Camera Arriving at the Station: Cinematic Memory as Cultural Memory

Russell Kilbourn

doi:10.3390/soc3030316

Abstract

This paper explores the modern metropolis as an ironically concrete metaphor for the collective memory and the mourning of cinema’s passing, as it—the “city”—is digitally constructed in two recent, auteur-directed, special effects-driven blockbuster films, Inception and Hugo. The modern city, and mass media, such as the cinema, as well as modes of mass transport, especially the train, all originate in the 19th century, but come into their own in the early 20th century in their address to a subject as the mobilised citizen-consumer who, as Anne Friedberg makes clear, is also always a viewer. Additionally, as Barbara Mennel has recently shown, the advent in Europe of trains and time zones, in their transformation of modern time and space, paved the way for cinema’s comparably cataclysmic impact upon modern subjectivity in its iconic reproduction of movement within illusory 3D space. Both films, thus, in their different ways employ cinematic remediation as a form of cultural memory whose nostalgia for cinema’s past is rendered with the latest digital effects, hidden in plain sight in the form of subjective memories (as flashback) and dreams. While a version of this reading has been advanced before (at least for Hugo), this paper goes further by connecting each film’s status as remediated dream-memory to its respective dependence upon the city as a post-cinematic three-dimensional framework within which locative and locomotive desires alike determine a subject whose psyche is indistinguishable from the cityscape that surrounds him.

Highlights

IntroductionI explore the modern metropolis as an ironically concrete metaphor for the collective memory and the mourning of cinema’s passing, as it—the ‘city’—is digitally constructed in two recent, auteur-directed, special effects-driven blockbuster films, Inception [2] and Hugo [3]
The Cinematic City, Identity and Cultural MemoryIn this paper, I explore the modern metropolis as an ironically concrete metaphor for the collective memory and the mourning of cinema’s passing, as it—the ‘city’—is digitally constructed in two recent, auteur-directed, special effects-driven blockbuster films, Inception [2] and Hugo [3]
I construe the locative axis of modern cinematic subjectivity in terms of real or metaphorical location or locus

Summary

Introduction

I explore the modern metropolis as an ironically concrete metaphor for the collective memory and the mourning of cinema’s passing, as it—the ‘city’—is digitally constructed in two recent, auteur-directed, special effects-driven blockbuster films, Inception [2] and Hugo [3]. The advent in Europe and North America of trains and universal time zones transformed modern time and space, paving the way for cinema’s comparably cataclysmic impact upon modern subjectivity in its iconic reproduction of movement within illusory three-dimensional space, e.g., [5].1 Both Inception and Hugo in their different ways employ cinematic remediation as a form of cultural memory whose nostalgia for cinema’s past is rendered with the latest digital effects, hidden in plain sight in the form of subjective memories (as flashback) and as dreams or what “one normally thinks of as the most private and mental of events” [7] These films exemplify the tendency in contemporary cinema to externalise a character’s interior topography through a naively literal allegorization of her/his environment. Both Inception and Hugo in their different ways employ cinematic remediation as a form of cultural memory whose nostalgia for cinema’s past is rendered with the latest digital effects, hidden in plain sight in the form of subjective memories (as flashback) and as dreams or what “one normally thinks of as the most private and mental of events” [7] These films exemplify the tendency in contemporary cinema to externalise a character’s interior topography through a naively literal allegorization of her/his environment. (Where Hugo contains a key flashback and dream scenes, Inception can be read as either one long dream scene or one long flashback [6], or both at once.) while Hugo’s nostalgia for cinema’s past has been much remarked upon, as has Inception’s allegorization of the filmmaking process [8,9,10], I go further here by connecting each film’s status as remediated dream-memory to its respective dependence upon the city (a specific city, and “the city” in general) as a post-cinematic three-dimensional framework within which locative and locomotive desires alike determine a subject whose psyche is indistinguishable from the cityscape that surrounds him

Locative and Locomotive Subjects

Post-Cinematic Nostalgia

Conclusion