59 The aura of conclusion.
There is no language I can create in order to speak across the borders of paranoid readings, and how these readings vary by culture. Every story wants to become a myth or legend, a thing worth remembering that is both recognizable and shareable.
“The artist and the dictator stand at opposite ends of the concept of agreement, which is essentially the concept of storytelling,” wrote Rachel Cusk in an essay titled “On Marble.”
My father’s imaginary involves one version of a story about leaving his homeland. In the meantime, my post-family imaginary uproots the soil in which his trees were planted. His videos can be read as texts that both create and perform possibilities for recognizability. Documentary film-makers, like writers, use closure to bind the material to the reading: to authorize it, and be authored by it. This closure is simply a mark or a signature demonstrating what the author wanted to be recognized for.
In a letter, Theodor Adorno mentioned Walter Benjamin’s “medusan, fixating gaze.” I suspect this accords with how Benjamin wanted to be seen: as one who reads the world closely and freezes it in order to transcribe the communication between statues. Medusa is terrifying and transgressive: her unpredictability asks to imagine the impossible.
For me, “conclusiveness” can’t be as interesting or accurate as uncertainty. The film my father developed in Romania, in the months they prepared to leave me behind and defect to the U.S., is a souvenir, a memorial, and a speculative fiction.
The “final cut” is the director’s choice of how the film should look before studios intervene. In mangling my father’s home video, I am interfering with his final cuts. In choosing which stills to share, I am determining which parts of his story should be permitted to speak. The “could” speak is inseparable from the “should” speak here.
Since it lacks a title, I refer to it as “The Last Days” film.
In The Last Days, the infant Alina tries to raise the dust in her hands but she cannot understand why it keeps disappearing. She is exploring object permanence. She has no way of knowing that she will wake up one morning with her parents gone—and no way of communicating with them until their reunion a few years later.
For the infant Alina, the parents disappear like the dust of The Last Days.
Studying the way my father made this film, I notice that the car occupies the same space as the child’s head. While the film plays, Maria Tanase’s “Ciuleandra” links the motions, drawing the characters into a sort of moving tableau. This is what music does: solve for X.
I can see a family, a community, a life, but when I pause the film and look at the still, there is no music, no connective texture.
The still is absolutely silent.
“The still is a bracket as well as a quotation,” my aunt says when looking at this photo after telling me the joke.
“Then let things remain as we established,” I think, as my aunt takes a deep drag from her Kent and glances