ÉDITIONS MATIÈRE

[…] Animated by an archival drive, Ristorcelli digs into forgotten past material to somehow ‘make sense’ of a recent event, performing a multilayered work of memory. [+]

Witnessing Fukushima Secondhand: Collage, Archive and Travelling Memory in Jacques Ristorcelli’s Les Écrans. […] Animated by an archival drive, Ristorcelli digs into forgotten past material to somehow ‘make sense’ of a recent event, performing a multilayered work of memory. As Erll and Rigney write, ‘remembering the past’ is not just a matter of recollecting events and persons, but often also a matter of recollecting earlier texts and rewriting earlier stories’ (2006: 112). Tackling the Fukushima catastrophe and its media representations, Les Écrans remembers the past, both in matter of historical events and cultural objects, in an experimental way, where the ‘meaning’ mostly arises from the graphic treatment and construction of the book. In the process, Ristorcelli raises questions about the circulation of images across time and space, about how memory ‘travels’ (Erll 2011), and proposes alternative ways of drawing collective memory in comics in a way that is reflexive of the medium’s own memory. […] Ristorcelli sets forth this cut-and-paste aesthetics in his account of the Fukushima disaster, drawing on the image as a carrier of memory. Moreover, his blog Théâtre de papier électrique documents the process and catalogues pages from his own scrapbook, directly illustrating how concrete panels are appropriated in the book (Figure 2). By doing so, he is reclaiming the appropriative practices of fine arts, be it Pop Art or Chicago Imagism, for the comics medium, despite the enduring resentment against these movements in the comics world. Moreover, the comics he appropriates are those where imitation and plagiarism have arguably been the most widespread: small comics digests, known in French as petits formats or pockets. These small, cheap pocket books were printed in black and white on pulp paper accommodating serials in various popular genres (science-fiction, western, romance, funny animals, etcetera). These petits formats epitomize the mass industrialized comics production: massively produced in the 1960s and 1970s, these petits formats… : publishers would buy microfilms mostly from American and Italian comics publishers or syndicates, and have their cartoonists and artisans anonymously reassemble the material. The process involved writing the dialogues, cutting ‘sensitive’ panels or elements liable to censorship, redrawing the backgrounds, and so on. Despite their enormous proliferation, these petits formats are relegated to a footnote in histories of comics, which privilege the adult comics of the 60s and 70s, often inscribing the past into national comics traditions where the petits formats emerged out of transnational exchanges. Ristorcelli’s collage undoubtedly reads as an homage to this forgotten production. Like scrapbooks were meant to preserve preferred comics images, Les Écrans combines these ‘visual possessions’ into a long sequence that mimics the aesthetics of the petits formats —realistic drawing style, strong black and white contrasts, grey zip-a-tone— only reanimating their collected fragments into another context (Figure 3). In the selection and collection that underpins the creation of Les Écrans, Ristorcelli draws predominantly from war comics such as Battler Britton (Figure 4), selecting elements from these past comics that are able to speak to the present. Ristorcelli’s graphic narrative is one long flow of chaotic transformations that visually echo the Tsunami disaster: explosions, tumbling objects, crashing vehicles, falling rocks, overflowing waves, burning cities, and so forth. The author thus ‘represents’ the Fukushima catastrophe by establishing links with presumably unrelated events in the past. Through this visual polyphony, Les Écrans ties the Fukushima disaster to other historical events. The civil defense posters date from the Sino-Japanese War and their imagery, featuring gas masks and nuclear mushroom clouds (Figure 4), strongly evoke the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an enduring topic in Japanese popular culture (from Gojira to Barefoot Gen and Akira). Furthermore, Ristorcelli also goes back to World War II through the American and European war comics, which bear marked historical and ideological residues. By cutting them to pieces and stripping them of their narratives, however, Ristorcelli also interrogates war comics, their representation of the conflict and their reliance on heroic figures. In Les Écrans, characters are barely recognizable, differentiable, and seem completely stripped of their agency, as if overwhelmed by the montage of catastrophic images. The connections between historical events that Ristorcelli’s collage and montage techniques bring up are not, however, explicit or led back to a singular plane of experience: instead, they rely on a logic of association which, ultimately, remains in the hands of the reader. What it does unravel, is a Warburgian ability to recover how memory travel through images, traditions, across space and time, how American war comics translated to Europe might strangely speak to our experience of the media representation of a natural disaster in Japan. […] [-]