“Broken Glass in Film City” (2022-2023)

As I write this reflection, I am brought back to the question that recurs every time I set out to create something. Having returned to Sweden, I find the density of the air here is specific, unmistakable, and surprisingly consistent considering the ever-sliding scales of the climate. The streets hold my identity in place, reflections of the paths that repeat within me, so much that I worry they will always lead me to the same conclusions. I think back to New York, to writing, to my memories from those streets. The question bores me, annoys me, but aches all the same: where does the truth lie?

In one of my favorite songs, musician Elliott Smith sings: “the litebrite’s now black and white, cause you took apart a picture that wasn’t right.” A lite-brite is a toy made out of a lightbox covered with a sheet of paper; plastic pegs attach the paper to a screen to create an image. To create a new image, the previous sheet must be removed and replaced. In “A Note Upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad,’” Sigmund Freud describes a writing device where writing could be ‘erased’ by lifting layers of waxed paper and resin from each other. At the same time, whatever had been written was never truly removed; it lingered as an imprint on the device. Whatever new writing was subsequently added would be informed by the traces. 

Freud saw this as an illustration of memory—how traces would remain, yet how they were unreliable, always informed by the space between what had already happened and the next developments. I wonder if the air really has the same density as it used to. Am I perhaps changing? The truth moves away as we approach it, the smallest fragment of egg shell slipping into a pale sugary batter, but this does not stop us. We dive head first into it, drown, awaken, sprout gills, and stay here forever. Then one day, we look up towards the light above, and see the truth as a movement across someone’s face, a twitch, a weight, a tensing, and it’s gone. Although it can never be brought back, never explained, it is there, and we can see it, feel it—it is true.

Felicia Grünbaum Powell-Jones, ‘22, was born in Stockholm, Sweden and attended NYU as part of an exchange during her master’s programme in Cinema Studies. Her interest in film builds from the same fascination as her interest in writing. Both are concerned with narrative—the feedback loop of creation and destruction through which we try to frame ourselves and the world around us. Felicia is especially focused on the reciprocal aspects of story and life—how do we live with stories? What exists outside of them? Her essay takes a personal approach to these tensions, playing with the role of narrativity as a means of unearthing meanings of great importance that are nevertheless sometimes in direct conflict with the search for truth.