Me Deadly

I’d been a fan of IWDRM for I don’t know how many years before I realized that the name came from one of my favorite noir films, “Kiss Me Deadly” (A film which itself never appeared in Mantel’s archive). Like all of my favorite noirs, Robert Aldrich’s 1955 film cuts across the city (in this case, Los Angeles), taking you from Beverly Hills mansions to the slums of Bunker Hill, revealing that the stratification of the city and its strict hierarchies is less important than a far more sinister thread that runs through everything.

Three: Luc Boltanski

From Luc Boltanski’s “Mysteries and Conspiracies: Detective Stories, Spy Novels, and the Making of Modern Societies”:

“The intervention of a detective… is triggered by an event that rips apart the seemingly flawless fabric of reality. As the investigation proceeds, it seeks out the origins of this rupture and tries to determine the field (which may prove to be more or less vast) that is affected. In both cases, the investigation results in an unveiling. Beneath reality there is something else that has to be identified because it threatens the very continuation and orderliness of reality.”

Four: The Glowing Thing

The cinematic trope of the “mysterious glowing thing that everyone is trying to get”

Five: Christina Rossetti, “Remember”

Remember me when I am gone away,
         Gone far away into the silent land;
         When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
         You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
         Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while
         And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
         For if the darkness and corruption leave
         A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
         Than that you should remember and be sad.