Ian Cheney
Sandbox Films, in some US cinemas from 23 February
“HUMANS don’t like forgetting,” says an archivist from the Al Ahmed Mahmoud Library in Chinguetti, Mauritania. Located on an old pilgrimage route to Mecca, Chinguetti is now disappearing under the spreading Sahara desert. Not for the first time: there have been two previous cities on this site, the first built in AD 777, and both vanished under the dunes.
Ian Cheney, a documentary-maker from Maine, visits the Arab-Berber libraries of Chinguetti towards the end of The Arc of Oblivion, a film all about what we try to preserve and hang on to, born as we are into a universe that seems wilfully determined to forget and erase our fragile leavings.
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You can understand why Cheney is anxious around issues of longevity and preservation: as a 21st-century film-maker, he is having to commit his life’s work to digital media that is less durable and more prone to obsolescence than the media of yesteryear: celluloid, paper or ceramic.
Nonetheless, having opened his film with the question “What from this world is worth saving?”, Cheney ends up asking a quite different one: “Are we insane to imagine anything can last?” That quote about humans not liking to forget may, in the end, be the best reason we can offer to explain why we frantically attempt to hold time and decay at bay.
This film is built on a pun. We see Cheney, various neighbours and family friends building an ark-shaped barn in his parents’ woodland, made from their lumber and designed by his retired architect father. It is big enough, Cheney calculates, that if the entirety of human knowledge were reduced to test tubes of encoded DNA, he could just about close the barn doors on it all. The ability to store information as DNA is one of the wilder detours in a film that delights in leaping down intellectual and poetic rabbit holes. The friability of memory, music, ghost stories, floods and hurricanes – the list is long, but, to Cheney’s credit, it never feels it.
Alongside that ark in the woods, there is also an arc – the “arc of oblivion” that gives this film its title and carries the viewer from anxiety into a more contemplative and accepting relationship with time. Perhaps it is enough, in this life, to be simply passing through and taking in the scenery.
Executive producer Werner Herzog, a veteran film-maker, appears towards the end of the movie. Asked why he destroys all the preparatory materials generated by his many projects, he replies: “The carpenter doesn’t sit on his shavings, either.”
This is good philosophy and can be sensible practice for an artist – but it is rather cold comfort for the rest of us. At least while we are saving things we might forget, for a moment, about oblivion.
If human happiness is what you want, the trick may be to collect for the pure pleasure of it. Even as it struggles to preserve Arab-Berber texts dating back to the time of the Prophet, the Al Ahmed Mahmoud Library finds time to accept and catalogue books of all kinds, including donations from people who are simply passing by.
Cheney’s cast of friends and acquaintances is long, and the film’s discursive, matesy approach to their experiences – losing photographs, burying artworks, singing to remember or to forget – teeters at times towards the mawkish. But The Arc of Oblivion remains an enjoyable, moving meditation on the pleasures and perils of the archive.
Simon also recommends…
Tung-Hui Hu (MIT Press)
This short, devastating book reveals how storing data in “the cloud” makes it even more vulnerable and irretrievable than it was in the first place.
Thomas Halliday (Penguin)
This epic, near-hallucinatory natural history of Earth works backwards past the Pleistocene to the first stirrings of multicellular life.
Simon Ings is a novelist and science writer. Follow him on Instagram at @simon_ings
