‘Time Turning Into Space’: Innocence of Memories’ Prismatic Istanbul

This chapter argues for a complex spatialisation of time and memory in Grant Gee’s essay film Innocence of Memories (2019). Focusing on issues of narrative, the indexical and memory, the author sees Gee’s film functioning in multiple registers, principally as a kind of palimpsest, referring to and writing over Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence (2009) and also referencing in multi-layered and intricate ways the real museum of the same name, located prominently in the centre of Istanbul. Both film and novel, as Tim O’ Farrell shows in an extended reading of the works, straddle a deep love of the past, a desire to preserve and understand it, and a fascination with the inexorability of time, transformation and notions of progress. Fact and fiction are thereby multiply entangled, produced by and supporting the disjunctive practice and interstitiality of the essay film, as the author points out with reference to Laura Rascaroli’s theoretical work How the Essay Film Thinks (2017).