Abstract
While forgetting is key to the proper functioning of the brain in day-to-day life, amnesia denotes the pathological loss of memory. Polish animation artist Izabela Plucinska’s Liebling (2013) is about a woman who suffers from memory loss and fails to put together the bits and pieces of her past. In line with Plucinska’s earlier work, Liebling focuses on the relationship between the amnesiac woman and her husband whom she fails to recognize. For the bulk of the film, the viewer follows the events through the eyes of the woman as she moves around in her home, argues with her husband who needs to tie her up because she is prone to escape, and stumbles upon objects that trigger ephemeral flashes of memory that fade in the next second. Husband and wife are tied up in the web of interdependency at the center of which stands a formative event (possibly the loss of their child). This chapter focuses on clay as the film’s medium and explores the affordances of this material in relation to representing memory loss. In particular, it explores how the malleability of clay allows Plucinska to dramatize the dialectics of remembering and forgetting in a way that activates the metaphor of the wax tablet in Plato’s Theaetetus and Aristotle’s De memoria et reminiscentia. My materialist interpretation demonstrates how clay comes to operate as a ‘material of amnesia’ through which the spatiality of the home, the contours of the husband, as well as the shapes of objects, furniture, and family photographs emerge and vanish.
