Acknowledgments  ix

Abbreviations  xi

Introduction. First Things: Two Black and Blue Thoughts  1

Author's Note I. A Sewing Needle inside a Plastic and Rubber Suction Cup Sitting on a Watch Spring; or, An Object for Seeing Nothing  17

1. Elegy of Milk, in Black and Blue: The Bruising of La Chambre claire  22

2. "A" is for Alice, for Amnesia, for Anamnesis: A Fairy Tale (Almost Blue) Called La Jetée  53

3. Happiness with a Long Piece of Black Leader: Chris Marker's Sans soleil  77

Author's Note II. She Wrote Me  111

4. "Summer Was inside the Marble": Alain Resnais's and Magurite Duras's Hiroshima mon amour  114

List of Illustrations  161

Notes  169

Index  191

“Black and Blue is only partly, though brilliantly, about the colours of its title. It’s avowedly indebted to novelist-philosopher William H. Gass’s extraordinary 1976 essay On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, and shares that book’s super-subjective love of lists and tendency to intuitive digressions.... Black and Blue has a poetic logic of mourning, and its rage to make too much sense.”—Brian Dillon, Art Review

“It is impossible to make sense of and represent catastrophes—Hiroshima, the Holocaust, loss of memory, death—and these are all approached in an oblique way that makes one ponder the concept. This reviewer would answer in the affirmative Mavor’s indirect question when she seems to wonder if she ‘effectively’ ‘combines catastrophe with frivolity as the text moves between the public and the private, in an effort to make sense.’ This well-maintained tension is the underlying thread that makes the reader watch, read, and think more deeply. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, researchers, faculty, general readers.”—E. A. Vanborre, Choice

“Mavor succeeds in producing a truly hybrid work: image and text, art criticism and self-analysis come together almost seamlessly, culminating in an impressively phenomenological approach to the subject of memory. . . . [H]er keen attention to etymology and intellectual history succeeds in opening the text, the field of play: the films she discusses function just as Proust’s madeleine, describing but not finally demystifying Mavor’s memory, involuntary in its movement between present and past, research and experience, art and life.”—Andrew Marzoni, Rain Taxi

“[T]he overall effect is hypnotic, aided by the stunning visual affect of the book, tis elegant typesetting and the variety of the images that litter the text. . . . a joy to read . . . a veritable feast for the eyes.”—Lucy Scholes, TLS

“Black and Blue is only partly, though brilliantly, about the colours of its title. It’s avowedly indebted to novelist-philosopher William H. Gass’s extraordinary 1976 essay On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, and shares that book’s super-subjective love of lists and tendency to intuitive digressions.... Black and Blue has a poetic logic of mourning, and its rage to make too much sense.”—Brian Dillon, Art Review

“It is impossible to make sense of and represent catastrophes—Hiroshima, the Holocaust, loss of memory, death—and these are all approached in an oblique way that makes one ponder the concept. This reviewer would answer in the affirmative Mavor’s indirect question when she seems to wonder if she ‘effectively’ ‘combines catastrophe with frivolity as the text moves between the public and the private, in an effort to make sense.’ This well-maintained tension is the underlying thread that makes the reader watch, read, and think more deeply. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, researchers, faculty, general readers.”—E. A. Vanborre, Choice

“Mavor succeeds in producing a truly hybrid work: image and text, art criticism and self-analysis come together almost seamlessly, culminating in an impressively phenomenological approach to the subject of memory. . . . [H]er keen attention to etymology and intellectual history succeeds in opening the text, the field of play: the films she discusses function just as Proust’s madeleine, describing but not finally demystifying Mavor’s memory, involuntary in its movement between present and past, research and experience, art and life.”—Andrew Marzoni, Rain Taxi

“[T]he overall effect is hypnotic, aided by the stunning visual affect of the book, tis elegant typesetting and the variety of the images that litter the text. . . . a joy to read . . . a veritable feast for the eyes.”—Lucy Scholes, TLS

"Carol Mavor has developed a unique way of responding to images and to their uses by artists and writers: with appetite and fastidious delicacy, she brings the full sensorium synaesthetically into play. Black and Blue is a highly wrought montage, an original attempt to open up the meanings of visual objects in relation to experience, and a startlingly daring account of a symbolic field. It resonates with—and pays tribute to—such key art historical works as Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas and William Gass's prose poem, On Being Blue."—Marina Warner, author of Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights

"In Black and Blue, Carol Mavor lives with the wounding memories of Hiroshima, the Holocaust, and the regime of hate in American racial history. She looks at herself through a kaleidoscope of texts and images whose pain her own writing seeks to alleviate. The reader witnesses conflicted emotions circulating within a gallery of figures defining the melancholic tenor of critical and creative labors of the last three decades. As a testament and a symptom, Black and Blue belongs to a growing number of first-person accounts that have coped with the years 1939–46 and after, including those by Sarah Kofman (Rue Ordener, rue Labat) and Jean-Luc Godard (Histoire(s) du cinéma), in which the 'author' deals with his or her own relation with the past, from a highly autobiographical standpoint. What makes Black and Blue stand out is its movement to and from a theoretical critical canon, through an impressive body of films, texts, and images, which literally punctuate the book."—Tom Conley, author of An Errant Eye: Poetry and Topography in Early Modern France

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