7/1/2023 0 Comments Gif deep dreamerIf Venus were to emerge from her shell today, we wouldn’t turn to a Botticelli or a Wagner for cultural testimony, or at least not entirely rather, the moment would be brief and bright and endlessly looped. The gif, with its modest looping of a few sequential frames, has become an unlikely cultural emblem for a technologically mature world more than capable of crafting long-form, exquisitely pixel-dense video however, the gif’s efficiency - its unparalleled ability to trim time’s messy sprawl down to easily digestible morsels of experiential visual data - has solidified its standing as a robust narrative technology. Though ostensibly disposable, the humble gif has become a potent narrative force in web content and culture, jockeying with text and static photography for storytelling primacy. What is a memory if not a circling, tightly wound emotional coil? If I dream in absurdist cinema, I remember in gifs. It seems to me that gifs - as circuits of mesmerizing imagery - are built like and analogous to a kind of invented memory, perhaps a communal one. But in thinking about gifs - the charming, droll, undoubtedly beloved visual currency of today’s internet space - I kept returning to the dreamy-eyed French novelist and his evangelism for the intensity of memory. It is the madeleine dipped in tisane that plunges the narrator into deepest reverie. True, Proust’s most famous of memories was one of taste, not sight. In the production of memory, you might say we traffic in the Proustian gif. When we imagine, when we recall, we make concentrated movies of these interior spaces, a series of connected echoes. They haunt the twilit attics and musty parlors of our inward worlds, untold troves of dusty stills and rickety loops. Memory coalesces into individual moments of charged significance and calcified feeling. That act of reverie - of navigating deep, personal memory - is composed of a kind of cinematic intimacy: awash in telling detail and dramatic, curated sequencing. For Proust, remembrance is tantamount to prayer. It is intensely relatable - indeed, the Proustian project, for all its intimidating length and esoteric reputation, remains warmly universal: to recapture what is irrevocably lost by time’s erosion. The narrator, tasting a cookie dunked in tea, is transported to distant childhood by way of the seductive power of involuntary memory, a world unspooled from the delicate budding of a single, potent recollection. The story of Proust’s madeleine in Swann’s Way is almost certainly the most famous passage of In Search of Lost Time, a cultural export so entrenched as to be a talking point even for those who have never read a word of Proust’s enduring novel.
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