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PALGRAVE ANIMATION

Animation
and Memory
Edited by
Maarten van Gageldonk
László Munteán
Ali Shobeiri
Palgrave Animation

Series Editors
Caroline Ruddell
Brunel University London
Uxbridge, UK

Paul Ward
Arts University Bournemouth
Poole, UK
This book series explores animation and conceptual/theoretical issues in
an approachable way. The focus is twofold: on core concepts, theories and
debates in animation that have yet to be dealt with in book-length format;
and on new and innovative research and interdisciplinary work relating to
animation as a field. The purpose of the series is to consolidate animation
research and provide the ‘go to’ monographs and anthologies for current
and future scholars.

More information about this series at


http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15948
Maarten van Gageldonk
László Munteán • Ali Shobeiri
Editors

Animation
and Memory
Editors
Maarten van Gageldonk László Munteán
ArtEZ University of the Arts Radboud University
Arnhem, The Netherlands Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Ali Shobeiri
Leiden University
Leiden, The Netherlands

ISSN 2523-8086     ISSN 2523-8094 (electronic)


Palgrave Animation
ISBN 978-3-030-34887-8    ISBN 978-3-030-34888-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34888-5

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-
tional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Alexander Schellow

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgments

The editors and publishers wish to thank the following rights holders for
permission to reproduce copyrighted material:

• The Koninck Studios for four stills from the Quay Brothers’ anima-
tion The Comb.
• Hiraki Sawa for two stills from Lineament. Image courtesy of the
artist and James Cohan, New York.
• Stacey Steers for one still from Phantom Canyon and another from
Night Hunter and two from Edge of Alchemy.
• Izabela Plucińska for two stills from Liebling.
• Ruth Lingford for two stills from Death and the Mother.
• Goda Verikaite for an illustration of celestial shadows.
• The National Film Board of Canada for two stills from Michelle
Cournoyer’s The Hat.
• Stan Douglas and Loc Dao, the National Film Board of Canada, for
two stills from Circa 1948.
• Özlem Sulak for two stills from Cinéma Emek, Cinéma Labour,
Cinéma Travail.
• Yücel Tunca for a photograph of the Emek Theater.

Every effort has been made to trace rights holders, but if any have been
inadvertently overlooked, the publishers would be pleased to make the
necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. We are grateful to the

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

anonymous peer reviewers for their constructive criticism of the manu-


script, which has been invaluable to making this book what it is now.
Melanie van der Elsen deserves our special thanks for her dedicated sup-
port in preparing the manuscript. We also thank Jamie McGrath for his
meticulous proofreading of the text. We are also grateful to the Leiden
University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) and the Department of
Cultural Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen for their financial sup-
port in finalizing this book.
Contents

Introduction  1
Maarten van Gageldonk, László Munteán, and Ali Shobeiri

Part I Memory and Materiality  21

Memoria Rerum: Animated Materiality, Memory, and Amnesia 23


Suzanne Buchan


Montages of Memory: Collage, Memory, and Gender in the
Films of Stacey Steers 45
Maarten van Gageldonk


Animating Amnesia: The Materiality of Forgetting in Izabela
Plucińska’s Liebling 63
László Munteán

vii
viii Contents

Part II Animation Techniques and Memory  79

 Printing Machine for the Memory”: Stillness,


“A
Metamorphosis, and the Poiesis of Memory in Ruth Lingford’s
Death and the Mother 81
Nicholas Andrew Miller


Drawing on Memory: Layers of Association in Robert Breer’s
Animated Films105
Miriam Harris

Part III Trauma and the Body 125


Antumbral Memory: A Psychosomatic Phenomenon in
Phantom Limb127
Ali Shobeiri


“Nothing But Paper and Ink”: Metamorphosis, Memory, and
Trauma in The Hat143
Ruth Richards

Part IV Animating Urban Pasts 161


Stan Douglas and the Animation of Vancouver’s Urban Past163
Joel McKim

Cinema Emek, Cinema Labour, Cinema Travail: The


Revitalization of Istanbul’s Urban Past and the Emek Theater
as a Lieu de Mémoire181
Cansu van Gageldonk
Contents  ix

Part V Documentary and Animation 199


“However It Affects You, It Does Not Have to Hold You
Back”: Animated Personal Accounts in CBBC’s Newsround
Special “My Autism and Me” and the Prosthetic Memory of
Disability and Ablement201
Hannah Ebben


Animated Documentary and the Reclamation of Lost Pasts
and Forgotten Memory in Irinka and Sandrinka and Waltz
with Bashir223
Annabelle Honess Roe

Index: Animation and Memory241


Notes on Contributors

Suzanne Buchan is Professor and Head of MA Animation at the Royal


College of Art London. She has published widely on animation and film
and is Editor of Animation: an interdisciplinary journal. Her research
theme of Pervasive Animation positions animation as central to contem-
porary debates in visual culture, and as a primary driver of the digital shift
and resulting changes in cultural metaphors. She is interested in the evolv-
ing relationship between media, creative industries, and social change. She
is also active as a curator, most recently of Animated Wonderworlds,
Museum of Design Zurich (2016).
Hannah Ebben is in the final stages of her PhD project at the Autism
Centre at Sheffield Hallam University. With her background in Cultural
Studies, she is committed to the cultural constellation of autism and
disability. She has worked at the Dutch foundation Disability Studies
in the Netherlands and is preparing for the defense of her thesis titled
“Representing autism as a discourse within ableist economies of
doubt.” Her interests lie in the construction of the abled subject in
culture as well as the governmentality of (mental) health, with the
aim to make theoretical ideas relevant to society and social change.
Miriam Harris is an experimental animator and Senior Lecturer at the
Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. She completed her
postgraduate studies in Digital Animation and Visual Effects at Sheridan
College, Toronto, and her experimental animated films have won
awards at international film and animation festivals. She has had

xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

essays published on the work of Len Lye, William Kentridge, and


Czech and Polish animation, and she is the co-editor, with Lilly
Husbands and Paul Taberham, of the book Experimental Animation:
From Analogue to Digital (2019).
Annabelle Honess Roe is Senior Lecturer and Programme Director for
Film Studies at the University of Surrey, UK. She is the author of
Animated Documentary (2013), which was the recipient of the 2015
Society for Animation Studies McLaren-Lambart Award for best book,
the co-editor of Vocal Projections: Voices in Documentary (2018) and
The Animation Studies Reader (2018), and the editor of the forthcom-
ing Aardman Animations: Craft, Technology and Identity Beyond
Stop-Motion.
Joel McKim is Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture at Birkbeck,
University of London. He is a visiting research fellow at the V&A
Museum of Art & Design and the Director of the Vasari Research
Centre for Art and Technology. He is the author of Architecture,
Media and Memory: Facing Complexity in Post-9/11 New York and the
co-editor, with Esther Leslie, of a special issue of Animation: An
Interdisciplinary Journal entitled “Life Remade: Critical Animation in
the Digital Age.”
Nicholas Andrew Miller is Associate Professor of English and Director
of Film Studies at Loyola University Maryland. His areas of teaching and
scholarly interest include film animation, early cinema, the intersections
between modernist print and visual cultures, and twentieth-century
Irish and British literature. He is at work on an interdisciplinary
study of metamorphosis in modernist visual culture. He is the author
of Modernism, Ireland, and the Erotics of Memory (2002).
László Munteán is an Assistant Professor with a double appointment in
Cultural Studies and American Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen,
the Netherlands. His publications have focused on the memorialization of
9/11 in literature and the visual arts, photography, urban culture and
architecture, and cultural heritage. In a broader sense, his scholarly work
revolves around the juncture of literature, visual culture, and cultural
memory in American and Eastern European contexts. He is co-editor of
Materializing Memory in Art and Popular Culture (2017).
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

Ruth Richards is a PhD candidate at the School of Media and


Communication at RMIT University. Her research focuses on the inter-
sections between feminist corporeal philosophy and the body in ­animation.
Her research interests include women in animation, animation and mem-
ory, animated metamorphosis, and feminist television studies.
Ali Shobeiri holds a PhD from the Faculty of Humanities at Leiden
University, titled Place: Towards a Geophilosophy of Photography. He has
worked as an Assistant Professor at Leiden University, teaching courses
related to cinema, photography, and visual culture. In his research, he
aspires to propose the notion of “placial aesthetics” through the triangula-
tion of fields of photography, geography, and philosophy.
Cansu van Gageldonk completed her Research M.A. in the Literary
Studies department at Leiden University (2017). Her main interests are
contemporary Turkish literature and animated film. She works as a lec-
turer at the Breda University of Applied Sciences, and she is the academic
programmer of the Kaboom Animation Festival in Amsterdam.
Maarten van Gageldonk holds a PhD from the Faculty of Humanities at
Radboud University, titled Transatlantic Mediators. Grove Press, Evergreen
Review and Postwar European Literature (2016). His main interests are
animation history and theory. He is a lecturer at the HAN University of
Applied Sciences and the ArtEZ University of the Arts. He is also the lead
programmer for the Kaboom Animation Festival in Amsterdam.
List of Figures

Memoria Rerum: Animated Materiality, Memory, and Amnesia


Figs. 1 and 2 (Left): Lineament, Hiraki Sawa, 2012. Two-channel
installation. © Hiraki Sawa. Image courtesy of the artist
and James Cohan, New York. (Right): Lineament, Hiraki
Sawa, 2012. Two-channel installation. © Hiraki Sawa.
Image courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York 31
Figs. 3 and 4 (Left): Twitching fingers in the real and animated dream
world. The Comb (From the Museums of Sleep). The Quay
Brothers, 1990. (Courtesy of, and with permission from,
the Koninck Studios). (Right): Twitching fingers in the
real and animated dream world. The Comb (From the
Museums of Sleep). The Quay Brothers, 1990. (Courtesy
of, and with permission from, the Koninck Studios) 35
Figs. 5 and 6 (Left): Lineament, Hiraki Sawa, 2012. Two-channel
installation. © Hiraki Sawa. Image courtesy of the artist
and James Cohan, New York. (Right): Lineament, Hiraki
Sawa, 2012. Two-channel installation. © Hiraki Sawa.
Image courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York 39

Montages of Memory: Collage, Memory, and Gender


in the Films of Stacey Steers
Fig. 1 Still from Phantom Canyon (2006) 51
Fig. 2 Lilian Gish in Night Hunter (2011) 55
Figs. 3 and 4 Mary Pickford (left) and Janet Gaynor (right) in Edge of
Alchemy (2017) 59

xv
xvi List of Figures

Animating Amnesia: The Materiality of Forgetting in Izabela


Plucińska’s Liebling
Fig. 1 The amnesiac woman looks at her reflection in the mirror 69
Fig. 2 The amnesiac woman confronts objects from her past that fail to
trigger memories 72

“A Printing Machine for the Memory”: Stillness,


Metamorphosis, and the Poiesis of Memory in Ruth
Lingford’s Death and the Mother
Fig. 1 Opening sequence, Death and the Mother (1997) 92
Fig. 2 A memory of the still-child, Death and the Mother (1997) 100

Drawing on Memory: Layers of Association in Robert Breer’s


Animated Films
Fig. 1 Bang! Robert Breer, 1986. Fragmented, gestural lines evoke the
abstract realm of the pre-linguistic and also point toward
figuration and the symbolic 112

Antumbral Memory: A Psychosomatic Phenomenon


in Phantom Limb
Fig. 1 Celestial shadows 138

“Nothing But Paper and Ink”: Metamorphosis, Memory,


and Trauma in The Hat
Fig. 1 Still from The Hat (1999) 155
Fig. 2 Still from The Hat (1999) 157

Stan Douglas and the Animation of Vancouver’s Urban Past


Fig. 1 Circa 1948, 2014. (© Stan Douglas and Loc Dao. Courtesy of
the Artists) 166
Fig. 2 Circa 1948, 2014. (© Stan Douglas and Loc Dao. Courtesy of
the Artists) 166
List of Figures  xvii

Cinema Emek, Cinema Labour, Cinema Travail:


The Revitalization of Istanbul’s Urban Past and the Emek
Theater as a Lieu de Mémoire
Fig. 1 Opening scene, Cinema Emek, Cinema Labour, Cinema Travail
(2016). (Courtesy of Özlem Sulak) 185
Fig. 2 Cinema Emek, Cinema Labour, Cinema Travail (2016).
(Courtesy of Özlem Sulak) 186
Fig. 3 The inside of the Emek Theater during the Labor Day
celebrations in 1987 (photo by Yücel Tunca). On the right is a
flag created by workers for the celebrations, reading “Welcome 1
May” in Turkish. On the left side, a promotional poster created
by the theater for the American film Falling in Love (Ulu
Grosbard, 1984), starring Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep.
(Courtesy of Yücel Tunca) 192

Animated Documentary and the Reclamation of Lost Pasts


and Forgotten Memory in Irinka and Sandrinka and Waltz
with Bashir
Fig. 1 The collage of the photographic and the animated as a way of
weaving the filmmaker into collective memory in Irinka and
Sandrinka (dir. Sandrine Stoïanov 2007) 228
Fig. 2 The three different registers of Waltz with Bashir (dir. Ari Folman
2008)—interview, memory, and hallucination—are animated in
the same style 235
Introduction

Maarten van Gageldonk, László Munteán,


and Ali Shobeiri

Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one
remembers it in order to recount it.
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The above epigraph to Marquez’s autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale,


highlights the difference between the actual past and the past kept alive in
memory. It is not so much that we remember what happened in the past
per se, but by way of remembering and sharing our memories, we create a
narrative of that past. The stories that we tell of our lives (as well as the

M. van Gageldonk (*)


ArtEZ University of the Arts, Arnhem, The Netherlands
e-mail: ma.vangageldonk@artez.nl
L. Munteán
Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
e-mail: l.muntean@let.ru.nl
A. Shobeiri
Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands
e-mail: s.a.shobeiri@hum.leidenuniv.nl

© The Author(s) 2020 1


M. van Gageldonk et al. (eds.), Animation and Memory, Palgrave
Animation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34888-5_1
2 M. VAN GAGELDONK ET AL.

ones that we choose not to tell) are the building blocks of the identities we
fashion of ourselves as well as of our communities. It is in this sense that
the memories we recount are constitutive of what Marquez calls life. By
foregrounding the role of remembering in the construction of identity,
the epigraph encapsulates one of the fundamental precepts of memory
studies, namely that memory is more than a mere recollection of what
actually happened in the past. Rather, it is a “fluid and flexible affair,” as
Bond et al. (2018, 1) assert, a performative practice mediated through
various modes of recounting such as places, rituals, as well as a variety of
textual, visual, and other sensory media (Bal et al. 1999; Erll and Rigney
2009; Plate and Smelik 2013). Animation is one of these media. Whether
made in pencil, paint, clay, paper, or sand, through the use of pin-screen
or the landscape, with puppets or created by computer, what different
forms of animation share is “the capacity for plasticity,” as Dobson et al.
(2019, 8) recently observed. It is this plasticity, combined with the free-
dom animation offers to escape from the indexical qualities inherent to
film, that makes it a particularly productive mnemonic medium. This book
sets out to explore this dimension of animation.
Despite the burgeoning of scholarship in the fields of both animation
and memory studies, the interrelation of animation and memory has
largely remained an uncharted area of inquiry. This lacuna is particularly
relevant for two reasons. An increasing number of animation films have
addressed various forms, methods, and contexts of remembering and for-
getting. Also, memory studies, especially recent work on the transnational,
multidirectional, affective, and material dimensions of memory, provides
novel theoretical and methodological frameworks to study animation as a
mnemonic medium. In its potential to preserve, transmit, and mediate
memories, animation constitutes a mediating technology that, often shar-
ing intermedial relationships with photography, literature, and live action
film, plays an integral role in the performance of personal and collective
memories. Animation and Memory deals with a large variety of animated
films, from stop motion to computer animation, from cell-animated car-
toons to clay animation. Cognizant of the medium’s inherent differences
from (as well as similarities to) live action cinema, this volume explores the
ways in which animation can function as a representational medium and a
technology of remembering as well as forgetting.
As increasingly vibrant fields of inquiry, animation studies and memory
studies have undergone substantial changes over the recent years. While in
her introduction to the 1997 edited volume A Reader in Animation
INTRODUCTION 3

Studies Jayne Pilling discusses animation’s “low visibility” compared to


film studies (xi), as well as problematic definitions and the lack of an ade-
quate terminology (xii–xiii), The Animation Studies Reader, published in
2019, already describes animation studies as a “vibrant and diverse” field
that “reflects the multiplicity and intermediality of animation” (Dobson
et al. 2019, 1). Unlike twenty years earlier, when the field was struggling
to define itself in relation to film studies, today animation studies is less
concerned with finding proper definitions and more interested in asking
new questions pertinent to animation as a medium in the broadest possi-
ble sense. A number of recent studies have theorized animation themati-
cally (Pilling 2012; Buchan 2013; Batkin 2017), on the basis of genre
(Wells 2002; Cavallaro 2009; Honess Roe 2013; Clements 2017), form
(Harris et al. 2019), technique and materiality (Ruddell and Ward 2019),
global influence (Bruckner et al. 2018), and neuroscience (Bissonnette
2019). Most recently, animation studies has increasingly become a trans-
national endeavor, propelled both by the transnationalization of the enter-
tainment industry and a growing understanding of animation history, as
demonstrated by a special issue on this topic published by the Society for
Animation Studies (Agnoli and Denison 2019).
The so-called spatial, cultural, transcultural, transnational, affective,
and material turns in the humanities and the social sciences over the past
decades have catalyzed new discourses and terminologies for rethinking
memory in the twenty-first century. As Lucy Bond, Stef Craps, and Pieter
Vermeulen (2018, 1) assert in their recent volume Memory Unbound:
Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies, memory is “presently conceptu-
alized as something that does not stay put but circulates, migrates, travels;
it is more and more perceived as a process, as work that is continually in
progress, rather than as a reified object.” Rather than restricting memory
research to monolithic categories of nation, culture, and generation,
memory studies has been moving toward exploring memory’s transna-
tional, transcultural, and transgenerational dimensions (2).
The general move toward investigating memory’s inter- and transdisci-
plinary dimensions that characterize contemporary research in memory
studies is reflected in the kinds of questions asked within animation stud-
ies. Increasing emphasis is laid on the performative and affective dimen-
sions of animation from the point of view of the spectator. As Lilly
Husbands and Caroline Ruddell (2019, 10) contend, “examining anima-
tion in spectatorial terms opens up opportunities to explore not only what
animation is but also what it can do—what it can show us and enable us to
4 M. VAN GAGELDONK ET AL.

feel” (italics in the original). Likewise, the shift of emphasis from the
ontology of animation to the spectator’s experience requires that such
unique properties of animation as the illusion of movement and metamor-
phosis be examined from a phenomenological perspective (Buchan 2006).
These new lines of inquiry in both animation and memory studies have
created a solid platform for cross-fertilization between the two fields to
which our volume seeks to contribute.
Animation and Memory emerged from a two-day conference organized
at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in June 2017. During
the conference around forty-five international academics and animated
filmmakers alike discussed areas of intersection between animated film and
memory. What became clear, from the enthusiastic response to the call for
papers, and the large number of attendants, was the need for a platform
for cross-fertilization between animation studies and memory studies.
This book, while only able to cover a fraction of the subjects discussed
during the conference, hopes to catalyze further research in this area.
What follows is a critical overview of the ways in which animation serves
as a medium for the performance of personal and collective memory.

Animated Film and Memory


Chosen as the best animated film on the basis of a four-year poll carried out
in 2002, Russian filmmaker Yuri Norstein’s Tale of Tales (1979) vividly
illustrates the performative and mediated nature of memory, as it comes to
the fore in the quote from Marquez in the epigraph. The film is structured
like a series of loosely intertwined memories centered around the sacrifice
of Russian soldiers in World War II, which underlines the significance of
free association in the functioning of memory. Recurring scenes of soldiers
departing for the war and their loved ones receiving letters of their deaths
are interspersed with motifs of fairy tales and popular culture particularly
recognizable for a generation of Russians who grew up in the wake of the
war. As Mikhail Iampolski writes in his astute assessment of the film, Tale
of Tales is not just a film about the shared memories of a generation who
witnessed the war as children, Norstein’s film also explicitly uses the func-
tioning of memory as a structuring device: “What confronts us is not sim-
ply a film about memory, but a film built like a memory itself, which
imitates in its special composition the structural texture of our conscious-
ness” (1987, 104). Specifically, the interlacement of scenes in an associative
INTRODUCTION 5

structure driven by visual symbolism foregrounds animation’s potential to


reflect on the mediated and performative nature of memory.
Objects play a particularly important role in propelling the associative
flow of memory, as exemplified by the madeleine cake in Marcel Proust’s
In Search of Lost Time, which prompts the narrator to involuntarily recall
his childhood memories. Recent scholarship in memory studies has dedi-
cated distinguished attention to the role of material culture in the perfor-
mance and mediation of memories (Munteán et al. 2017). Animation
films have extensively addressed this dimension of memory at the levels of
both narrative and technique. For instance, in the stop motion film After
All (2017), by Australian filmmaker Michael Cusack, we follow a man
clearing out his childhood home. Set against a black background that
resembles a stage, memories, triggered by various objects he encounters,
come to life and prompt an extended discussion between the man and his
deceased mother, who used to live in the house. At the level of narrative,
these objects delineate the contours of the absent person and provide an
interface for connection. At the level of technique, Cusack’s puppets, in
their deliberate artificiality, disclose the material texture of the animation,
while the smooth movement of the camera between various scenes accen-
tuates the associative structure of memory. Izabela Plucińska’s clay anima-
tion Liebling (2013) dramatizes precisely the opposite, when objects are
devoid of memories for the amnesiac protagonist. The film compels view-
ers to perceive clay not simply as a narrative medium but rather as a mate-
rial that blurs the contours between foreground and background, person
and object, present and past.
No matter how personal, memories cannot be extracted from the col-
lective experience of the past in which they are entangled. As Maurice
Halbwachs (1992) maintains in his 1925 book On Collective Memory, one
of the earliest and most salient works in the field of memory studies, indi-
vidual memories are shaped by social frameworks. In his notion of cultural
memory, Jan Assmann (2008) underlines the role of communities in keep-
ing memories alive. The free association of memories in Norstein’s Tale of
Tales is, for instance, just as personal as it is enveloped in the collective
memories of his generation. Scenes of soldiers marching into the distance
and letters falling from the sky, bringing news of their deaths to their fami-
lies, evoke experiences that may not even be Norstein’s own but rather
shared by many in his age group. Individual memories are constitutive of
collective imaginaries of the past, sustained by the circulation of stories
and myths, iconic photographs and films, as well as other products of
6 M. VAN GAGELDONK ET AL.

popular culture. These shared imaginaries and sentiments, in turn, shape


individual recollections, as the film’s title, Tale of Tales, also suggests.
Chinese animator Lei Lei’s Recycled (2012) showcases the interrelation
between collective and individual memories from a different angle. Made
in cooperation with French photography collector Thomas Sauvin, the
film consists of a few thousand discarded private family photos recovered
from a recycling zone outside of Beijing. Viewers are confronted with a
barrage of visual imagery as the photos flash by at break-neck speed, often
with multiple images juxtaposed. Family photos, as Gillian Rose (2010)
and Marianne Hirsch (1997) have demonstrated, play a crucial role in
sustaining a sense of cohesion and togetherness within families. In
­particular, the time-honored ritual of showing photo albums to family
members and guests constitutes a performance of memory by recounting
stories and anecdotes triggered by the photographs, while conventions of
framing and posing in amateur snapshots both reflect and reinforce cul-
tural norms and hierarchies. Once discarded, these photos cease to func-
tion as conduits for the transmission of personal and familial memories. In
the hands of Lei Lei and Sauvin, however, they come to serve as frames of
a film featuring people posing at similar landmarks in Beijing. As personal
memories give way to collectively recognizable locations and conventions
of posing, the images are literally recycled as vehicles of collective memo-
ries of the metropolis. With the inclusion of faded and damaged photo-
graphs, the filmmakers also lay bare the material texture of both the
retrieved photos and the resulting film itself.
If material culture is key to the mediation and performance of memo-
ries, geographical locations are no less relevant. With the vanishing of
milieux de mémoire (environments of memory), communities that once
ensured the preservation and transmission of collective memories to pos-
terity, Pierre Nora (1989) underlines the role of lieux de mémoire (sites of
memory), where the past is kept alive through commemorative rituals
woven around monuments, memorials, and a variety of locations laden
with mnemonic relevance. Nora’s contribution has yielded voluminous
scholarship on the spatial embeddedness of practices of memory (Young
1993, 2000; Foote 2003; Doss 2010; Trigg 2012) and worked as one of
the catalysts of the “spatial turn” in memory studies. Owing to the vari-
ety and malleability of the materials it utilizes, animation is less tied to the
constraints of physical space than live action films. Consequently, ani-
mated film yields plenty of possibilities to dramatize the relationship
between memory and place, and serve as platforms for mnemonic
INTRODUCTION 7

­ ractices in ways that live action films cannot. Vuk Jevremovic’s Patience
p
of the Memory (2009) is a case in point. It depicts the history of Dresden
by foregrounding the city’s material transformations over centuries of
history (Pikkov 2010, 56). Inspired by artists who lived and worked in
Dresden, the rise and fall of the city’s landmark buildings are animated
through the application of archival footage overlain with layers of paint
that form a palimpsest of shapes, colors, and media, thus dramatizing the
city’s multilayered built environment. Layers also play an important role
in Alexander Schellow’s Tirana (2011), which consists of drawings based
on the filmmaker’s memory of his visit to the Albanian capital combined
with live action footage, interviews, and satellite images. In a similar vein,
How Steel Was Tempered (2018), by the Croatian filmmaker Igor Grubić,
was filmed on location at various abandoned factory sites in Zagreb and
Rijeka. The film combines a comic book style of digital animation with
actual footage shot inside the empty factories. When a father takes his son
to the now abandoned factory where he used to work, the factory comes
to life through animated sequences inserted into the live action footage.
Grubić’s film closely connects the memories of a lost socialist past to
industrial heritage, illustrating the tenacity of memory over time, as well
as its rootedness in place.
Places play a particularly important role in remembering traumatic
events. Reworking Freud’s theses on the structure of the traumatic experi-
ence, contemporary trauma theory defines trauma as an event inassimila-
ble into categories of consciousness, an “event without a referent,” in
Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s words (1992, 102), which the trauma-
tized subject unwillingly relives in various forms of traumatic reenactment.
Sites of trauma constitute a particular category of memory sites. Insofar as
trauma refuses to be recalled consciously as a memory, certain locations
can function as triggers that compel the traumatized subject to relive or
reenact their traumatic experience. Recently, animation studies has also
witnessed a growing interest in the ability of the medium to engage with
traumatic memory, as explored by Victoria Grace Walden’s chapter in The
Animation Studies Reader (2019). As Walden argues, the increased atten-
tion to traumatic memory in animated film in recent years needs to be seen
in tandem with the rise of the animated documentary, where animation
can assist in “[drawing] attention to an individual’s subjective response to
events, rather than claiming to represent official or purportedly objective
accounts of an event” (84). Father and Daughter (2000), by the Dutch
filmmaker Michaël Dudok de Wit, lucidly illustrates this point. The film
8 M. VAN GAGELDONK ET AL.

focuses on a woman who is haunted by the absence of her father who left
her at an early age. Despite the passing of the years and the changing of
the landscape, the daughter time and again returns to the location of her
abandonment, as though reenacting her experience of childhood loss. The
film’s ambiguous ending reunites her with the memory of her father, who,
despite the passing of years, remains the father of her childhood. Here,
once again, the plasticity of animation allows for a sleek transition from an
old woman into a young girl.
For other filmmakers, animation has been a means to work through
trauma. Dennis Tupicoff’s The Darra Dogs (1993) functions as an
­investigation into the filmmaker’s trauma of losing beloved dogs one after
the other as a young boy. The “blunt simplicity” of the animation style
here perfectly befits an equally blunt narrative dealing with echoes of
childhood loss in adult life in a “tough and haunting story,” as the New
York Times wrote (Canby 1993, 16). In some of his other films, Tupicoff
explicitly engages with the reconstruction of traumatic memory. In His
Mother’s Voice (1997) we twice listen to the same radio interview with a
mother whose son was murdered, first accompanied by a colorful, roto-
scoped version of the murder, then played again, but now accompanied by
sparser, black and white pencil animation of the interview itself and of the
mother’s house. Not only does the repetition allow us to scrutinize the
interview more carefully the second time around, but the employment of
the two different animated visualizations also makes the viewer conscious
of the influence that the visualization has on our experience of trauma.
While Dudok’s and Tupicoff’s films demonstrate animation’s potential
to dramatize the impact of trauma on a person’s life, such traumatic expe-
riences as genocide and the destruction of war leave an imprint on the
collective identities of groups and generations of people (Eyerman 2001;
Alexander et al. 2004; Craps 2013). The memory of Auschwitz and
Hiroshima, to name only two, is not restricted to those who experienced
them firsthand, but their long-lasting impact has also affected subsequent
generations. Over recent years, with descendants of genocide survivors
engaging with the traumatic pasts that linger on in their families, the trans-
generational dimension of memory has increasingly come into focus.
Marianne Hirsch (2012) has coined the term postmemory, which denotes
the enduring presence of trauma within the generation that came after the
one whose members had actively experienced trauma. Although members
of this new generation are temporally removed from the traumatic past,
they have developed an affective relationship with it through their parents’
INTRODUCTION 9

and grandparents’ stories. With a twist on the Freudian concept of “work-


ing through” trauma, Victoria Grace Walden (2019, 85) points to the
proliferation of Holocaust-related Lego “brickfilms” that suggest “that
post-memory generations need to play through traumatic pasts in order to
feel bodily invested in them” (italics in original). These animations partake
in the long tradition of using toys as an aide-mémoire, or a memory-aid, to
reenact the Holocaust (Van Alphen 2005). Memories that fall outside the
realm of trauma also have the potential to be owned by successive genera-
tions insofar as they are sustained by films, museums, and products of mass
culture. Alison Landsberg (2004) refers to this type of memory as
­“prosthetic.” Prosthetic memories “emerge at the interface between a per-
son and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site such as
a movie theater or museum. In this moment of contact, an experience
occurs through which the person sutures himself or herself into a larger
history . . . ” (2).
Estonian animation artist Ülo Pikkov’s stop motion film Body Memory
(2011) is centered on the post-World War II deportation of Estonians to
Siberia by the Soviets from the perspective of a postmemory generation.
Although Pikkov has no firsthand experience, the memory of the deporta-
tion has been passed on to his generation as an “unconscious experience,”
which he calls body memory (Pikkov 2018, 36). Pikkov created a set remi-
niscent of the interior of a freight car in which yarn puppets fight for sur-
vival against an outside force that unravels them. The gestures of the
trembling, moving, and unraveling puppets are life-like but, by portraying
them as unwinding spools of yarn, Pikkov represents people as literally
“shackled to their past by the yarn coming from their bodies” (150). The
level of abstraction afforded by stop motion animation serves here as an
expedient to render the body a mnemonic site that harbors the imprint of
traumatic experiences.
Although Body Memory addresses the deportation of Estonians, the film
is not generous with such contextual information. In fact, for viewers less
familiar with Estonian history, the interior of the livestock car evokes
deeply entrenched prosthetic memories of the Holocaust. In the light of
the Holocaust’s prevalence in European and North American cultural
memory, this association is not at all surprising. While the confluence of
the Jewish and the Estonian deportation may be perceived as a problem-
atic aspect of Pikkov’s film, it also provides a platform for engagement
with both memories in relation to each other. As such, Body Memory attests
to animation’s potential to establish a comparison in a non-competitive
10 M. VAN GAGELDONK ET AL.

manner. Memory studies scholar Michael Rothberg (2009) calls this


dimension of collective memory multidirectional. The model of multidi-
rectional memory, Rothberg contends, “posits collective memory as par-
tially disengaged from exclusive versions of cultural identity and
acknowledges how remembrance both cuts across and binds together
diverse spatial, temporal, and cultural sites” (11). In the context of Body
Memory, as Jakob Ladegaard (qtd. in Pikkov 2018, 224) suggests, “we
more often find productive attempts to negotiate such complex relations
in artistic creations than in official political discourses. The way that Ülo
Pikkov’s Body Memory tries to balance a national Estonian memory of
World War II with an international Holocaust iconography is a case
in point.”
A group of animation films that have been on the rise since the 1990s
falls into the category of animated documentaries. Although the conven-
tional understanding of documentary films emphasizes film’s indexical
relation to reality, a quality with which animation is ontologically incom-
patible, documentaries increasingly make use of animation as a strategy of
representation. Instead of reinforcing the ontological difference between
animation and archival footage, Annabelle Honess Roe (2013, 2) regards
animation as a productive medium that “broadens the limits of what and
how we can show about reality by offering new or alternative ways of see-
ing.” As she continues, “by releasing documentary from the strictures of a
causal connection between filmic and profilmic, animation has the poten-
tial to bring things that are temporally, spatially and psychologically dis-
tant from the viewer into closer proximity. It can conflate history, transcend
geography and give insight into the mental states of other people” (2). Ari
Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008) is an eloquent example of the ani-
mated documentary’s potential to problematize the amnesia that befell
Israeli soldiers as a result of their inability to work through their guilt over
the massacre of Palestinian refugees during the 1982 Lebanon War. Unlike
Pikkov’s Body Memory, which addresses the collective trauma of victims
passed on to subsequent generations in the form of postmemory, Waltz
with Bashir engages with the trauma of perpetrators. To visualize what
would otherwise remain repressed, the film uses animation as a means to
reconstruct their forgotten memories (see Honess Roe’s chapter in
this volume).
An essentially different example of animated documentary is Winsor
McCay’s The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), often regarded as the first
INTRODUCTION 11

film in this category. It pioneered the use of animated footage in lieu of


nonexistent, actual footage of the ship’s sinking in 1915, which famously
prompted the United States to enter World War I. By creating animated
footage of an event that went unrecorded, McCay did more than provide
a substitute to stand in for the absence of indexical evidence. As a medium
of memory, the film attests to the potential of animated documentaries to
“offer us an enhanced perspective on reality by presenting the world in a
breadth and depth that live-action alone cannot” (Honess Roe 2019,
129). By doing so, especially with its sentimental ending featuring a young
woman submerging in the deep with her child, the film also serves the
function of propaganda insofar as it posits the sinking of the ocean liner as
an act to be rightfully avenged. Even if the documentary’s fame fades with
time, the widely circulated frame which depicts the Lusitania going under
with her stern ascending and slightly listing has burned into our collective
imaginary of World War I as a prosthetic memory.
Honess Roe’s approach to animated documentaries attests to the grad-
ual shift of scholarly attention from animation’s ontological differences
from live action (Denslow 1997, 2–4) toward the creative ways in which
the two are entangled. With animation’s pervasiveness in everyday life
(Buchan 2013), the destabilization of boundaries between animation and
live action cinema has been regarded as an ongoing tendency, which raises
new questions about the application of animation in the service of realism
(Husbands and Ruddell 2019, 7–8). The increasingly popular technique
of colorization takes animation as a performance of memory to a new
level, as exemplified by Peter Jackson’s 2018 film They Shall Not Grow Old.
In it, Jackson uses archival films of World War I and applies cutting edge
technology to slow down and colorize original footage, thus creating a
stunningly realistic experience of the war. Conceived as a cinematic memo-
rial, Jackson literally retouches the original footage and renders the film a
new kind of prosthetic interface for viewers to affectively engage with the
past. Here, the purpose of animation is not to create the illusion of move-
ment frame by frame, as conventional definitions would hold (Wells 2002,
5; Pikkov 2010, 14), but, literally, to retouch old footage frame by frame
and, bring it closer to today’s viewers through the high level of realism
achieved. Jackson’s project is a recent example of the evaporation of bor-
ders between animation, live action, and the documentary form, and it
opens new horizons to exploit animation’s potential to catalyze mnemonic
practices.
12 M. VAN GAGELDONK ET AL.

The Structure of the Book


Animation and Memory not only aims to serve as the conjunction of ani-
mation studies and memory studies, but also as an adjoining platform
where other scholarly discourses, such as material, city, gender, trauma,
and film studies, conduce an effervescent ground to divulge the intricacies
of memory through the medium of animation. To do this, the book exam-
ines the fields of animation and memory studies through a variety of case
studies that engage the problematics of (im)materiality, re-presentation,
documentation, architecture, and the body. Consequently, the structure
of the book is divided into five thematic parts, each of which focuses on a
particular way of thinking about memory through animation, exploring
how animation animates memories, or, how it deals with their absence.
Moreover, each part of the book begins with an intervention by German
artist Alexander Schellow, who, by using Indian ink drawings on see-­
through paper, employs drawing as a performative means of remember-
ing, simultaneously a tool and a trace in the process of “memory
reconstruction.”
Part I, “Memory and Materiality,” looks at the construction and medi-
ation of memory through human interaction with profilmic materials,
showing how animated materials can become a means of memory work in
lived and meaningful ways. It suggests that memory is rooted in the expe-
riential, where everyday objects can be either invested with latent memo-
ries or divested of them through particular animation techniques, such as
stop motion and collage, or through the animation of materials such as
clay. To develop a phenomenological understanding of how stop motion
technique can be used to express memory and forgetting, Suzanne Buchan
examines films by the Quay Brothers, Adara Todd, and Hiraki Sawa, sug-
gesting how objects in these particular examples can activate eradicated
memories in the diegetic presence of a living human protagonist that is
witnessed by an audience. By specifically focusing on stop motion in her
chapter, Buchan offers a new analytical framework that sees this technique
as a performative vehicle for the reification of individual and cultural mem-
ory, as well as the loss thereof. Approaching materiality from a different
angle, Maarten van Gageldonk delves into a body of recent collage films
by the American animator Stacey Steers, showing how collage can become
a rupture that reconfigures cultural memory through recontextualization,
thereby subverting the gender-prescribed roles usually given to actresses
in early Hollywood (Chap. 2). Afterward, László Munteán’s reading of
INTRODUCTION 13

Izabela Plucińska’s animation Liebling (2013) explores the affordance of


clay in relation to representing amnesia. Unlike the way in which forget-
ting is key to the proper functioning of the brain in day-to-day life, amne-
sia denotes a whole or partial loss of memory caused by psychological
trauma. Through his materialist interpretation of Plucińska’s animation,
Munteán proposes that clay can operate as a material of amnesia through
which the memory of things, people, and places emerges and vanishes in
the animation (Chap. 3).
Part II, “Animation Techniques and Memory,” examines how the logi-
cal structures of the past and the present, and thus the memory of those,
can be re-presented through different animation techniques, such as meta-
morphosis and drawing. Metamorphosis, for instance, not only allows ani-
mators to reflect the fluidity and performativity of memory, that is, its
everchanging nature, but it also makes it possible to conceive of memory
processes through the transmutation of individual still frames in anima-
tion. While animation’s primary currency is movement, Nicholas Andrew
Miller explores a visual dynamic in which the antithesis of figural stasis is
not motion but transformation, demonstrating how a single frame in Ruth
Lingford’s Death and the Mother (1997) can operate structurally as a fig-
ure of the persistence of the past in the form of a remembered image
(Chap. 4). By focusing on drawing in Robert Breer’s Bang! (1986) and
What Goes Up (2003), Miriam Harris looks at how this specific technique
makes references to autobiographical themes that can hurtle the viewer
back to the pre-linguistic realm through the use of animation (Chap. 5).
Part III, “Trauma and the Body,” inspects the intersection of the body
and memory in order to examine how animation can be used as a method
of engaging with the unrepresentable, that is, the corporeal memories of
past events that are sedimented within the body in the phenomenal world.
By investigating the link between the body and traumatic memories, this
part of the book asks how the bodily loss of a person after a traumatic
accident can be transmitted, felt, and even perceived in another person.
Furthermore, it questions how animation can blur the boundaries between
past and present, thus collapsing temporal linearity, by linking traumatic
memory to the body. Discussing the phenomenon of the phantom limb in
Alex Grigg’s animation Phantom Limb (2013), Ali Shobeiri proposes that,
for the animated character who has not physically lost a limb, but never-
theless feels this loss, the phantom limb’s sensations spring up as what he
terms “antumbral memory,” a psychosomatic memory whose spectral
shadow is felt in a person while its corporeal source is twice removed from
14 M. VAN GAGELDONK ET AL.

that person (Chap. 6). Subsequently, by exploring the connections


between traumatic memories and the body in Michèle Cournoyer’s ani-
mated film The Hat (1999), Ruth Richards looks at how the sustained
metamorphosis of the body can function as a tool that allows the animator
to interrogate the allusive and subjective dispositions of memory (Chap. 7).
Shifting its focus from the body to the urban environment, part IV,
“Animating Urban Pasts,” looks at how recent animation technologies
reconstruct vanished architectural sites of the past in order to deal with
present debates on gentrification, collective memory, and cultural identity.
Animation not only has the ability to enliven the city by previsualizing
how it will appear in the future, but it can also digitally rebuild what has
gone unheeded in the collective memory of its residents. Through reading
several animated films made by Stan Douglas, Joel McKim explores how
these animations digitally reconstruct a largely overlooked period of
Vancouver’s seamy past that stands in sharp contrast to the current afflu-
ent image of the city as a metropolis of gleaming condo towers (Chap. 8).
In the next chapter, Cansu van Gageldonk looks at Özlem Sulak’s recent
animation film Cinema Emek, Cinema Labour, Cinema Travail (2016),
suggesting how the artist not only uses animation as a mimetic substitu-
tion of the past, but also as a metonym to revitalize the collective memory
of the recent protest against the gentrification projects in Istanbul
(Chap. 9).
Part V, “Documentary and Animation,” explores how animation can
comment on the collective memories of the past through exploring the
documentational capacities of the medium. By particularly focusing on
animated documentary, this part of the book sheds light on the possibili-
ties and challenges of this genre regarding the representations of ancestral
discontinuity and autism. Hannah Ebben offers a unique reading of the
cultural representation of autism in the CBBC’s animated documentary
My Autism and Me (2011), in order to decentralize a realist understanding
of the clinical condition in favor of a cultural critique of ableist prosthetic
memory (Chap. 10). In the last chapter of the book, Annabelle Honess
Roe provides a salient analysis of two animated documentaries, Irinka and
Sandrinka (2007) and Waltz with Bashir (2008), putting forward the
contestational potential of this genre to counter long-established official
histories (Chap. 11).
Through its unprecedented interdisciplinary approach and varied case
studies, Animation and Memory aspires to construct a new theoretical and
methodological platform that contributes to both the expanding field of
memory studies and the germinating field of animation studies.
INTRODUCTION 15

SHE
An intervention by Alexander Schellow
You see a trace left by an encounter—one frame of the animation, SHE,
is split into six phases, which appear as interventions throughout this book
in the reversal of the drawing’s creation: its disappearance.
I decided to give myself a task—to describe from memory as precisely
as possible one drawing process:
The paper forms a shallow surface space. The tip of the brush is dipped into
the ink. The edges of the format, in addition to being visible, can also be sensed
from the body’s composure and the various hand positions. An association is
created between the awareness of the hand, its position relative to the sur-
rounding format, and the punctually construed recollection present in con-
sciousness, which is not yet pictured at this point in time.
For years I visited HER in the clinic where she was staying. I became
some kind of a “proximate other” to her, and she to me. The woman suf-
fered from Alzheimer’s for many years. She had lost her capacity to
remember, or her ability to be in (only) one other place seen from a
“standpoint,” or to name an object and thereby say precisely “I” through
this relation to the object. Vis-à-vis “her-self,” the woman is located in a
sliding state of constant transformation on the outer surface of a body of
memory now and forever closed; a state analogous to that which prevents
her from identifying “something” or someone—not being able to address
me as “you,” for example, at the other end of the room. And turned
around again: if it were still possible, to say “me” to herself, would that
not refer to a state of subject anymore? “Me,” here, might be the inexis-
tent overlapping point of oscillating processes of (non-)consciousness.
Then, who was that “you” who sat across from her all these years?
A shift of weight lowers the perpendicular brush to a point just above the
surface of the paper, right before the swell of the ink touches the receiving stra-
tum. The flow of the ink follows its contact with the surface. The spot is the
trace of this contact between two materials. The precise quality of the outflow
depends on the quality of the ensuing contact of release along with the complex
surrounding conditions, such as the surface tension of the ink drop (affected
by dilution factor, drop size, and temperature) or the texture of the paper
surface at the exact marking point (fiber length, temperature, contours,
thickness, and moisture of paper). The microscopic triggering parameters find
their greatly intensified effect in the two-dimensionality of the spot: in its
bounds, the very specific contours of its edges, its size, the dispersion of ink on
the surface defined by it.
16 M. VAN GAGELDONK ET AL.

Later on, in the studio, through drawing, I remembered her image, dot
by dot, frame by frame, in an endless process. This practice existed before
our first encounter: dots are placed within a specifically defined set of pro-
cedures to create complex spotted structures, which serve as a trigger for
projection—of concrete visual situations of the past. It is particularly their
quality of indefinition that can be used to access a less conscious nexus of
memorizing and forgetting, in order to process such past visual surfaces
anew. Following such a method of drawing is neither a medium of repro-
duction, nor is what it produces simply a representation of a preexisting
image. Rather, it can be seen at the same time as a tool and a trace within
a process of remembering.
This marking, though it is minimal, transforms the entire surface of the
format as it intervenes into its fragile relational system. In the case of the first
dot, we could even say it renders the format primarily into such: a relational
system, a network of punctual information, into which “an image”
can be read.
Thus, once the first spot has been set, the described process is repeated under
completely transformed conditions: as for now, the map is no longer only for-
mat and material. It contains a trace.
To date, about 15,000 single image reconstructions (re)animate, frame
by frame, her facial landscape. The movement is perceived like a ghost,
between failing representations. Their collapse concretely enacts the status
of a subject in which the individual framework of perceptions and memo-
ries begins to dissolve, bordering on dysfunction. What appears are exclu-
sively moments of “just before”—a perception, a thought, a memory. In
such a zone, the individual begins to disappear; still, the result of this
endless mental movement does not seem like an absence—neither of iden-
tity, nor of meaning. On the contrary, the drawings reconstruct a space of
memory without remembering. A space that appears as a crystallization of
that which might constitute itself as “subject”: a maximum of life in
appearance and disappearance of momentary lines and traces of (his-)sto-
ries. Though they may be illegible, their complex potential is hardly arbi-
trary. What they enact could be seen as a communication without language;
narration and utopia in a literal sense.
The oscillation between the individual parts of the perception apparatus
(hand, sense of touch, eye, nerves, brain, etc.) expands toward a stronger
reflexive zone that could be called a reading of predetermined information.
Eye and hand, inasmuch as the hand reveals to the eye additional possibilities
of exegetical placement (interpretations), search within the increasingly
INTRODUCTION 17

expanding framework of visual information for a visual perception that may


be linked to the punctually triggering fragment of recollection.
I like the idea that “I” for “her” in this “scene” might have been some-
thing like how she was for me in the latter and still within an ongoing
reconstruction process: a catalyst of an intertwined act of remembering
and forgetting. One can play with such a thought, although it remains, of
course, pure and unidirectional speculation.
Such reflexive projection of “a memory” interlocks at the point with the
tentative hand and its positioning of information in that it becomes the
increasingly dominant part of the recollection form as the drawing
progresses.
The drawing is created from an oscillation between these components. In
other words: step by step and increasingly dominant, the existing potential
image overwrites the hybrid agility of the “original” recollection. It replaces
the remembered as a form of materialized memory and performs a practical
work of forgetting.
My grandmother died in November 2014 at the age of 101.

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Harris, Miriam, Lily Husbands, and Paul Taberham. 2019. Experimental
Animation: From Analogue to Digital. London: Routledge.
Hirsch, Marianne. 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory.
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———. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the
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Honess Roe, Annabelle. 2013. Animated Documentary. London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
———. 2019. Animation and Performance. In The Animation Studies Reader, ed.
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et al., 5–15. New York: Bloomsbury.
INTRODUCTION 19

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Soviet Occupation in Body Memory. In Anti-Animation: Textures of Eastern
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Memory in Art and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge.
Nora, Pierre. 1989. Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.
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———. 2018. Anti-Animation: Textures of Eastern European Animated Film
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Publishing.
———, ed. 2012. Animating the Unconscious: Desire, Sexuality and Animation.
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Plate, Liedeke, and Anneke Smelik, eds. 2013. Performing Memory in Art and
Popular Culture. New York: Routledge.
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Politics of Sentiment. Farnham: Ashgate.
Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust
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Athens: Ohio University Press.
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———. 2000. At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary
Art and Architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press.
PART I

Memory and Materiality


Memoria Rerum: Animated Materiality,
Memory, and Amnesia

Suzanne Buchan

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 expe-
rience; 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: mate-
rial, functional, and symbolic; and this suggests memory is rooted in expe-
riential, 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 place-
holders 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 exam-
ine films with implicit and explicit themes of memory, from the Quay

S. Buchan (*)
Royal College of Art, London, UK

© The Author(s) 2020 23


M. van Gageldonk et al. (eds.), Animation and Memory, Palgrave
Animation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34888-5_2
24 S. BUCHAN

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 pres-
ent 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 sociocul-
tural 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 exer-
cise, 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 exam-
ine 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 mad-
MEMORIA RERUM: ANIMATED MATERIALITY, MEMORY… 25

eleine and deals specifically with matter, stuff and things, and entangle-
ments—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 develop-
ment, 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, net-
work),” as well as ask how individuals, organizations, collectives, genera-
tions, and societies “come to experience, use and debate memory” (2).
They also comment on “technologies [that] mediate meaning and experi-
ence 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 repre-
sentation 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 dif-
ferent 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 sym-
bolic (influence, immaterial, social, and cultural); public memory and cul-
tural trauma (ethics), as well as ethnic, generational, and national groups.
These external aspects are something animation filmmakers can circum-
vent 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 memo-
ries, Maurice Halbwachs regarded “history as dead memory, a way of pre-
serving pasts to which we no longer have an ‘organic’ experiential relation”
(quoted in Lentin 2010, 24), and thus he demarcated memory from his-
tory, as does Pierre Nora (1989, 9), who distinguishes history that belongs
“to everyone and no one,” from “memory [that] takes root in the
26 S. BUCHAN

c­ oncrete, 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 techni-
cal processes. Astrid Erll summarizes these in Memory and Culture as fol-
lows: (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 expres-
sion, transmission, and interpretation of memory. To ask a central ques-
tion 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 interpreta-
tion, and the need for intermediaries to interpret (here I mention Aby
Warburg, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor Adorno as criti-
cal touchstones in the West, and there are many others). Another theme is
the construction and reception of memory, its hegemonic dominance, and
our acceptance of how it should feel—what we can call “official” mem-
ory—and, on the other side, its contestation in a vernacular sense of how
social reality really feels. These debates can be found in generational,
MEMORIA RERUM: ANIMATED MATERIALITY, MEMORY… 27

­ olitical, and social differences of historical remembering (Confino 1997,


p
1401) of trauma or historical events, for instance.

From Ars Memoria to Media


Another question for us to ask when considering the visual imagery of
animation is: how does memory work? In the Greek Classical period (Le
Goff’s second period of the “rise of memory”) notable poets who exam-
ined memory include Quintilian and Aristotle, and in De Oratore (55 BCE)
Cicero tells us Simonides invented the art of memory as one of five ele-
ments of the rhetorical system of oratory persuasion. According to Cicero
in his Rhetorica ad Herrennium, written around 80 BCE, memory is
described as “the treasure-house of inventions” (quoted in Yates [1966]
1999, 20). To develop oratory, imaginary mnemonic structuring aimed to
create a “memory building” or “palace” composed of a series of imagined
places and spaces that are populated by other elements: these helped visu-
alize and remember the organization of a speech, for instance. Later tech-
niques developed besides the architectural references are graphical and
textual mnemonics. In her seminal work, Art of Memory, Frances Yates
suggests “we have to think of the ancient orator as moving in imagination
through his memory building whilst he is making his speech, drawing
from the memorised places and images he has placed on them” ([1966]
1999, 3). She wrote that these “inner techniques . . . depend on visual
impressions of almost incredible intensity” and that Cicero emphasized
“the art of memory rested, not only on the discovery of the importance of
order for memory, but also on the discovery that the sense of sight is the
strongest of all the senses” (4). In the Greek rhetorical system, memory is
an internally visualized imagination of a trajectory. In a memory palace,
the orator moves backward, forward, in any direction. The spatiotemporal
nature of the method is apparent, and it is interesting to speculate what
the classic poets, whose mnemonic supports were the cultural products
available to them—text, art, and architecture—would have done with
their ars memorativa if cinema had been invented then (the cinema studies
model for media memory is of course Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”).
This heuristic technique of mental shortcuts went through many adapta-
tions over the centuries, through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to
the Enlightenment. Today it would be described as a cognitive map or
mnemonic ordering, and computing employs memory as a mechanism,
28 S. BUCHAN

such as Distributed Shared Memory Systems, all of this in anticipation of


AI (artificial intelligence)—but that is another topic for another time.
As neurological and cognitive processes, memory and its recall, and its
companion, forgetting, are at work constantly in our waking and uncon-
scious lives. These are experiences that remain invisible, subjective, and
personal until their interpretation and expression through some form of
communication. In her writings on the mental, social, and material fea-
tures of memory culture, Astrid Erll (2011, 104) notes that “media not
only connect [these] three dimensions of memory culture; they are also
the interface between the collected and collective, the cognitive and the
social/media level of memory,” and she observes that there are “different
modes of remembering identical past events” (104) as individuals, society,
political, or family history. Neiger, Meyers, and Zandberg (2011, 7) make
a valuable distinction between media and “memory agents such as aca-
demia or historical museums which are, by and large, committed to a com-
mon ethos of depicting the past according to agreed-upon, publicly known
conventions,” but they contrast this by observing that “the divergence
among media genres is enormous.” Later I will propose that there is an
additional divergence and wealth of visual expression available to anima-
tion directors and artists, not least because, besides the breadth of genres
it can engage with, animation (not a genre) is also a set of techniques and
a filmic and digital media form. The images produced by these techniques
extend beyond formal and visual qualities of non-animated film and other
arts practices. But what does memory “look like,” and how does it get
from mind to linguistic articulation to screen?
Personal memory is intangible and becomes accessible to ourselves and
others through a number of processes, including excogitation—the pro-
cess of thinking things out. Moving image media enhance accessibility to
interpretations of memories, but the same event can have different narra-
tive and stylistic approaches, visualization strategies, and construction
(Tekin 2012, 6), all of which depend on differing cultural or social origi-
nators of artworks. Media and memory studies work with a variety of
memory typologies and analytical tools, like textual and content analysis
(visual and sound) of formal film elements (narrative, mise-en-scène, etc.),
and interpretation, from explicit to implicit to symptomatic (Bordwell and
Thompson 2008, 60–64); and again, these can be subject to a director’s
(and critic’s) own preferences and subjectivity. Kuhn, Biltereyst, and Meers
(2017, 9) comment on distinctive features of cinema memory research:
“the mix of approaches, modes of investigation, source materials, data and
MEMORIA RERUM: ANIMATED MATERIALITY, MEMORY… 29

uses of data it deploys and creates.” Just a few they mention include ques-
tionnaires, focus groups and interviews, observations, diaries, testimonies,
and memories, most of which are worked with qualitatively, and increas-
ingly, with digital tools (9–10); but they also raise questions about validity
and transparency of data (11), and encourage wide sharing of raw data.
The range of different disciplinary meanings for the term collective mem-
ory is further problematized by film: Grainge (2003, 7) suggests “the
notion of authentic and territorialised memory, tied to personal and col-
lective experience, has been challenged in a media world where the past
may no longer be felt or understood in any culturally specific or referen-
tial sense.”

Entangledness and Cognitio Confusa: The Comb


(From the Museums of Sleep)
Alon Confino (1997, 1388) suggests “the term ‘memory’ can be useful in
articulating the connections between the cultural, the social, and the polit-
ical, between representation and social experience.” I am interested in this
notion of articulation, and the term has a number of meanings, from a
technical sense of joining segments of clear distinct speech to fluent and
coherent expressions of ideas or feelings. I will now briefly explore how
describing a memory has affinities with the psychoanalytic process—the
articulation in spoken language of the simultaneity and chaos of remem-
bering dreams, and making language-based sense during verbal recall of
the disjointed simultaneity of a dream—and then put this to test in a film.
Episodic, repetitive memory, or fragments of experiences are elements of
dreams, an epiphenomenon of regenerative sleep. These fragments are
what Sigmund Freud (1914, 559–61) called “residues of daytime life . . .
[that] are essential ingredients in the formation of dreams, since experi-
ence has revealed the surprising fact that in the content of every dream
some link with a recent daytime impression—often of the most insignifi-
cant sort—is to be detected.” For neuroscientist Penelope Lewis (2013,
96), “dreams not only replay memory fragments but also create brand-­
new, highly creative mixtures of memories and knowledge.” Whether
retained in the mind, or communicated verbally, both are conscious
attempts to comprehend and structure what is recalled. Isidora Stancović
describes this as a “preserved memory flash [that] is without context, lack-
ing basic information about what came before and after it. It is due to
30 S. BUCHAN

narration and interpretation that these flashes have subsequently gained


shape and structure, thus becoming stable” (2014, 89–90). Rudolf
Arnheim (1980, 494) also helps us here: “Visual structuring occurs in two
ways which, for lack of more precise terms, [he] call[s] the intuitive and
the intellectual mode . . . [in the former] . . . the result is a true cognitio
confusa, in which every component is dependent on every other. The
structure of the whole controls the parts and vice versa.” I see a relation
between Arnheim’s cognitio confusa and entanglement, a term that has
leverage in memory studies.

In a synchronic perspective, memory’s entangledness is presented as two-


fold. Every act of remembering inscribes an individual in multiple social
frames. This polyphony entails the simultaneous existence of concurrent
interpretations of the past. In a diachronic perspective, memory is entangled
in the dynamic relation between single acts of remembering and changing
mnemonic patterns. (Feindt et al. 2014, 24)

Because it can present both synchrony and diachrony, the moving image
can work with this polyphony and with both of Arnheim’s modes (intui-
tive and intellectual). Images can represent a “mode of cognition . . . avail-
able only through perception” (Arnheim 1980, 494) that he calls “intuitive
perception [which] conveys the experience of a structure” (495) and
which I would describe as synchronous (in Feindt’s sense), as well as con-
densed and displaced (as in Freud’s), but this perception “does not offer
its ‘intellectual’ analysis” (495). The intellectual analysis in a film is made
possible by the visual and aural articulation of its formal and narrative
structuring—from composition and camera movement to montage and
editing (which is also its diachrony).
[A digression, dear reader. To try this yourself, please take a moment to
call up a memory or remember a dream you’ve had recently. What is it you
remember about it? Were your eyes closed or open? Does this memory
have a structure? Is it something you internally visualize, or feel physically,
or emotionally, or both? How would you reconstruct and describe it to
someone else? What about its temporality? If it was a dream, did it have
any connection to your waking life?]
The Quay Brothers’ 1990 film The Comb (From the Museums of Sleep)
features two animated realms (Feindt et al.’s “frames”). One is the black/
white “real-world” realm of a pixilated sleeping woman in a room (see
Fig. 1), the other a colored realm of animated puppets, environments, and
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Maint de blanc, et point du bis.’

On no word has amateur philology been more riotous. It has


been derived from ‘au gui menez,’ ‘à gui l’an neuf,’ ‘au
gueux menez,’ ‘Hálig monath,’ ἁγία μήνη, ‘Homme est né,’
and the like. Tille thinks that the whole of December was
formerly Hogmanay, and derives from monâth and either
*hoggva, ‘hew,’ hag, ‘witch,’ or hog, ‘pig.’ Nicholson tries
the other end, and traces auguilanleu to the Spanish
aguinaldo or aguilando, ‘a New Year’s gift.’ This in turn he
makes the gerund of *aguilar, an assumed corruption of
alquilar, ‘to hire oneself out.’ Hogmanay will thus mean
properly ‘handsel’ or hiring-money,’ and the first Monday in
the New Year is actually called in Scotland ‘Handsel
Monday.’ This is plausible, but, although no philologist, I
think a case might be made out for regarding the terms as
corruptions of the Celtic Nos Galan-gaeaf, ‘the night of the
winter Calends’ (Rhys, 514). This is All Saints’ eve, while
the Manx ‘Hob dy naa’ quête is on Hollantide (November
12; cf. p. 230).
[886] A Gloucestershire wassail song in Dixon, Ancient
Poems, 199, ends,

‘Come, butler, come bring us a bowl of the best:


I hope your soul in heaven will rest;
But if you do bring us a bowl of the small,
Then down fall butler, bowl and all.’

[887] In Herefordshire and the south of Scotland it is lucky to


draw ‘the cream of the well’ or ‘the flower of the well,’ i. e.
the first pail of water after midnight on New Year’s eve
(Dyer, 7, 17). In Germany Heilwag similarly drawn at
Christmas is medicinal (Grimm, iv. 1810). Pembroke folk
sprinkle each other on New Year’s Day (F. L. iii. 263). St.
Martin of Braga condemns amongst Kalends customs
‘panem in fontem mittere (Appendix N, No. xxiii), and this
form of well-cult survives at Christmas in the Tyrol (Jahn,
283) and in France (Müller, 500). Tertullian chaffs the
custom of early bathing at the Saturnalia (Appendix N, No.
ii). Gervase of Tilbury (ed. Liebrecht, ii. 12) mentions an
English belief (†1200) in a wonder-working Christmas dew.
This Tille (Y. and C. 168) thinks an outgrowth from the
Advent chant Rorate coeli, but it seems closely parallel to
the folk belief in May-dew.
[888] Burne-Jackson, 388; Simpson, 202; F. L. v. 38; Dyer,
410. The festival in its present form can only date from the
reign of James I, but the Pope used to be burned in
bonfires as early as 1570 upon the accession day of
Elizabeth, Nov. 17 (Dyer, 422).
[889] Dyer, 389 (Sussex).
[890] Brand, i. 210, 215 (Buchan, Perthshire, Aberdeenshire,
North Wales).
[891] Pfannenschmidt, 207; Jahn, 240.
[892] Ashton, 47 (Isle of Man, where the day is called ‘Fingan’s
Eve’).
[893] Jahn, 253.
[894] F. L. xii. 349; W. Gregor, Brit. Ass. Rept. (1896), 620
(Minnigaff, Galloway; bones being saved up for this fire);
Gomme, Brit. Ass. Rept. (1896), 633 (Biggar, Lanarkshire).
[895] Brand, i. 14; Dyer, 22 (Gloucestershire, Herefordshire).
Twelve small fires and one large one are made out in the
wheat-fields.
[896] Dyer, 507; Ashton, 218; Simpson, 205; Gomme, Brit.
Ass. Rept. (1896), 631; F. L. J. vii. 12; Trans. Soc. Antiq.
Scot. x. 649.
[897] Simpson, 205, quoting Gordon Cumming, From the
Hebrides to the Himalayas, i. 245.
[898] Bede, D. T. R. c. 17: cf. the A.-S. passage quoted by
Pfannenschmidt, 495; Jahn, 252. Other Germanic names
for the winter months are ‘Schlachtmonat,’ ‘Gormânaða’: cf.
Weinhold, Die deutschen Monatsnamen, 54.
[899] Jahn, 229; Tille, Y. and C. 28, 65; Pfannenschmidt, 206,
217, 228.
[900] Dyer, 456, 470, 474, 477; Ashton, 171; Karl Blind, The
Boar’s Head Dinner at Oxford and an Old Teutonic Sun-
God, in Saga Book of Viking Club for 1895.
[901] Dyer, 473.
[902] Hampson, i. 82.
[903] Gummere, G. O. 433.
[904] Tacitus, Germ. 45, of the Aestii, ‘matrem deum
venerantur. insigne superstitionis formas aprorum gestant:
id pro armis omnique tutela securum deae cultorem etiam
inter hostis praestat.’
[905] Dyer, 439.
[906] Dyer, 492; Ashton, 204; Grimm, iv. 1816.
[907] Dyer, 481; N. W. Thomas, in F. L. xi. 250. Cf. ch. xvii for
the hunt of a cat and a fox at the ‘grand Christmas’ of the
Inner Temple.
[908] Dyer, 494, 497; Frazer, ii. 442; Northall, 229.
[909] Ashton, 114 (Reculver); Dyer, 472 (Ramsgate);
Ditchfield, 27 (Walmer), 28 (Cheshire: All Souls’ day).
[910] Dyer, 486.
[911] Ditchfield, 28.
[912] Bertrand, 314; Arbois de Jubainville, Cycl. myth. 385;
Rhys, C. H. 77.
[913] Tille, D. W. 109.
[914] C. de Berger (1723), Commentatio de personis vulgo
larvis seu mascharis, 218 ‘Vecolo aut cervolo facere; hoc
est sub forma vitulae aut cervuli per plateas discurrere, ut
apud nos in festis Bacchanalibus vulgo dicitur correr la
tora’; J. Ihre ( † 1769), Gloss. Suio-Gothicum, s. v. Jul.
‘Julbock est ludicrum, quo tempore hoc pellem et formam
arietis induunt adolescentuli et ita adstantibus incursant.
Credo idem hoc esse quod exteri scriptores cervulum
appellant.’ In the Life of Bishop Arni (nat. 1237) it is
recorded how in his youth he once joined in a scinnleic or
‘hide-play’ (C. P. B. ii. 385). Frazer, ii. 447, describes the
New Year custom of colluinn in Scotland and St. Kilda. A
man clad in a cowhide is driven deasil round each house to
bless it. Bits of hide are also burnt for amulets. Probably
the favourite Christmas game of Blind Man’s Buff was
originally a scinnleic (N. W. Thomas, in F. L. xi. 262).
[915] Brand, i. 210, 217; Jackson and Burne, 381, 392, 407;
Ashton, 178; Jahn, 487, 500; Müller, 487, 500.
Scandinavian countries bake the Christmas ‘Yule-boar.’
Often this is made from the last sheaf and the crumbs
mixed with the seed-corn (Frazer, ii. 29). Germany has its
Martinshörner (Jahn, 250; Pfannenschmidt, 215).
[916] Dyer, 501; Ashton, 214.
[917] Brand, i. 19; Dyer, 21, 447; Ashton, 86, 233. Brand, i.
210, describes a Hallow-e’en custom in the Isle of Lewis of
pouring a cup of ale in the sea to ‘Shony,’ a sea god.
[918] Brand, i. 14; Dyer, 22, 448; Northall, 187. A cake with a
hole in the middle is hung on the horn of the leading ox.
[919] Grimm, iv. 1808. Hens are fed on New Year’s day with
mixed corn to make them lay well.
[920] Gregory, Posthuma, 113 ‘It hath been a Custom, and yet
is elsewhere, to whip up the Children upon Innocents-Day
morning, that the memory of this Murther might stick the
closer, and in a moderate proportion to act over the cruelty
again in kind.’ In Germany, adults are beaten (Grimm, iv.
1820). In mediaeval France ‘innocenter,’ ‘donner les
innocents,’ was a custom exactly parallel to the Easter
prisio (Rigollot, 138, 173).
[921] Dyer, 24; Cortet, 32; Frazer, iii. 143; Deslyons, Traités
contre le Paganisme du Roi boit (2nd ed. 1670). The
accounts of Edward II record a gift to the rex fabae on
January 1, 1316 (Archaeologia, xxvi. 342). Payments to the
‘King of Bene’ and ‘for furnissing his graith’ were made by
James IV of Scotland between 1490 and 1503 (L. H. T.
Accounts, 1. ccxliii; 11. xxiv, xxxi, &c.). The familiar mode of
choosing the king is thus described at Mont St. Michel ‘In
vigilia Epyphaniae ad prandium habeant fratres gastellos et
ponatur faba in uno; et frater qui inveniet fabam, vocabitur
rex et sedebit ad magnam mensam, et scilicet sedebit ad
vesperas ad matutinam et ad magnam missam in cathedra
parata’ (Gasté, 53). The pre-eminence of the bean, largest
of cereals, in the mixed cereal cake (cf. ch. vi) presents no
great difficulty; on the religious significance attached to it in
South Europe, cf. W. W. Fowler, 94, 110, 130. Lady Jane
Grey was scornfully dubbed a Twelfth-day queen by
Noailles (Froude, v. 206), just as the Bruce’s wife held her
lord a summer king (ch. viii).
[922] Accts. of St. Michael’s, Bath, s. ann. 1487, 1490, 1492
(Somerset Arch. Soc. Trans. 1878, 1879, 1883). One entry
is ‘pro corona conducta Regi Attumnali.’ The learned editor
explains this as ‘a quest conducted by the King’s Attorney’!
[923] Ashton, 119; Dyer, 388, 423, 427.
[924] Brand, i. 261, prints from Leland, Itinerary (ed. 1769), iv.
182, a description of the proclamation of Youle by the
sheriffs at the ‘Youle-Girth’ and throughout the city. In
Davies, 270, is a letter from Archbp. Grindal and other
ecclesiastical commissioners to the Lord Mayor, dated
November 13, 1572, blaming ‘a very rude and barbarouse
custome maynteyned in this citie and in no other citie or
towne of this realme to our knowledge, that yerely upon St.
Thomas day before Christmas twoo disguysed persons,
called Yule and Yule’s wife, shoulde ryde throughe the citie
very undecently and uncomely....’ Hereupon the council
suppressed the riding. Drake, Eboracum (1736), 217, says
that originally a friar rode backwards and ‘painted like a
Jew.’ He gives an historical legend to account for the origin
of the custom. Religious interludes were played on the
same day: cf. Representations. The ‘Yule’ of York was
perhaps less a ‘king’ than a symbolical personage like the
modern ‘Old Father Christmas.’
[925] Ramsay, Y. and L. ii. 52; Blomefield, Hist. of Norfolk, iii.
149. The riot was against the Abbot of St. Benet’s Holm,
and the monks declared that one John Gladman was set
up as a king, an act of treason against Henry VI. The city
was fined 1,000 marks. In 1448 they set forth their wrongs
in a ‘Bill’ and explained that Gladman ‘who was ever, and
at thys our is, a man of sad disposition, and trewe and
feythfull to God and to the Kyng, of disporte as hath ben
acustomed in ony cite or burgh thorowe alle this realme, on
Tuesday in the last ende of Cristemesse, viz. Fastyngonge
Tuesday, made a disport with hys neyghbours, havyng his
hors trappyd with tynnsoyle and other nyse disgisy things,
coronned as kyng of Crestemesse, in tokyn that seson
should end with the twelve monethes of the yere, aforn
hym yche moneth disguysed after the seson requiryd, and
Lenton clad in whyte and red heryngs skinns, and his hors
trapped with oystyr-shells after him, in token that sadnesse
shuld folowe, and an holy tyme, and so rode in diverse
stretis of the cite, with other people, with hym disguysed
makyng myrth, disportes and plays.’
[926] Jevons, Plutarch’s Romane Questions, 86. The Ides
(Jan. 9) must have practically been included in the Kalends
festival. The Agonium, probably a sacrifice to Janus, was
on that day (W. W. Fowler, 282).
[927] Appendix N, Nos. ix, xi, xiv, xvii, xviii, xxviii, xxxvi.
[928] G. L. Gomme, in Brit. Ass. Rep. (1896), 616 sqq.; Tille,
D. W. 11, Y. and C. 90; Jahn, 253; Dyer, 446, 466; Ashton,
76, 219; Grimm, iv. 1793, 1798, 1812, 1826, 1839, 1841;
Bertrand, 111, 404; Müller, 478.
[929] Tille, Y. and C. 95.
[930] Dyer, 456; Ashton, 125, 188. A Lombard Capitulary (App.
N, No. xxxviii) forbids a Christmas candle to be burnt
beneath the kneading-trough.
[931] Müller, 236; Dyer, 430; Ashton, 54; Rigollot, 173;
Records of Aberdeen (Spalding Club), ii. 39, 45, 66. In
Belgium the household keys are entrusted to the youngest
child on Innocents’ day (Durr, 73).
[932] Saupe, 9; Tille, Y. and C. 118; Duchesne, 267. A custom
of feasting on the tombs of the dead on the day of St. Peter
de Cathedra (Feb. 22) is condemned by the Council of
Tours (567), c. 23 (Maassen, i. 133) ‘sunt etiam qui in
festivitate cathedrae domui Petri apostoli cibos mortuis
offerunt, et post missas redeuntes ad domos proprias, ad
gentilium revertuntur errores, et post corpus Domini,
sacratas daemoni escas accipiunt.’ I do not doubt that the
Germano-Keltic tribes had their spring Todtenfest, but the
date Feb. 22 seems determined by the Roman Parentalia
extending from Feb. 13 to either Feb. 21 (Feralia) or Feb.
22 (Cara Cognatio): cf. Fowler, 306. The ‘cibi’ mentioned
by the council of Tours seem to have been offered in the
house, like the winter offerings described below; but there
is also evidence for similar Germano-Keltic offerings on the
tomb or howe itself; and these were often accompanied by
dadsisas or dirges; cf. Saupe, Indiculus, 5-9. Saupe
considers the spurcalia in Februario, explained above (p.
114) as a ploughing rite, to be funereal.
[933] Pfannenschmidt, 123, 165, 435; Saupe, 9; Golther, 586;
C. P. B. i. 43; Jahn, 251. The chronicler Widukind, Res
gestae Sax. (Pertz, Mon. SS. iii. 423), describes a Saxon
three-days’ feast in honour of a victory over the Thuringi in
534. He adds ‘acta sunt autem haec omnia, ut maiorum
memoria prodit, die Kal. Octobris, qui dies erroris,
religiosorum sanctione virorum mutati sunt in ieiunia et
orationes, oblationes quoque omnium nos praecedentium
christianorum.’ This is probably a myth to account for the
harvest Todtenfest, which may more naturally be thought of
as transferred with the agricultural rites from November.
For the mediaeval Gemeinwoche, beginning on the Sunday
after Michaelmas, was common to Germany, and not
confined to Saxony. Michaelmas, the feast of angels,
known at Rome in the sixth century, and in Germany by the
ninth, also adapts itself to the notion of a Todtenfest.
[934] Pfannenschmidt, 168, 443.
[935] Mogk, in Paul, iii. 260; Tille, Y. and C. 107.
[936] Cf. p. 231.
[937] Appendix N, Nos. xii, xvii, xxvii, xxxiii, xxxv, xxxix.
[938] Appendix N, No. xlii.
[939] Martin of Amberg, Gewissensspiegel (thirteenth century,
quoted Jahn, 282), the food and drink are left for ‘Percht
mit der eisnen nasen.’
[940] Thes. Paup. s. v. Superstitio (fifteenth century, quoted
Jahn, 282) ‘multi credunt sacris noctibus inter natalem
diem Christi et noctem Epiphaniae evenire ad domos suas
quasdam mulieres, quibus praeest domina Perchta ... multi
in domibus in noctibus praedictis post coenam dimittunt
panem et caseum, lac, carnes, ova, vinum, et aquam et
huiusmodi super mensas et coclearea, discos, ciphos,
cultellos et similia propter visitationem Perhtae cum
cohorte sua, ut eis complaceant ... ut inde sint eis propitii
ad prosperitatem domus et negotiorum rerum
temporalium.’
[941] Usener, ii. 84 ‘Qui preparant mensam dominae Perthae’
(fifteenth century). Schmeller, Bairisch. Wörterb. i. 270,
gives other references for Perchte in this connexion.
[942] Usener, ii. 58.
[943] Dives and Pauper (Pynson, 1493) ‘Alle that ... use nyce
observances in the ... new yere, as setting of mete or
drynke, by nighte on the benche, to fede Atholde or
Gobelyn.’ In English folk-custom, food is left for the house-
spirit or ‘brownie’ on ordinary as well as festal days; cf. my
‘Warwick’ edition of Midsummer Night’s Dream, 145.
[944] Jahn, 283; Brand, i. 18; Bertrand, 405; Cortet, 33, 45.
[945] Appendix N, No. xxiii. If the words ‘in foco’ are not part of
the text, ‘youling’ (cf. pp. 142, 260) may be intended.
[946] Bertrand, 111, 404.
[947] Jahn, 120, 244, 269: the Gertruden-minnes on St.
Gertrude’s day (March 17) perhaps preserve another
fragment of the spring Todtenfest, St. Gertrude here
replacing the mother-goddess; cf. Grimm, iii. xxxviii.
[948] Grimm, i. 268, 273, 281; Mogk, in Paul, iii. 279. The
especial day of Frau Perchte is Epiphany.
[949] Mogk, in Paul, iii. 260; Tille, D. W. 173.
[950] Grimm, iv. 1798.
[951] Ibid. iv. 1814.
[952] Tille, D. W. 163; Grimm, iv. 1782.
[953] Ashton, 104.
[954] Müller, 496.
[955] Hamlet, i. 1. 158. I do not know where Shakespeare got
the idea, of which I find no confirmation; but its origin is
probably an ecclesiastical attempt to parry folk-belief. Other
Kalends notions have taken on a Christian colouring. The
miraculous events of Christmas night are rooted in the
conception that the Kalends must abound in all good
things, in order that the coming year may do so. But
allusions to Christian legend have been worked into and
have transformed them. On Christmas night bees sing
(Brand, i. 3), and water is turned into wine (Grimm, iv.
1779, 1809). While the genealogy is sung at the midnight
mass, hidden treasures are revealed (Grimm, iv. 1840).
Similarly, the cattle of heathen masters naturally shared in
the Kalends good cheer; whence a Christian notion that
they, and in particular the ox and the ass, witnesses of the
Nativity, can speak on that night, and bear testimony to the
good or ill-treatment of the farmers (Grimm, iv. 1809, 1840);
cf. the Speculum Perfectionis, c. 114, ed. Sabatier, 225
‘quod volebat [S. Franciscus] suadere imperatori ut faceret
specialem legem quod in Nativitate Domini homines bene
providerent avibus et bovi et asino et pauperibus’: also p.
250, n. 1.—Ten minutes after writing the above note, I have
come on the following passage in Tolstoi, Résurrection
(trad. franç.), i. 297 ‘Un proverbe dit que les coqs chantent
de bonne heure dans les nuits joyeuses.’
[956] Müller, 272.
[957] Pfannenschmidt, 207.
[958] Müller, 235, 239, 248.
[959] Tille, D. W. 107; Y. and C. 116; Saupe, 28; Io. Iac.
Reiske, Comm. ad Const. Porph., de Caeremoniis, ii. 357
(Corp. Script. Byz. 1830) ‘Vidi puerulus et horrui robustos
iuvenes pelliceis indutos, cornutos in fronte, vultus fuligine
atratos, intra dentes carbones vivos tenentes, quos
reciprocato spiritu animabant, et scintillis quaquaversum
sparsis ignem quasi vomebant, cum saccis cursitantes, in
quos abdere puerulos occursantes minitabantur, appensis
cymbalis et insano clamore frementes.’ He calls them ‘die
Knecht Ruperte,’ and says that they performed in the
Twelve nights. The sacci are interesting, for English nurses
frighten children with a threat that the chimney-sweep (here
as in the May-game inheriting the tradition on account of
his black face) will put them in his sack. The beneficent
Christmas wanderers use the sack to bring presents in; cf.
the development of the sack in the Mummers’ play (p. 215).
[960] Müller, 235, 248.
[961] A mince-pie eaten in a different house on each night of
the Twelves (not twelve mince-pies eaten before
Christmas) ensures twelve lucky months. The weather of
each day in the Twelves determines that of a month
(Harland, 99; Jackson and Burne, 408). I have heard of a
custom of leaping over twelve lighted candles on New
Year’s eve. Each that goes out means ill-luck in a
corresponding month.
[962] Caesarius; Boniface (App. N, Nos. xvii, xviii, xxxiii);
Alsso, in Usener, ii. 65; F. L. iii. 253; Jackson and Burne,
400; Ashton, 111; Brit. Ass. Report (1896), 620. In some of
the cases quoted under the last reference and elsewhere,
nothing may be taken out of the house on New Year’s Day.
Ashes and other refuse which would naturally be taken out
in the morning were removed the night before. Ashes, of
course, share the sanctity of the fire. Cf. the maskers’
threat (p. 217).
[963] Boniface (App. N, No. xxxiii); cf. the Kloster Scheyern
(Usener, ii. 84) condemnation of those ‘qui vomerem
ponunt sub mensa tempore nativitatis Christi.’ For other
uses of iron as a potent agricultural charm, cf. Grimm, iv.
1795, 1798, 1807, 1816; Burne-Jackson, 164.
[964] Cf. Burchardus (App. N, No. xlii); Grimm, iv. 1793, with
many other superstitions in the same appendix to Grimm;
Brand, i. 9; Ashton, 222; Jackson and Burne, 403. The
practical outcome is to begin jobs for form’s sake and then
stop. The same is done on Saint Distaff’s day, January 7;
cf. Brand, i. 15.
[965] Harland, 117; Jackson and Burne, 314; Brit. Ass. Rep.
(1896), 620; Dyer, 483; Ashton, 112, 119, 224. There is a
long discussion in F. L. iii. 78, 253. I am tempted to find a
very early notice of the ‘first foot’ in the prohibition ‘pedem
observare’ of Martin of Braga (App. N, No. xxiii).
[966] F. L. iii. 253.
[967] Kloster Scheyern MS. (fifteenth century) in Usener, ii. 84
‘Qui credunt, quando masculi primi intrant domum in die
nativitatis, quod omnes vaccae generent masculos et e
converso.’
[968] Müller, 269 (Italy). Grimm, iv. 1784, notes ‘If the first
person you meet in the morning be a virgin or a priest, ’tis a
sign of bad luck; if a harlot, of good’: cf. Caspari, Hom. de
Sacrilegiis, § 11 ‘qui clericum vel monachum de mane aut
quacumque hora videns aut o[b]vians, abominosum sibi
esse credet, iste non solum paganus, sed demoniacus est,
qui christi militem abominatur.’ These German examples
have no special relation to the New Year, and the ‘first foot’
superstition is indeed only the ordinary belief in the
ominous character of the first thing seen on leaving the
house, intensified by the critical season.
[969] Tille, D. W. 189; Y. and C. 84, 95, 104.
[970] Cf. p. 238.
[971] Brand, i. 3, 209, 226, 257; Spence, Shetland Folk-Lore,
189; Grimm, iv. 1777-1848 passim; Jackson and Burne,
176, 380, &c., &c. Burchardus (App. N, No. xlii) mentions
that the Germans took New Year omens sitting girt with a
sword on the housetop or upon a [sacrificial] skin at the
crossways. This was called liodorsâza, a term which a
glossator also uses for the kindred custom of cervulus
(Tille, Y. and C. 96). Is the man in Hom. de Sacr. (App. N,
No. xxxix) ‘qui arma in campo ostendit’ taking omens like
the man on the housetop, or is he conducting a sword-
dance?
[972] Burchardus (App. N, No. xlii).
[973] Brand, i. 209.
[974] Grimm, iv. 1781, 1797, 1818.
[975] Quoted Pfannenschmidt, 489 ‘quod autem obscoena
carmina finguntur a daemonibus et perditorum mentibus
immittuntur, quidam daemon nequissimus, qui in Nivella
urbe Brabantiae puellam nobilem anno domini 1216
prosequebatur, manifeste populis audientibus dixit: cantum
hunc celebrem de Martino ego cum collega meo composui
et per diversas terras Galliae et Theutoniae promulgavi.
Erat autem cantus ille turpissimus et plenus luxuriosis
plausibus.’ On Martinslieder in general cf. Pfannenschmidt,
468, 613.
[976] T. Gascoigne, Loci e Libro Veritatum (1403-58), ed.
Rogers, 144.
[977] Aubrey, Gentilisme and Judaisme (F. L. S.), 1.
[978] Tille, D. W. 55; K. Simrock, Deutsche Weihnachtslieder
(1854); Cortet, 246; Grove, Dict. of Music, s. v. Noël; Julian,
Dict. of Hymn. s. v. Carol; A. H. Bullen, Carols and Poems,
1885; Helmore, Carols for Christmastide. The cry ‘Noël’
appears in the fifteenth century both in France and England
as one of general rejoicing without relation to Christmas. It
greeted Henry V in London in 1415 and the Marquis of
Suffolk in Rouen in 1446 (Ramsay, Lancaster and York, i.
226; ii. 60).
[979] Constantinus Porphyrogenitus, de Caeremoniis Aulae
Byzantinae, Bk. i. c. 83 (ed. Reiske, in Corp. Script. Hist.
Byz. i. 381); cf. Bury-Gibbon, vi. 516; Kögel, i. 34; D.
Bieliaiev, Byzantina, vol. ii: Haupt’s Zeitschrift, i., 368; C.
Kraus, Gotisches Weihnachtsspiel, in Beitr. z. Gesch. d.
deutschen Sprache und Litteratur, xx (1895), 223.
[980] Fouquier-Cholet, Hist. des Comtes de Vermandois, 159,
says that Heribert IV (ob. † 1081) persuaded the clergy of
the Vermandois to suppress the fête de l’âne. This would
have been a century before Belethus wrote. But he does
not give his probatum, and I suspect he misread it.
[981] Belethus, c. 72 ‘Festum hypodiaconorum, quod vocamus
stultorum, a quibusdam perficitur in Circumcisione, a
quibusdam vero in Epiphania, vel in eius octavis. Fiunt
autem quatuor tripudia post Nativitatem Domini in Ecclesia,
levitarum scilicet, sacerdotum, puerorum, id est minorum
aetate et ordine, et hypodiaconorum, qui ordo incertus est.
Unde fit ut ille quandoque annumeretur inter sacros
ordines, quandoque non, quod expresse ex eo intelligitur
quod certum tempus non habeat, et officio celebretur
confuso.’ Cf. ch. xv on the three other tripudia.
[982] Lebeuf, Hist. de Paris (1741), ii. 277; Grenier, 365:

Ad amicum venturum ad festum Baculi.


Festa dies aliis Baculus venit et novus annus,
Qua venies, veniet haec mihi festa dies.

Leonius is named as canon of N.-D. in the Obituary of the


church Guérard, Cartulaire de N.-D. in (Doc. inédits sur
l’Hist. de France, iv. 34), but unfortunately the year of his
death is not given.
[983] During the fifteenth century the Chantre of N.-D. ‘porta le
baston’ at the chief feasts as ruler of the choir (F. L.
Chartier, L’ancien Chapitre de N.-D. de Paris (1897), 176).
This baculus must be distinguished from the baculus
pastoralis or episcopi.
[984] Guérard, Cartulaire de N.-D. (Doc. inéd. sur l’Hist. de
France), i. 73; also printed by Ducange, s. v. Kalendae; P.
L. ccxii. 70. The charta, dated 1198, runs in the names of
‘Odo [de Soliaco] episcopus, H. decanus, R. cantor,
Mauricius, Heimericus et Odo archidiaconi, Galo,
succentor, magister Petrus cancellarius, et magister Petrus
de Corbolio, canonicus Parisiensis.’ Possibly the real
moving spirit in the reform was the dean H[ugo Clemens],
to whom the Paris Obituary (Guérard, loc. cit. iv. 61)
assigns a similar reform of the feast of St. John the
Evangelist. Petrus de Corbolio we shall meet again. Eudes
de Sully was bishop 1196-1208. His Constitutions (P. L.
ccxii. 66) contain a prohibition of ‘choreae ... in ecclesiis, in
coemeteriis et in processionibus.’ In a second decree of
1199 (P. L. ccxii. 72) he provided a solatium for the loss of
the Feast of Fools in a payment of three deniers to each
clerk below the degree of canon, and two deniers to each
boy present at Matins on the Circumcision. Should the
abuses recur, the payment was to lapse. This donation was
confirmed in 1208 by his successor Petrus de Nemore (P.
L. ccxii. 92).
[985] A ‘hearse’ was a framework of wood or iron bearing
spikes for tapers (Wordsworth, Mediaeval Services, 156).
The penna was also a stand for candles (Ducange, s.v.).
[986] A prosa is a term given in French liturgies to an
additional chant inserted on festal occasions as a gloss
upon or interpolation in the text of the office or mass. It
covers nearly, though not quite, the same ground as
Sequentia, and comes under the general head of Tropus
(ch. xviii). For a more exact differentiation cf. Frere,
Winchester Troper, ix. Laetemur gaudiis is a prose ascribed
to Notker Balbulus of St. Gall.
[987] cum farsia: a farsia, farsa, or farsura (Lat. farcire, ‘to
stuff’), is a Tropus interpolated into the text of certain
portions of the office or mass, especially the Kyrie, the
Lectiones and the Epistola. Such farces were generally in
Latin, but occasionally, especially in the Epistle, in the
vernacular (Frere, Winchester Troper, ix, xvi).
[988] Laetabundus: i. e. St. Bernard’s prose beginning
Laetabundus exultet fidelis chorus; Alleluia (Daniel,
Thesaurus Hymnologicus, ii. 61), which was widely used in
the feasts of the Christmas season.
[989] The document is too long to quote in full. These are the
essential passages. The legate says: The Church of Paris
is famous, therefore diligence must be used ‘ad
exstirpandum penitus quod ibidem sub praetextu pravae
consuetudinis inolevit ... Didicimus quod in festo
Circumcisionis Dominicae ... tot consueverunt enormitates
et opera flagitiosa committi, quod locum sanctum ... non
solum foeditate verborum, verum etiam sanguinis effusione
plerumque contingit inquinari, et ... ut sacratissima
dies ... festum fatuorum nec immerito generaliter
consueverit appellari.’ Odo and the rest order: ‘In vigilia
festivitatis ad Vesperas campanae ordinate sicut in duplo
simplici pulsabuntur. Cantor faciet matriculam (the roll of
clergy for the day’s services) in omnibus ordinate; rimos,
personas, luminaria herciarum nisi tantum in rotis ferreis, et
in penna, si tamen voluerit ille qui capam redditurus est,
fieri prohibemus; statuimus etiam ne dominus festi cum
processione vel cantu ad ecclesiam adducatur, vel ad
domum suam ab ecclesia reducatur. In choro autem induet
capam suam, assistentibus ei duobus canonicis
subdiaconis, et tenens baculum cantoris, antequam
incipiantur Vesperae, incipiet prosam Laetemur gaudiis:
qua finita episcopus, si praesens fuerit ... incipiet Vesperas
ordinate et solemniter celebrandas; ... a quatuor
subdiaconis indutis capis sericis Responsorium
cantabitur.... Missa similiter cum horis ordinate celebrabitur
ab aliquo praedictorum, hoc addito quod Epistola cum
farsia dicetur a duobus in capis sericis, et postmodum a
subdiacono ... Vesperae sequentes sicut priores a
Laetemur gaudiis habebunt initium: et cantabitur
Laetabundus, loco hymni. Deposuit quinquies ad plus
dicetur loco suo; et si captus fuerit baculus, finito Te Deum
laudamus, consummabuntur Vesperae ab eo quo fuerint
inchoatae.... Per totum festum in omnibus horis canonici et
clerici in stallis suis ordinate et regulariter se habebunt.’
[990] The feast lasted from Vespers on the vigil to Vespers on
the day of the Circumcision. The Hauptmoment was
evidently the Magnificat in the second Vespers. But what
exactly took place then? Did the cathedral precentor hand
over the baculus to the dominus festi, or was it last year’s
dominus festi, who now handed it over to his newly-chosen
successor? Probably the latter. The dominus festi is called
at first Vespers ‘capam redditurus’: doubtless the cope and
baculus went together. The dominus festi may have, as
elsewhere, exercised disciplinary and representative
functions amongst the inferior clergy during the year. His
title I take to have been, as at Sens, precentor stultorum.
The order says, ‘si captus fuerit baculus’; probably it was
left to the chapter to decide whether the formal installation
of the precentor in church should take place in any
particular year.
[991] P. L. ccxv. 1070 ‘Interdum ludi fiunt in eisdem ecclesiis
theatrales, et non solum ad ludibriorum spectacula
introducuntur in eas monstra larvarum, verum etiam in
tribus anni festivitatibus, quae continue Natalem Christi
sequuntur, diaconi, presbiteri ac subdiaconi vicissim
insaniae suae ludibria exercentes, per gesticulationum
suarum debacchationes obscoenas in conspectu populi
decus faciunt clericale vilescere.... Fraternitati vestrae ...
mandamus, quatenus ... praelibatam vero ludibriorum
consuetudinem vel potius corruptelam curetis e vestris
ecclesiis ... exstirpare.’ As to the scope of this decretal and
the glosses of the canonists upon it, cf. the account of
miracle plays (ch. xx).
[992] Decretales Greg. IX, lib. iii. tit. i. cap. 12 (C. I. Can. ed.
Friedberg, ii. 452). I cannot verify an alleged confirmation
of the decretal by Innocent IV in 1246.
[993] C. of Paris (1212), pars iv. c. 16 (Mansi, xxii. 842) ‘A
festis vero follorum, ubi baculus accipitur, omnino
abstineatur. Idem fortius monachis et monialibus
prohibemus.’ Can. 18 is a prohibition against ‘choreae,’
similar to that of Eudes de Sully already referred to. Such
general prohibitions are as common during the mediaeval
period as during that of the conversion (cf. ch. viii), and
probably covered the Feast of Fools. See e.g. C. of
Avignon (1209), c. 17 (Mansi, xxii. 791), C. of Rouen
(1231), c. 14 (Mansi, xxiii. 216), C. of Bayeux (1300), c. 31
(Mansi, xxv. 66).
[994] Codex Senonen. 46 A. There are two copies in the Bibl.
Nat., (i) Cod. Parisin. 10520 B, containing the text only,
dated 1667; (ii) Cod. Parisin. 1351 C, containing text and
music, made for Baluze (1630-1718). The Officium has
been printed by F. Bourquelot in Bulletin de la Soc. arch. de
Sens (1858), vi. 79, and by Clément, 125 sqq. The metrical
portions are also in Dreves, Analecta Hymnica Medii Aevi,
xx. 217, who cites other Quellen for many of them. See
further on the MS., Dreves, Stimmen aus Maria-Laach,
xlvii. 575; Desjardins, 126; Chérest, 14; A. L. Millin,
Monuments antiques inédits (1802-6), ii. 336; Du Tilliot, 13;
J. A. Dulaure, Environs de Paris (1825), vii. 576; Nisard, in
Archives des Missions scientifiques et littéraires (1851),
187; Leber, ix. 344 (l’Abbé Lebeuf). Before the Officium
proper, on f. 1vo of the MS. a fifteenth-century hand
(Chérest, 18) has written the following quatrain:

‘Festum stultorum de consuetudine morum


omnibus urbs Senonis festivat nobilis annis,
quo gaudet precentor, sed tamen omnis honor
sit Christo circumciso nunc semper et almo’:

and the following couplet:

‘Tartara Bacchorum non pocula sunt fatuorum,


tartara vincentes sic fiunt ut sapientes.’

Millin, loc. cit. 344, cites a MS. dissertation of one Père Laire,
which ascribes these lines to one Lubin, an official at
Chartres. The last eight pages of the MS. contain epistles
for the feasts of St. Stephen, St. John the Evangelist, and
the Innocents.
[995] Chérest, 14; Millin, op. cit. ii. 336 (plates), and Voyage
dans le Midi, i. 60 (plates); Clément, 122, 162; Bourquelot,
op. cit. vi. 79 (plates); A. de Montaiglon, in Gazette des
Beaux-arts (1880), i. 24 (plates); E. Molinier, Hist. générale
des Arts appliqués, i; Les Ivoires (1896), 47 (plate); A. M.
Cust, Ivory Workers of the Middle Ages (1902), 34. This
last writer says that the diptych is now in the Bibl.
Nationale. The leaves of the diptych represent a Triumph of
Bacchus, and a Triumph of Artemis or Aphrodite. It has
nothing to do with the Feast of Fools, and is of sixth-
century workmanship.
[996] Dreves, 575, thinks the MS. was ‘für eine
Geckenbruderschaft,’ as the chants are not in the
contemporary Missals, Breviaries, Graduais, and
Antiphonals of the church. But if they were, a separate
Officium book would be superfluous. Such special festorum
libri were in use elsewhere, e.g. at Amiens. Nisard, op. cit.,
thinks the Officium was an imitation one written by
‘notaires’ to amuse the choir-boys, and cites a paper of M.
Carlier, canon of Sens, before the Historic Congress held
at Sens in 1850 in support of this view. Doubtless the
goliardi wrote such imitations (cf. the missa lusorum in
Schmeller, Carmina Burana, 248; the missa de potatoribus
in Wright-Halliwell, Reliquiae Antiquae, ii. 208; and the
missa potatorum in F. Novati, La Parodia sacra nelle
Letterature moderne (Studi critici e letterari, 289)); but this
is too long to be one, and is not a burlesque at all.
[997] Cf. the chapter decree of 1524 ‘festum Circumcisionis a
defuncto Corbolio institutum,’ which is doubtless the
authority for the statements of Taveau, Hist. archiep.
Senonen. (1608), 94; Saint-Marthe, Gallia Christiana
(1770), xii. 60; Baluze, note in B. N. Cod. Parisin. 1351 C.
(quoted Nisard, op. cit.).
[998] Dreves, 575; Chérest, 15, who quotes an elaborate
opinion of M. Quantin, ‘archiviste de l’Yonne.’ M. Quantin
believes that the hand is that of a charter of Pierre de
Corbeil, dated 1201, in the Yonne archives. On the other
hand Nisard, op. cit., and Danjou, Revue de musique
religieuse (1847), 287, think that the MS. is of the
fourteenth century.
[999] Chérest, 35; Dreves, 576.
[1000] Liturgically a conductus is a form of Cantio, that is, an
interpolation in the mass or office, which stands as an
independent unit, and not, like the Tropes, Proses and
Sequences, as an extension of the proper liturgical texts.
The Cantiones are, however, only a further step in the
process which began with Tropes (Nisard, op. cit. 191;
Dreves, Anal. Hymn. xx. 6). From the point of view of
musical science H. E. Wooldridge, Oxford Hist. of Music, i.
308, defines a conductus as ‘a composition of equally free
and flowing melodies in all the parts, in which the words
are metrical and given to the lower voice only.’ The term is
several times used in the Officium. Clément, 163, falls foul
of Dulaure for taking it as an adjective throughout, with
asinus understood.
[1001] Wordsworth, Mediaeval Services, 289; Clément, 126,
163. Dulaure seems to have taken the tabula for the altar.
The English name for the tabula was wax-brede. An
example ( † 1500) is printed by H. E. Reynolds, Use of
Exeter Cathedral, 73.
[1002] Appendix L; where the various versions of the ‘Prose’
are collated.
[1003] There are many hymns beginning Salve, festa dies.
The model is a couplet of Venantius Fortunatus, Carmina,
iii. 9, Ad Felicem episcopum de Pascha, 39 (M. G. H. Auct.
Antiquiss. iv. 1. 60):

‘Salve, festa dies, toto venerabilis aevo,


qua Deus infernum vicit et astra tenet.’

[1004] Clément, 127, correcting an error of Lebeuf. A still more


curious slip is that of M. Bourquelot, who found in the word
euouae, which occurs frequently in the Officium, an echo of
the Bacchic cry évohé. Now euouae represents the vowels
of the words Seculorum amen, and is noted at the ends of
antiphons in most choir-books to give the tone for the
following psalm (Clément, 164).
[1005] Clément, 138, reads Conductus ad Ludos, and inserts
before In Laudibus the word Ludarius. Dreves, Anal. Hymn.
xx. 221, reads Conductus ad Laudes. The section In
Laudibus, not being metrical, is not printed by him, so I do
not know what he makes of Ludarius. If Clément is right, I
suppose a secular revel divided Matins and Lauds, which
seems unlikely.
[1006] I follow Dreves, Anal. Hymn. xx. 228. Clément, 151, has
again Ludarium.
[1007] Prudentius, Cathemerinon, iii.
[1008] Egerton MS. 2615 (Catalogue of Additions to MSS. in
B. M. 1882-87, p. 336). On the last page is written ‘Iste
liber est beati petri beluacensis.’ On ff. 78, 110v are book-
plates of the chapter of Beauvais, the former signed ‘Vollet
f[ecit].’ The MS. was bought by the British Museum in
1883, and formerly belonged to Signor Pachiarotti of
Padua. It was described and a facsimile of the harmonized
Prose of the Ass given in Annales archéologiques (1856),
xvi. 259, 300. Dreves, Anal. Hymn. xx. 230 (1895), speaks
of it as ‘vielleicht noch in Italien in Privatbesitz.’ This, and
not the MS. used by Ducange’s editors, is the MS. whose
description Desjardins, 127, 168, gives from a 1464
Beauvais inventory: ‘No. 76. Item ung petit volume entre
deux ais sans cuir l’ung d’icelx ais rompu à demy
contenant plusieurs proses antiennes et commencemens
des messes avec oraisons commençant au iie feuillet Belle
bouche et au pénultième coopertum stolla candida.’ The
broken board was mended, after 420 years, by the British
Museum in 1884.
[1009] B. M. Catalogue, loc. cit., ‘Written in the xiiith cent.,
probably during the pontificate of Gregory IX (1227-41) and
before the marriage of Louis IX to Marguerite of Provence
in 1234.’ There are prayers for Gregorius Papa and
Ludovicus Rex on ff. 42, 42v, but none for any queen of
France.

[1010] Between ff. 40vo and 41.


[1011] So B. M. Catalogue, loc. cit. To me it reads like
‘Conductus asi ... adducitur.’
[1012] F. 43.
[1013] Cf. ch. xix.
[1014] Louis VII married Adèle de Champagne in 1160 and
died in 1180.
[1015] Pierre Louvet, Hist. du Dioc. de Beauvais (1635), ii.
299, quoted by Desjardins, 124. I am sorry not to have
been able to get hold of the original. Nor can I find E.
Charvet, Rech. sur les anciens théâtres de Beauvais
(1881).
[1016] Grenier, 362. He says the ‘cérémonial’ is ‘tiré d’un ms.
de la cathédrale de Beauvais,’ and gives the footnote
‘Preuv. part 1, no. .’ On the prose Kalendas Ianuarias and
the censing his footnotes refer to Ducange, s. v. Kalendae.
The ‘Preuves’ for his history are scattered through the
MSS. Picardie in the Bibl. Nat. No doubt the reference here
is to MSS. 14 and 158 which are copies of the Beauvais
office (Dreves, in Stimmen aus Maria-Laach, xlvii. 575).
These, or parts of them, are printed by F. Bourquelot, in
Bulletin de la Soc. arch. de Sens (1854), vi. 171 (which
also, unfortunately, I have not seen), and chants from them
are in Dreves, Anal. Hymn. xx. 229. But here Dreves
seems to speak of them as copies of Pacchiarotti’s MS.
(Egerton MS. 2615). And Desjardins, 124, says that
Grenier and Bourquelot used extracts from eighteenth-
century copies of Pacchiarotti’s MS. in the library of M.
Borel de Brétizel. Are these writers mistaken, or did
Grenier only see the copies, and take his description from
Louvet? And what has become of the twelfth-century MS.?
[1017] Ducange, s. v. Kalendae, ‘MS. codice Bellovac. ann.
circiter 500, ubi 1a haec occurrit rubrica Dominus ...
ianuae. Et alibi Hac ... saucita.’
[1018] Ducange, s. v. Festum Asinorum. Desjardins and other
writers give the date of the ‘codex’ as twelfth century. But
500 years from 1733-6 only bring it to the thirteenth
century. The mistake is due to the fact that the first edition
of Ducange, in which the ‘codex’ is not mentioned, is of
1678. Clément, 158, appears to have no knowledge of the
MS. but what he read in Ducange; and it is not quite clear
what he means when he says that it ‘d’après nos
renseignements, ne renferme pas un office, mais une sorte
de mystère postérieur d’un siècle au moins à l’office de
Sens, et n’ayant aucune autorité historique et encore bien
moins religieuse.’ The MS. was contemporary with the
Sens Officium, and although certainly influenced by the
religious drama was still liturgic (cf. ch. xx).
[1019] Cf. Appendix L, on an Officium (1553) for Jan. 1 without
stulti or asinus, from Puy.
[1020] Leber, ix. 238. This is a note by J. B. Salques to the
reprint of D’Artigny’s memoir on the Fête des Fous. The
writer calls the ceremony the ‘fête des apôtres,’ and says
that it was held at the same time as the ‘fête de l’âne.’ He
describes a Rabelaisian contretemps, which is said to have
put an end to the procession in 1634. No authority is given
for this account, which I believe to be the source of all later
notices. I may add that Ducange gives the name Festum
Apostolorum to the feast of St. Philip and St. James on
May 1.
[1021] Cod. Senonens. G. 133, printed by Chérest, 47;
Quantin, Recueil de pièces pour faire suite au Cartulaire
général de l’Yonne (1873), 235 (No. 504) ‘mandamus,
quatenus illa festorum antiqua ludibria, quae in
contemptum Dei, opprobrium cleri, et derisum populi non
est dubium exerceri, videlicet, in festis Sancti Ioannis

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