Future Memories

Abstract

of urgency. The children’s motivation for being filmed betrays a sophisticated reflexivity of the camcorder as a tool for producing future memories. Even at a young age, children keenly apprehend the pliability of mediated experience; their father’s film is not simply a registration of present fun activities, but a conscious steering of their future past. The camcorder constructs family life at the same time and by the same means as it constructs our memory of it; whereas the camcorder registers private lives, these images may help shape (future) public identity. The children’s awareness was most likely triggered by contemporary television programs—anything from so-called reality TV and lost-relative quests to dating shows and celebrity interviews—deploying home video footage to represent a person’s past life. This scene helps articulate three levels of mediation at which the audiovisual construction of memory takes place. First, home movies could be considered mediated acts of cognition: minds instructing instruments to manufacture (desirable) images of personal or family life. Second, filming the children’s play might be seen as the camera’s registration of ‘real’ life—footage shot and stored for later reminiscence. And third, home videos may become visual resources in cinematic productions of remembrance; as the children in the above scene perfectly understand, the video camera shapes their individual or family’s future past. These three levels of mediation structure of what I call ‘cinematic hindsight’: audiovisual retrospectives of remembered life as an aggregate of (actual or fictional) home videos and filmic (re)constructions. Cinematic hindsight could simply be considered a representational trope preferred by movie