Fordham University

Chapter Title: Cinema and Memory

Chapter Author(s): Susannah Radstone

Book Title: Memory

Book Subtitle: Histories, Theories, Debates
Book Editor(s): SUSANNAH RADSTONE, BILL SCHWARZ
Published by: Fordham University. (2010)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1c999bq.26

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Memory

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 22. Cinema and Memory

Susannah Radstone

It is possible that even when working from memory, I saw the world in
movie terms, as who did not, or, indeed, who does not?
Gore Vidal1

The recent film The Butterfly Effect (Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber,
2004) tells the story of a young man, Evan, whose capacity to recover lost
memories goes further than most, for once his memories return, he learns
how to ‘‘jump into’’ the scenes of his past, traveling back in time to divert
fate and put right the wrongs of the past. But this ‘‘memory travel’’ turns
out to be doomed from the start. Only by killing himself at birth, Evan
discovers, can he change the past and save the girl he loves. In an early
scene, Evan is undergoing memory recovery therapy for blackouts and
memory loss. Under hypnosis, his psychiatrist encourages him to think
of his memory ‘‘like a movie. You can pause, rewind or slow down any
details you wish. Remember,’’ his psychiatrist continues, ‘‘it’s only a
movie. You’re completely safe.’’ This scene—and the film to which it
belongs—exemplify the cinema’s current fascination with memory and,
in foregrounding the close ties between cinema and memory, draw on
themes that recur, both in films concerned with memory and in writings
on the cinema and memory. In counterposing the safety of cinema spec-
tatorship with memory’s potential to disturb, and the relative permanence
of the photographic and cinematic image with the mind’s tendency to
forget, this scene demonstrates cinema’s simultaneous promise both to
enhance and to tame memory. In gesturing also to the cinema’s capacity
to manipulate memory’s often involuntary divergences from linear tem-
porality—a capacity now devolved down to spectators by the pause, re-
wind, and slow motion of video or DVD—The Butterfly Effect instantiates
the hope expressed in cinema/memory metaphors for some respite from

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 SUSANNAH RADSTONE

memory’s profound unbiddability. But if Evan’s ‘‘memory travel’’ tropes the cinema’s re-
semblance to and surpassing of ‘‘natural’’ memory, expressing a wish to change the past
and overcome memory’s caprices, then The Butterfly Effect’s dystopian conclusion suggests
that this is a hope that may not be fulfillable by the cinema or its heirs. Nevertheless, the
ties between cinema and memory run deep and continue to fascinate.
The cinema’s long-standing and intimate relationship with memory is revealed in
cinema language’s adoption of terms associated with memory—the ‘‘flashback’’2 and the
‘‘fade,’’ for instance—to describe cinematic dissolves between a film narrative’s present
and its past. The routinized deployment of these terms has rendered them unremarkable,
suggesting an apparently automatic, involuntary, and mechanical relationship between
cinema and memory. Theories of cinema’s relation to memory have hinged, too, on meta-
psychological accounts of the cinema as a mechanical, technical, and ideological apparatus
geared to the production of particular spectator positions3 as well as on the involuntary
and automatic aspects of both cinema spectatorship and memory. But the question of
cinema’s relation to memory remains open and has been theorized within three distinct
paradigms. Memory has been conceived of by analogy with cinema, and in a reverse
move, the cinema—and specific types of film—have been understood to be analogous
with or even to be modes of memory. Third, and more recently, in theories of cinema/
memory, the relations between cinema, film, and memory emerge as more porous and
more deeply interpenetrating than is allowed for by the two preceding formulations.
Models of memory as cinema, cinema as memory and cinema/memory all elaborate
differently nuanced understandings of cinema and of memory. The history of these meta-
phors does not illustrate a straightforward narrative of progress in the understanding of
memory or of the cinema. Instead, they reveal both more and less than ‘‘the reflections
of an age, a culture, an ambience’’ or ‘‘an intellectual climate.’’4 For—particularly since
the nineteenth century—at moments, the figuring of memory by media, including the
cinema, and of the cinema by memory have become key sites within which to explore,
map, and radically critique the changing relationship between the ‘‘inside’’ and the ‘‘out-
side,’’ the personal and the social. Always at stake in discussions of the cinema’s relation
to memory is the question of memory’s ‘‘transindividuality’’: the social and cultural, as
well as the individual and personal aspects of memory, for cinema—along with television
and digital and print media—has been central to the development of the concepts of
cultural, social, and public memory. At stake, too, is the question of memory’s relation to
the history of media forms and technologies.

Memory as Cinema

Cinema was by no means the first medium to have informed understandings of memory,
and neither has the metaphorical troping of memory confined itself to the media.

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 CINEMA AND MEMORY

Memory has been figured as wine cellar and dovecote, treasure chest and labyrinth.5 How-
ever, the classical association of memory with the wax tablet in Plato’s Theaetetus founded
an enduring pattern of associations between memory and imprinting, memory and writ-
ing and, more recently, memory and the visual media, that continues to this day. Through
such metaphors, philosophers and, more recently, psychologists have striven to under-
stand the workings of memory.
The strength of memory’s association with the visual media derives in part from
broader para-optical models of thought, consciousness, and the mind6 and in part from
the often-noted visuality of memory. Though the association of memory with visual
media has a longer history, it reached its zenith in associations between memory and
nineteenth-century inventions such as the daguerreotype and then photography. As
Douwe Draaisma explains, ‘‘photography’s revolutionary new technique for preserving
images’’ led to a plethora of photographic metaphors in papers on visual memory.7 These
associations between memory and the visual media extended beyond visual memory to
encompass memory in general, their view of memory revealing a mechanist philosophy
typical of the nineteenth century and expressed, too, in Freud’s famous analogy between
memory and the mystic writing pad.8 In this essay, Freud drew on and developed the
classical association between memory and writing on the wax tablet, while using the writ-
ing pad’s ‘‘mystical’’ ability to retain and erase in order to figure the mind’s mechanisms
of perception, remembrance, and forgetting. Freud’s emphasis, in this essay, on forgetting
and remembering, inscription and erasure provides one example of an early ‘‘mediated’’
modeling of memory prefigurative of deconstructivist theories of subjectivity and writing.9
The invention of photography eclipsed the camera obscura’s capacity to reflect mov-
ing images, encouraging the analogy between memory and still images. But the invention
of the cinema opened the way once again for understandings of memory by analogy with
the moving image.10 Interestingly, however, such analogies have continued to emphasize
the stillness of the images constitutive of film stock over the illusion of movement granted
by the apparatus of projection. For instance, Henri Bergson’s unfavorable comparison of
the intellect with intuition compared intellectual thought to the cinema’s mechanical
animation of fragmented and isolated extractions of reality,11 using cinema as what Amy
Herzog has termed ‘‘a model for the forces of rationality that immobilize and fragment
time.’’12 In Bergson’s formulation, the cinema may be mobilized to demonstrate how the
intellect differs from memory, rather than as a metaphor for memory. Only with De-
leuze’s rereading of Bergson does the cinema become not a metaphor for either memory
or the intellect but what Herzog describes as a practice with ‘‘the potential to create its
own fluid movements and temporalities.’’13
Bergson’s alignment of the cinema with rationality, rather than with intuition, fore-
grounds the apparatus of projection and the mechanical movement of film stock through
the projector’s lens. But when we turn to the cinema and to films that model themselves

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 SUSANNAH RADSTONE

on the workings of memory, then it is film’s capacity to express memory’s intuitive associ-
ational links that emerges as one of multiple associations between cinema, film, and
memory.

Cinema as Memory

Memory’s metaphorical alignment with the still, as opposed to the moving, image is
sustained even by films that model themselves on the workings of memory. In films such
as Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), art and avant-garde cinema’s abiding
fascination with memory expresses itself through relatively immobile camerawork,
lengthy, photograph-like shots, and brief flashback sequences evocative of involuntary
memory. Similarly, in Terence Davies’s beautiful memory films14 Distant Voices Still Lives
(1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992), shots often resemble still photographs from a
family album, the ‘‘logic’’ governing relations between such shots and scenes being closer
to memory’s poetic associations than to narrative cause and effect. These films’ relations
to memory complicate the distinction between form and style, flashbacks providing the
formal means for the connection of the diegetic present with its remembered past while
evoking the ‘‘feel’’ of memory’s movements. So too, memory films such as Davies’s com-
plicate the relations between personal and social memory, underlining the fact that mem-
ories are not simply ‘‘ours’’ by drawing from and mediating a cultural memory bank of
cinematic images and sounds. Davies’s memory films remember the past, in part, by
means of aural cinematic quotation, alluding not just to a history the films purport to
share with their spectators, but to a commonly-held memory-store constituted by the
films of the past.
The permeability of the boundary between personal and social memory extends be-
yond memory films intended for public exhibition to the domain of the home movie.
Like images from the family album, home movies supplement, enhance or even supplant
intimate memories of the personal and familial past, while drawing on film language
learned as much at the cinema as at home. The transmission of memories stored in home
movies depends, too, upon the capacity of their spectators to recognize those archived
memories. With the loss of that social community of remembering,15 home movies cease
to provide documentary evidence for, or commemoration of, a remembered past, their
protagonists becoming something like the anonymous ghosts of an unremembered past.16
Though avant-garde and art cinema and memory films constitute privileged locations
for investigating cinema’s relation to memory, those relations extend to almost every
genre and every period of film history—shadowing, if not coinciding exactly with the
history of the flashback.17 Memory permeates the cinema’s narratives, plots, and modes
of narration, from mainstream entertainment cinema’s subordination of the memory

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 CINEMA AND MEMORY

flashback to the exigencies of economical and coherent linear narration, to the fore-
grounding of memory and its vicissitudes in recent mainstream U.S. entertainment films,
including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michael Gondry, 2004), Memento (Chris-
topher Nolan, 2001), and the Bourne trilogy: The Bourne Identity (Doug Liman, 2002),
The Bourne Supremacy (Paul Greengrass, 2004), The Bourne Ultimatum (Paul Greengrass,
2007). The impossible memories of a murdered man motivate one of the most famous
film-long flashbacks, in Billy Wilder’s film noir Sunset Boulevard (1950), and the symp-
toms of traumatic memory, particularly as they had been discussed by psychoanalysis,
provided the alibi for surrealist incursions within Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964), as
well as his earlier Spellbound (1945). Meanwhile, the very possibility of the cinematic
‘‘illusion’’ depends upon optical memory, as the fast flowing frames leave their imprints
on the spectator’s retina, masking each image’s stillness and separation from the next—an
aspect of cinema memory much exploited by experimental and avant-garde cinema.
If the extensiveness and complexity of cinema’s relation to memory and of under-
standings of cinema as memory exceed the bounds of any short summary, it has been the
cinema’s capacity to discipline, enhance, supplement, or substitute for memory that has
provoked deepest debate. Already in the 1930s, the perception of a ‘‘memory crisis’’18
had prompted the critical theorists Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin to consider
photography’s and cinema’s relation to modernity’s assault on the inner world of mem-
ory.19 Unsurpassed in his grasp of cinema as both opportunity and loss, and facing head-
on the erosion of memory’s inner world by the shocks of modernity, Benjamin imagined
the cinema’s role in producing new modes of modern subjectivity capable of thinking—
and thinking critically—under modern conditions. In an essay on Baudelaire, Benjamin
described modernity’s erosion of involuntary memory, and its supplanting of experience
(once passed on through intimate modes of contact and storytelling) by modern modes
of mediated information. But Benjamin did not reject the innovations introduced by
cinema. Instead, he argued that:

the techniques based on the use of the camera and of subsequent analogous mechani-
cal devices extend the range of the mémoire voluntaire; by means of these devices they
make it possible for an event at any time to be permanently recorded in terms of
sound and sight. Thus they represent important achievements of a society in which
practice is in decline.20

As well as providing a technological support for memory, Benjamin suggested, habituated

exposure to the startling rush of cinematic images might enable spectators to withstand
better the shocks of modern city life: ‘‘Technology,’’ he wrote,

has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training. There came a day
when a new and urgent need for stimuli was met by the film. In a film, perception in
the form of shocks was established as a formal principle.21

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 SUSANNAH RADSTONE

If, in this appraisal of cinema, Benjamin seems to align its technology with modernity’s
attack on memory, he had already seized on the potential of cinema’s technological en-
hancement of vision to aid in the perception of ‘‘the necessities which rule our lives.’’
Through devices such as slow motion and close-ups, the cinema projects images unavail-
able to consciousness, cinema becomes an optical unconscious with the potential to pro-
duce liberatory visions of modernity’s spaces: ‘‘Then came the film and burst this prison-
world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its
far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go travelling.’’22 For Benjamin,
the cinema becomes a technology for the advancement of (political) consciousness in the
modern era of ‘‘post-memory.’’ Impelled by his particular relationship with Marxism to
find revolutionary potential in the present, Benjamin grasped technology’s role in eroding
tradition and memory, but he grasped, too, the cinema’s potential to proffer alternative
modes of consciousness in an age of ravished memory. As much contemporary feminist
film criticism has shown, the full resonance of Benjamin’s writings on cinema’s relation
to memory, time, and spectatorship remains to be revealed.23
Recent criticism—even where it acknowledges debts to Marxism, to Benjamin, and
to the critical theory of the 1930s—fails to match either the subtlety of Benjamin’s dialec-
tical vision or its embrace of cinematic images, technologies, and temporalities. Instead,
contemporary criticism, focusing, in the main on filmic representations of the past, has
tended to adopt unadulteratedly positive or negative views of the cinema’s relation to
memory in modern and postmodern times. Much of this criticism is informed by a perva-
sive view that sees the contemporary moment—with its purportedly relentless focus on
the present, its detachment from the past and from traditional modes of knowledge, and
its information and media overload—as one in which the past can no longer be ade-
quately grasped. On such accounts, older modes of memory, under the pressure of the
contemporary ‘‘storm’’ of representations, live transmissions, and instant replay,24 have
given way to their mediated substitutes or supplements. For criticism inflected by a Marx-
ist belief in the revolutionary necessity of grasping the dialectical relation between past
and present, it is the lack of any truly historical consciousness that is seen to be (poorly)
substituted for by the cinema’s nostalgic ‘‘memories’’ of the past.
Though indebted to Benjamin, Fredric Jameson finds little progressive potential in
the dubious pleasures of the nostalgia film. Jameson identifies two types of nostalgia film:
those that recreate the look and feel of past times, for instance, Chinatown (Roman Polan-
ski, 1974) or American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973), with their evocations of the 1930s
and 1950s; and films that return to a past period by evoking the feel and shape of older
media series or genres, for instance, in Star Wars (Lucas, 1977), which reawakens a sense
of the past by pastiching the style and look of the Saturday afternoon serial.25 For Jameson,
the nostalgia film’s recycling of the look and feel of the past substitutes the pleasures of
nostalgic memory for historical consciousness, or the capacity to know and understand
the true relationship between the past and the present. Jameson’s critique of the nostalgia

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 CINEMA AND MEMORY

film disparages the pleasures of cinematic nostalgic memory—and of the cinema’s role in
constructing and transmitting ‘‘cultural memories’’ of, for instance, the look and feel of
past decades, of the pleasures of Saturday afternoon serials. For Jameson, these pleasurable
‘‘memories’’ constitute poor or even debased substitutes for historical consciousness.
A similarly derogatory stance has inflected recent criticism of the ‘‘heritage film’’—
another category of film that has been constituted by film criticism as a mode of cinematic
cultural memory. The heritage film, often adapted from well-known literary works—for
instance, Howards End (James Ivory, 1992) and A Room with a View (Ivory, 1985), both
adapted from novels by E. M. Forster—and characterized by high production values and
lavish, lovingly dwelt-on period detail (including location shooting at stately homes), has
been criticized for its ‘‘artful and spectacular projection of an elite, conservative vision of
the national past’’26 and for its pleasurable spectacle associated with nostalgia for a fanta-
sized vision of a lost Englishness. In an argument reminiscent of Jameson’s critique of the
nostalgia film, Andrew Higson has suggested that even where the heritage film’s narrative
may offer an ironic, critical commentary on the national past—as with the adaptations of
Forster—the power of its commentary is diminished by the film’s fetishistic spectacle that
commodifies its version of that past, turning it into a glossy surface to be pleasurably
consumed.27
That what the heritage film articulates is cultural memory might be confirmed by
noting its similarities with other modes of memory film—heritage films are ‘‘typically
slow moving and episodic, avoiding the efficient and economic causal development of the
classical film. The concern for character, place, atmosphere and milieu tends to be more
pronounced than dramatic, goal-directed action.’’28 But the politics of heritage cinema’s
versions of cultural memory remain in question. If the identification of ‘‘alternative heri-
tage films,’’ such as Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher (1999) or Terence Davies’ trilogy (1976–
83), set outside metropolitan centers and evoking working-class and regional cultural
memories, leaves in place critiques of the mainstream heritage film as conservative specta-
cle, Raphael Samuel’s defense of heritage offers a more nuanced approach to these main-
stream films, suggesting that denigratory criticism of heritage may be at best misguided
and at worst blinkered and elitist.29 Critics of heritage accuse it, argues Samuel, of sanitiz-
ing the record of the past, while making it harmless and unthreatening in the present.
‘‘Heritage,’’ says Samuel, ‘‘has had a very bad press, and it is widely accused of wanting
to commodify the past, and turn it into tourist kitsch.’’30 But, he goes on to suggest—in
terms that might serve, also, as correctives to the absolutism of Jameson’s critique of the
nostalgia film—that historians too attempt to hold their readers’ attention by drawing on
‘‘vivid detail and thick description to offer images far clearer than any reality could be.’’31
Yet while history still claims to tell the ‘‘unvarnished truth,’’ historians accuse heritage of
passing off fabrication as the true picture of the past. Samuel emphasizes too, the ‘‘social
condescension’’32 embedded in critiques of heritage, suggesting, for instance, that ‘‘literary
snobbery comes into play: the belief that only books are serious.’’33 Critiques of heritage

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 SUSANNAH RADSTONE

may be influenced too, he goes on to suggest, by ‘‘a suspicion of the visual’’ that assumes
that ‘‘artefacts, whether they appear as images on the television screen, or as ‘living his-
tory’ displays in the museums . . . are not only inferior to the written word but, being by
their nature concerned with surface appearance only, irredeemably shallow.’’34 To Samuel,
the implication that such pleasures are almost by definition mindless, ought not to go
unchallenged: ‘‘People don’t simply ‘consume’ images,’’ he concludes, ‘‘in the way, in
which, say, they buy a bar of chocolate. As in any reading, they assimilate them as best
they can to pre-existing images and narratives.’’35 Here I want to stress the democratizing
drive fuelling Samuel’s proposals concerning the cultural and political elitism embedded
in critiques of heritage culture and its pleasures, since this is a theme that has been taken
up in discussions concerning the politics and pleasures of the contemporary history film.
A group of films released in the waning years of the last century, and taking as their
subject events of recent U.S. history, for instance, Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of
July (1989), Platoon (1986), Nixon (1995), and JFK (1991), and Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest
Gump (1994), have all been characterized by elliptical, fragmented narratives, a mix of
fact and fiction, and an emphasis on the lives of ordinary people. These films have more
frequently been discussed in the context of history than of memory, and it is within this
context that they have been associated with processes of democratization. Vivian Sob-
chack has argued that, far from signaling the ‘‘end of history,’’ today’s highly mediated
world, in which events and their representation come to occupy almost simultaneous
moments, produces a new awareness of ‘‘one’s comportment as an historical actor . . . a
very real and consequential ‘readiness’ for history.’’36 For Sobchack, this readiness for and
democratization of history can be seen too in the contemporary history film’s focus on
ordinary people and its address to a media-savvy audience that well understands TV,
film, and digital media’s relations to ‘‘the happened.’’ For Sobchack, the new historical
consciousness, of which the contemporary history film forms a part, promises ‘‘a vibrant
connection of present to past and a sense of agency in the shaping of human events’’ as
well as ‘‘a more active and reflective historical subject.’’37 But if films such as JFK and
Forrest Gump have been treated as contemporary history films, their elliptical narratives
and their mixing of fact and fiction have been associated also with traumatic memory,
producing rather different understandings of these films’ relation to memory, history, and
audiences.
The idea of trauma cinema bears some relation to Benjamin’s writings on cinema
and modern experience—an experience that Benjamin associated with the overwhelming
shocks to the human sensorium meted out by the noise, speed, and inhumanity of mass
production and city life. Drawing on Freud, Benjamin argues that the warding off of these
shocks by consciousness had the effect of protecting against their traumatic effect while
diminishing memory, since, on Freud’s account, ‘‘becoming conscious and leaving behind
a memory trace are processes incompatible with each other within one and the same
system.’’38 As we have seen, for Benjamin, the cinema offered the potential to train human

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 CINEMA AND MEMORY

consciousness in its attempts to ward off higher and higher levels of shock. More recently,
Hayden White’s seminal essay ‘‘The Modernist Event’’ described contemporary experi-
ence in terms that exceed those of Benjaminian shock. Laying stress on the impact of
what he controversially terms ‘‘holocaustal’’ events, including the Holocaust itself, two
world wars, and the great depression, White argued that the scale and complexity of these
events confound humanity’s sense-making capacities, functioning ‘‘in the consciousness
. . . exactly as infantile traumas are conceived to function in the psyche of neurotic
individuals. . . . They cannot be simply forgotten . . . but neither can they be adequately
remembered.’’39 In the case of relatively recent events—White cites, for example, the ex-
plosion of NASA’s Challenger space shuttle in 1986—the sheer extent of, and manipula-
bility of, their visual representations compounded these effects: ‘‘All that the ‘morphing’
technology used to re-present the event provided was a sense of its evanescence. It ap-
peared impossible to tell any single authoritative story about what really happened—
which meant that one could tell any number of possible stories about it.’’40 White
concludes that only the adequate representation of these events will loosen their traumatic
hold, allowing them to be mourned and forgotten. Having cited Oliver Stone’s controver-
sial film JFK—a work that blurs the distinction between fact and fiction41 and in which a
catastrophic event ‘‘intrude[s] on linear narrative and disturb[s] realist representa-
tion’’42 —White concludes that strategies such as these, indebted as they are to their
modernist literary forebears, offer precisely this potential. On White’s account, the incom-
prehensibility and ‘‘unbelievability’’ of traumatic events confound their integration into
preexisting images and stories; hence trauma cannot be integrated into memory. But
modernist trauma cinema, while refusing the fetishistic illusion of mastery of the event,
ushers in the possibility of representing that which had hitherto confounded representa-
tion, allowing mourning, remembrance, and even, perhaps, forgetting.
Contemporary theories of trauma cinema continue that modern tradition within
which the media—and cinema in particular—come to be understood as a substitute,
supplement, or support for modern memory’s atrophy, failure, or vicissitudes. In this
new area of film theory, much remains to be thought through. White, joined by much of
the writing that has informed theories of trauma and film to date,43 proposes that it is the
shocking nature of events that renders them inassimilable and that causes the symptoms
associated with trauma’s disturbance of normal memory. However, other psychoanalytic
understandings of trauma focus on the interface between events and the preexisting psy-
chical ‘‘landscapes’’ through which those events are mediated.44 The latter approach would
call on film theory to develop modes of analysis better able to engage with questions of
the spectatorship of trauma films, including the range of spectator positions they make
available and the diverse ways in which trauma films have been, or might be, read by
different audiences. Though writings on heritage, nostalgia, and trauma films all approach
cinema as a mode of memory, it is also noticeable that in discussions of trauma and film,
and under the influence of a broader ethical turn within humanities scholarship, the

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 SUSANNAH RADSTONE

question of how cinema might prove adequate to the remembrance and mourning of
traumatic experiences has supplanted that focus on the politics of memory that drives
much of the criticism of nostalgia and heritage films. That these approaches need not be
regarded as incommensurate may have been demonstrated for us already in Benjamin’s
prefigurative writings.
Commentaries on trauma and film propose that trauma films have the potential to
provide a cultural ‘‘working through’’ of traumatic memories—that they might enable
some remembrance of events that, due to their shocking nature, have left only scars rather
than memories. Though trauma theory—much of it produced in the U.S.—has yet to
make this explicit, its focus falls, in the main, on events—the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam war, 9/11—that have occurred during the lifetimes of
recent generations of U.S. film audiences. The theorization of cinema as substitute or
supplement to memory reaches its zenith, however, with the introduction of the concept
of prosthetic memory. Alison Landsberg has mobilized the concept of prosthetic memory
to argue that the cinema has the capacity to implant memories of events unexperienced
by audiences and previously unknown to them.45 Theorists of cinema as prosthetic mem-
ory take as their starting point theories of early cinema as a cinema of attractions46 and
theories of cinema as an embodied experience,47 work that posits cinema not as represen-
tation, but as an experience that fully and directly engages the body and its feelings or
affects. Theories of cinema as prosthetic memory build too on cybertheory’s accounts of
technology’s dissolving of the borders between humans and their electronic, digital, and
media ‘‘enhancements.’’48 Theories of cinema as prosthetic memory propose that the ex-
perience of spectating certain kinds of films is indistinguishable from lived experience
and has the potential to create long-lasting ‘‘memories’’ with the capacity to remould
identity.
That theories of ‘‘prosthetic’’ memory need not be related only to mass-mediated
experiences has been demonstrated by the philosopher Bernard Stiegler, whose writings
on technics ought not to be confused with theories only of film and prosthetic memory,
since, as Ben Roberts explains, for Stiegler, human history in its entirety has occurred ‘‘in
the realm of . . . technical evolution . . . in which it is impossible to separate the living
being from its external prosthetic technical support.’’49 Though Stiegler views the emer-
gence of cinema as marking ‘‘a distinctive shift in the history’’50 of memory’s exterioriza-
tion, on Stiegler’s account, ‘‘cinema simply partakes in the history of mnemotechnics or
the ‘exteriorization of memory’ from primitive tools through writing to analogue and
digital recording.’’51 For Stiegler, then, the industrialization of memory consequent upon
the invention of cinema and other mass media ‘‘is not a transformation in the relationship
between technology and culture or between technology and the individual imagination
but a transformation in the technology of memory itself.’’52 For theorists of film and
prosthetic memory, on the other hand, the cinema’s capacity to transmit memories comes
to be understood precisely in relation to a potentially revolutionary transformation of

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 CINEMA AND MEMORY

culture and of the individual imagination. Once posited, this transformation has been
welcomed and greeted with trepidation. While acknowledging that memories may always
have been ‘‘prosthetic,’’ Landsberg’s somewhat utopian vision builds on the ways in which
cinema audiences may feel emotionally ‘‘possessed’’ by a character long after a film has
ended, proposing that this might enable a new, enduring, and politically progressive ca-
pacity to identify across social differences, including those of ethnicity and class. In prob-
lematizing oppositions between authentic and false memories, and between real and
virtual experience, theories of cinema and prosthetic memory usher in a world in which
prosthetic memories can enhance understanding of others, building empathic alliances
across difference. But the implantation of memory by cinema is a scenario that may lend
itself to darker interpretation. Writing uncharacteristically polemically of the impact of
certain films upon popular memory, Michel Foucault proposed that cinema constituted
one of ‘‘a whole number of apparatuses . . . set up . . . to obstruct the flow of this popular
memory.’’ ‘‘Today,’’ he continued,

cheap books aren’t enough. There are much more effective means like television and
the cinema. And I believe that this was one way of reprogramming popular memory,
which existed but had no way of expressing itself. So people are shown not what they
were, but what they must remember having been.53

In terms reminiscent of the Frankfurt School’s warnings concerning the mass media,
Foucault proposes here that the cinema as agent of the ruling powers might overlay popu-
lar memories with false ones. In Robert Burgoyne’s similarly dystopian vision, the film
Forrest Gump is understood to reprogram memory ‘‘in such a way that the political and
social ruptures of the sixties can be reclaimed as sites of national identification.’’54
Whether viewed with optimism or fear, theories of cinematic prosthetic memory promul-
gate the view that cinema can implant memories of the unexperienced, or reprogram
existing memories. These theories imbue the cinema with remarkable powers without
offering full explanations of the processes by which cinematic prosthetic memories come
to be integrated into the memories of spectators. Prosthetic memory models the cinema–
memory relation as one in which cinema implants memories into passive spectators, but
this takes no account of the spectator’s negotiation of images. The assumption by theories
of cinematic prosthetic memory of an equivalence between spectating a cinematic experi-
ence and living through an experience dissolves the distinction between representation
and event. By adopting this perspective and by imbuing the cinema with immense powers
to transform identity by transforming memory, theories of prosthetic memory forget film
theory’s earlier theorizations of cinema spectatorship and of the complex interplay be-
tween text and spectator. In short, by proposing that memories originating in film make
their way seamlessly into the minds of spectators, theories of cinematic prosthetic mem-
ory offer a one-way account of prosthetic memory.

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 SUSANNAH RADSTONE

But there is an approach to the cinema and memory that weds a complex under-
standing of the spectatorship of films, and of the inner worlds into which films become
integrated, to a full analysis of films and their complex webs of meaning, allusion, and
affect. Analyses of cinema/memory demonstrate that what we take to be personal memo-
ries are informed by cinema images. But the ways that these images are remembered and
become woven into the texture of identity/memory is as much a question of the history
of individual subjects as it is a question of films themselves. In theories of cinema/mem-
ory, one-way theorizations that conceive of cinema as that which programs, substitutes
for, or supplements memory become transformed into a fully two-way exchange.

Cinema/Memory

So far we have seen that memory has been conceived of by recourse to the cinema and
that the cinema has been conceived of as a mode of memory. But more recently, film
theorists have begun to conceive of the cinema/memory relation in new ways. Theorists
such as Annette Kuhn and Victor Burgin have explored the transitional or hybrid world
of what I’m calling ‘‘cinema/memory.’’ This is a world constituted of images, sequences,
and their associated affects. Situated within the mind, yet positioned between the personal
and the cultural, cinema/memory melds images remembered from the cinema with the
inner world’s constitutive ‘‘scenes’’ or scenarios. Such recent accounts of the cinema–
memory relation do not merely mobilize conceptions of memory and its processes in
order to deepen our understanding of the cinema, nor do they simply illuminate memory
by recourse to understandings of the cinema. In place of formulations that give primacy
to the cinema or to memory, what emerges is a liminal conception of cinema/memory,
where the boundaries between memory and cinema are dissolved in favor of a view of
their mutuality and inseparability. By exploring the world of cinema/memory, this strand
of film theory dissolves conceptual boundaries between the inside and the outside, the
personal and the social, the individual and the cultural, and the true and the false. Burgin’s
and Kuhn’s explorations both take the form of what Kuhn has elsewhere called ‘‘memory
work’’—a practice that uses critical analysis of one’s own memories to produce deeper
understandings of identity’s complex relation to culture and the media.55
Investigations of cinema/memory seek answers to the question, ‘‘What binds together
images and sounds in personal memory with images and sounds in collective memory?’’56
The explorations advanced by Burgin and Kuhn of cinema/memory are differently nu-
anced and follow different paths. Though their investigations move in opposite direc-
tions—remembered film images forming a prompt for Burgin’s journey and an ending of
sorts to Kuhn’s voyage through her own reveries—both suggest that the process that
binds together the personal and the collective constitutes the inner world’s psychical me-
diation of cinema.

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 CINEMA AND MEMORY

Burgin’s quest to understand the compelling nature of certain remembered film im-
ages uses psychoanalysis to explore a chain of associations that lead from the affects
aroused by those remembered images back to his earliest psychical fantasies. For Burgin,
then, these remembered film images constitute ‘‘screen memories’’ (as Freud had called
them)57—memories ‘‘that come . . . to mind in place of, and in order to conceal, an
associated but repressed memory.’’58 Noting that sociologists have found ‘‘an almost uni-
versal tendency for personal history to be mixed with recollections of scenes from films
and other media productions,’’59 and drawing on the psychoanalytic ideas of D. W. Win-
nicott60 and his own self-analysis, Burgin concludes that the inner landscape within which
fantasies are bound together with scenes and images spectated at the cinema constitutes
the ‘‘location of cultural experience.’’61 Explorations of cinema/memory such as Burgin’s
reveal the processes binding inner and outer worlds, ‘‘experience’’ and ‘‘culture.’’ But in
place of the overtly public-political perspectives that have driven critiques of nostalgia
films or heritage films, for example, explorations of cinema/memory offer ‘‘micro’’ por-
traits of culture’s most intimate locations. Burgin himself expresses some unease about
his own shift from film theory’s ‘‘study of the ways in which films . . . contribute to the
formation, perpetuation and dissemination of dominant systems of commonly held be-
liefs and values’’ to the study of ‘‘whatever irreducibly subjective meanings an image
might have for this or that individual.’’62 Responding to his own unease, Burgin concludes
by proposing that what he finds at the end of his own analysis has a universal resonance:
‘‘the mise-en-scène of a riddle we must all answer at one point or another . . . : the enigma
of sexual difference.’’63
But perhaps analyses of cinema/memory can and do move beyond the apparent uni-
versalism and ahistoricism of Burgin’s conclusion, for in her analyses of her own daytime
reveries and their associations with certain film images, Kuhn reveals cinema/memory’s
binding of individuals with a national imaginary and with place. This binding turns out
to be very much a two-way affair. Beginning with her own daytime reveries while walking
through London streets, Kuhn traces certain of her reverie-images back to two films—
Humphrey Jennings and Stuart McAllister’s moving wartime documentary Listen to Brit-
ain (1942), and Derek Jarman’s powerful and angry attack on the ravages wrought by
Thatcherite politics upon Britain, The Last of England (1988). Kuhn notes that both these
films make ‘‘shorthand allusion to the mythopoesis of a particular national imaginary.’’64
The attunement of these films’ aesthetics and sensibility to those of memory’s inner
worlds suggests, perhaps, that their evocations of memory may render them particularly
assimilable with reverie’s inner landscapes. Kuhn’s central exploration, or ‘‘memory
work’’ demonstrates how her own daydream images or ‘‘reveries’’ allude to yet transform
images from remembered films. Kuhn reveals how, by means of psychical processes of
condensation and displacement, images from these two films become integrated, in modi-
fied form, with those ‘‘scenes’’ that constitute our inner worlds. Kuhn demonstrates, for
instance, how, under the sway of fantasies including Freud’s ‘‘family romance’’65 and

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 SUSANNAH RADSTONE

‘‘primal scene fantasy,’’66 she produces reveries that are intimately associated with these
remembered films:

What my two stories have in common above all is that in both I am placing myself
firmly in the centre of the frame. . . . It is not difficult to grasp the desire behind the
Listen to Britain reverie, which is very much a primal scene fantasy. Part of its intense
pleasure must surely lie in its affirmation that I belong in this place where I am
standing, that this place belongs to me and, above all, that my attachment to it
reaches back to a time before I was born. . . . In my fantasy, I cast myself as a witness
of, and participant in, a moment when the most ordinary of activities . . . become
imbued with an aura of transcendence. . . . My reverie then combines a primal fantasy
with a host of other fascinations (with the recent past, with recent war, with a family
romance); and sets these into imaginings in which a sense of place, a sense of belong-
ing to a place, are central.67

This exploration of cinema/memory as ‘‘cultural experience’’ illuminates the intimate and

‘‘micro’’ processes through which subjectivity binds itself with culture, place, and nation,
while noting also how these processes may be prompted or facilitated by films that share
in the aesthetics, languages, and textures of memory.

Future Directions

Explorations of cinema/memory such as Kuhn’s68 produce intimate and forensic accounts

of certain common yet unique processes by which cinema images become bound with,
and are remembered through, scenes already constitutive of the inner world. Research in
the area of what I’ve called cinema/memory unpicks a particular set of relations between
cinema, memory, and spectatorship, revealing both the usefulness and the limitations of
terms such as ‘‘personal’’ and ‘‘public’’ memory. Though Burgin expressed concern that
his research on cinema/memory focused only on ‘‘irreducibly subjective meanings,’’69 cin-
ema/memories prove to be composites and condensations, belonging wholly neither to
the public world of the cinema nor to the personal and interior realm of fantasy. In this
sense, cinema/memory, with its binding together of images assimilated from cinema with
the psyche’s currency of ‘‘scenes,’’ serves to highlight the fact that memory is never
straightforwardly or irreducibly subjective. At the same time, cinema/memory research
reveals the limitations of studies of memory cinema, including heritage, nostalgia, and
trauma films, for such largely text-based analyses tell only part of the story, lacking the
capacity to reveal fully how such films might mesh with and be assimilated with the
intricacies of psychical scenes and preexisting images. But telling part of the story is not
without value, particularly where we can hold in mind that the story we are telling is only

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 CINEMA AND MEMORY

part of a more complex picture in need of further exploration. In that spirit, I want to
end this chapter by returning from cinema/memory’s micro-focus on exchanges between
the psychical and the public to questions more easily recognizable, perhaps, as those of
the politics of memory and the cinema.
As we have seen, Kuhn’s journey through cinema/memory led her to two films—
Jennings and McAllister’s Listen to Britain and Jarman’s The Last of England—both of
which allude, Kuhn notes, to ‘‘the mythopoesis of a particular national imaginary.’’70
These two films evoke, however, very differently nuanced versions of nation. Listen to
Britain constructs national life—evoked through soundscapes, in particular—as enduring
under enemy fire, while The Last of England comprises a welter of scenes of terrible devas-
tation and violence wrought by the nation—and one government in particular—on parts
of itself. In their essay on cognition and memory in this volume, John Sutton, Celia Harris
and Amanda Barnier argue that the interpersonal dimensions of memory’s emergence
support social practices, including promising and forgiving, and complex emotions, in-
cluding grief, love, and regret. I’d like to take up that insight, extending its reach from
the developmental and the familial to the field of culture and cinema, in order to suggest
some areas for future research. Taking its lead from the directions followed by memory
research in the humanities more generally, much of the research on cinema as memory
that has emerged since the 1990s has focused particularly on cinema’s relation to national
catastrophe, victimhood and trauma, leaving unexplored cinema’s relation to a fuller
range of memory’s interpersonal and public dimensions and the social practices that these
might facilitate, support, or inhibit. If Listen to Britain might lend itself to analysis in the
context of national suffering and trauma, The Last of England, while associated also with
the devastation of aspects of England, evokes national memory to quite different effect,
for this is a film that mourns losses associated with self-inflicted violence, in the form of
the damage wreaked by Thatcherism upon its own nation. Staying with this theme of
intra-national violence, I want to conclude this chapter with some thoughts about the
role of cinema in the public remembrance of such violence. How exactly does the cinema
‘‘remember’’ such a past?
These are questions that can be answered only in the specific and in the local. Rabbit-
Proof Fence (Philip Noyce, 2002) evoked the great disturbances and sorrows caused by the
forced removal of thousands of Aboriginal children from their families by the Australian
authorities between 1900 and 1970. Told through the true story of three sisters who es-
caped from the state home in which they had been placed, traveling over two thousand
miles along the titular fence back to their own country, the film brought ‘‘this epic journey
to public attention.’’71 ‘‘Prompted by and respond[ing] to Bringing Them Home (1997),
the controversial national inquiry’’72 into what became known as the ‘‘stolen generations,’’
Rabbit-Proof Fence’s mainstream popularity made it a huge success at the Australian box
office.73 The success of this film elicits all manner of questions—about how, exactly, films
can be said to ‘‘recover’’ such memories, about their address to spectators, about how

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 SUSANNAH RADSTONE

such films are viewed by specific audiences, and about the role of such films in the broader
public and political negotiation of the past and construction of the future.
As Felicity Collins and Therese Davis explain, Rabbit-Proof Fence’s generic hybrid-
ity—its complex melding of familiar Hollywood and Australian cultural and cinematic
genres, plots, and narratives—arguably contributed greatly to the film’s resonance for,
and its capacity to move, its Australian audience. Collins and Davis identify Rabbit-Proof
Fence’s mixing of elements of Hollywood genres, including the maternal melodrama, the
adventure and the chase film, the romance-quest, and the political-historical drama.
These elements, they go on to show, are orchestrated with the Australian theme of the
‘‘lost child’’—‘‘a recurrent theme in the Australian cultural tradition.’’74 This is a theme,
Collins and Davis explain, that has traditionally spoken to European settler anxieties asso-
ciated with life in an unknown land far from home. But, Collins and Davis propose, the
settler ‘‘lost child’’ theme may also have allowed for some recognition—though only on
settler culture’s terms—of the history of child separation, so that ‘‘at some level of the
Australian social imaginary, ‘the Aborigine’ may still be seen as the ‘lost child.’ ’’75 Yet in
Rabbit-Proof Fence, Collins and Davis conclude, the ‘‘lost child’’ theme is made to speak
otherwise than of an infantilized, landless people: it is embodied in ‘‘the image of Molly
emerging from the desert, both as a child and later as a grown woman . . . demanding
recognition of Aboriginal people as being at home in their country.’’76
Collins and Davis’s analysis of Rabbit-Proof Fence suggests that it would not be quite
accurate to propose simply that the separation of Aboriginal children from their mothers
constituted an aspect of the past that, until the release of the Bringing Them Home report,
settler Australia had preferred, on the whole, to forget—a history whose telling was ‘‘long
overdue.’’77 Instead, what emerges is that the motif of the lost child had already provided
one problematic way of remembering that past—a way of remembering that was arguably
revised by Rabbit-Proof Fence. What is at stake here, then, is how images become articu-
lated with preexisting images and narratives, the resonances of which—as we have seen
above—remain to some degree open. The terms upon which the renegotiation of ele-
ments of the social imaginary—the revising of memory—takes place are, however, im-
mensely complex. I have drawn on Collins and Davis’s analysis of Rabbit-Proof Fence
in order to demonstrate how film theory has explored the cinema’s specific role in the
rearticulation of cultural memory in the public sphere. As we have seen, this rearticulation
is orchestrated through form, genre, narrative, address, and plot. Of import too are the
relations between the institutions and authorities of the public sphere—which extend, in
the case of the renegotiation of these Australian memories, as Collins and Davis show, to
the spheres of the state and to the institutions of public opinion, as well as to the cinema.
But also important is the historico-political moment, which provides the germinating
soil, so to speak, from which films, and other cultural forms grow. Rabbit-Proof Fence
emerged after the Australian High Court’s 1992 Mabo decision, which recognized the
property rights of Australia’s Indigenous peoples, and in the wake of the Bringing Them

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 CINEMA AND MEMORY

Home report, but before the new Australian Labor Party Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd,
delivered a historic speech, ‘‘Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples,’’ at Parliament
House, Canberra, on February 13, 2008.78 While the report, the Mabo decision, the film,
and the speech have all played their part in the renegotiation of national memory in the
public sphere, the precise articulations between these very different sites remain to be
explored. Earlier, I made reference to Sutton, Harris, and Barnier’s proposal in this vol-
ume that complex emotions and social practices are supported by memory’s interpersonal
dimensions. This proposal might be extended to embrace memory’s national, political,
and cultural dimensions, including, for our present purposes, the cinema and specific
films. Films such as Rabbit-Proof Fence may play a part in supporting revisions of interper-
sonal memory linked to grief and regret and producing specific social practices—in this
case, new recognitions of the rights of Indigenous people, an apology speech, and changes
in government policy. But this suggestion remains highly speculative, for research on
cinema and memory has yet to—and would perhaps be hard pressed to—develop meth-
odologies and projects that might fully test that hypothesis.
I have chosen to end this discussion of cinema and memory by shifting perspective
from the intimate terrain of cinema/memory toward larger questions of the cinema’s role
in the revision of a nation’s cultural memory. But in making this shift I have spoken in
the singular, of a political and historical moment, of a national cultural imaginary, and of
cultural memory. Yet, as my discussion of cinema/memory has already shown, those sin-
gular terms screen as much as they reveal. Though films and their constituent scenes may
articulate with commonly recurring psychical fantasies including the family romance and
the primal scene, as well as with more culturally and nationally nuanced themes such as
that of the ‘‘lost child,’’ those articulations take place on terrain differentiated by individ-
ual and cultural histories. But as I hope I’ve also indicated, I don’t think this should lead
film or cultural theory to abandon its quests to map the relations between politics, culture,
and memory—though it should encourage us to temper our findings with an awareness
of the diversity of the terrain we attempt to map and the need to research as closely to
the ground as possible.
This chapter has surveyed the field of cinema and memory research to date, but there
is much ground still to cover, from the field of global media relations to the intimate
terrain of spectators and their psychical and affective relations to the cinema as memory.
The cinema is but one aspect of an ‘‘intermedial’’ field of cultural memory that extends
to literature, photography, television, digital media, and beyond, articulating with public
discourses and domains of many kinds, as well as becoming assimilated within the hybrid
scenes of our inner worlds. Research has yet to focus fully on the articulation of memory
across media—on how memory ‘‘travels,’’ as it were, between different media, as well as
across and between diverse public institutions and sites. Future research might focus too
on the ways in which cinema memory travels across and between nations, asking how the

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 SUSANNAH RADSTONE

consuming national memories evoked, revised, and negotiated by films such as Rabbit-
Proof Fence or The Last of England might be consumed differently across national divides,
as well as by different audiences within any single nation. Questions of cinema memory’s
journeys across spatial and national borders connect too with issues of time—with the
question, that is, of how cinema memories travel across time and between one historical
moment and the next. Meanwhile, studies of cinema/memory such as those discussed in
this chapter have transformed understandings of the relations between our inner worlds
and our media experiences, so that spaces once imagined as separated—albeit by a porous
membrane—now emerge as transitional space. But how these insights might be brought
to bear on broader questions of the politics of cinema memory in the public, cultural,
and national spheres and vice versa? These are the questions that remain very much open
to future study.

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