Cinematic Memory Research Articles

Mounage Structures for Building a Film Narrative

The book "Montage Structures for Building a Film Narrative" by Dr. Bilyana Topalova is an indepth analysis of external montage structures and their transformation under the influence of new technologies. The research was done with reasoning and knowledge of new trends in cinema and film language. The topic is current and offers scientifically based conclusions and analyses. Cinema has become a visual, aural and narrative memory of humanity. Cinematic memory is more important, because of its social or cultural character, because there will always be a viewer who, when watching and listening to films, will have the opportunity and desire to discover something different from the familiar.

Beyond Memory

The introduction situates the Special Focus section “Chilean Film and Media: Fifty Years Later (1973/2023)” in its historical and cultural context. The year 2023 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the coup that toppled the socialist government of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. To reflect on the role of film and media in relation to the coup demands a move away from mere commemoration and, more broadly, from memory studies as the overarching critical framework that has dominated studies of Chilean cinema. This Special Focus section seeks to move beyond memory without neglecting the duty to remember. It is a project of reactivation, reappropriation, and repoliticization of the cinematic memory of the coup. This approach favors continuities between films made throughout the last five decades under different historical moments—the socialist years of Allende, the dictatorship, the postdictatorship, and the estallido social (social uprising) of October 2019.

On longing for loss: a theory of cinematic memory and an aesthetics of nostalgia

ABSTRACT Nostalgia is everywhere in media today—be it films, television, or advertisements. But what does it mean to say that media is nostalgic? Beyond presenting nostalgic narratives, media texts can also express nostalgia stylistically. So how does this nostalgia look and feel? This article presents an original theory of the aesthetics of nostalgia, arguing that ‘pastness’ becomes fantastical when nostalgic media use an artificial style: often a hazy and hyper-coloured image. Through a case study of Guy Maddin’s Careful (1992), this article demonstrates how nostalgia may function audiovisually in the context of cinematic melodrama theory. These nostalgic aesthetics serve as both an articulation of mediated memory and a reflection of lived nostalgia, which is a longing for the inaccessible, the impossible, the lost—in other words, fantasy itself. Using phenomenologies of nostalgia by Edward Casey, James Hart, and Steven Galt Crowell, this article defines nostalgia philosophically, as the contradictory position between emotional yearning and a self-reflexive distance from the past. Such a radically critical nostalgia locates nostalgics not in a regressive and idealized relic of the past, but in the present moment, in which we may long for the loss of a past so inaccessible that it never was.

‘Dubai’ as a Place of Memory in Malayalam Cinema

This paper is an exploration of cinematic memory as a resource for remembering large-scale Keralan migration to the Gulf since the late 1960s. The south Indian state of Kerala, which predominantly speaks Malayalam, is a major contributor to the migrant labour force in the Gulf region for the last five decades. However, until recently, the migrant figured in the public discourse of Kerala as an economic agent alone. There has been increasing instances of memorialising the Gulf in the Malayalam public sphere since the beginning of the 2000s which brings to light the subjective aspects of the Gulf migration. However, what is lost in these accounts is the simultaneity and interlinked nature of the two places. Cinema, on the other hand, offers resources to inscribe the mutuality of the two places in the collective memory of Kerala. Invoking Pierre Nora’s concept of places of memory, the paper looks at cinematic renditions of ‘Dubai’ as one such site of memory in the present when the image of Dubai and the profile of Keralan migrant has undergone a shift. Taking the example of one Malayalam film, Pathemari (Salim Ahamed, 2015), and tracing its cinematic genealogy, this paper analyses the ways in which ‘Dubai’ is remembered and how this remembrance inscribes the Gulf as part of the collective memory of Kerala. The paper identifies the persistence of filmed space, intertextuality, and the archivality of the star body as the modes in which cinematic memory achieves this collective memorialisation. The mutuality between Kerala and Dubai, offered by cinematic memory, allows it to be an act of affective citizenship on the part of the migrants, i.e. embodied and sensorial acts of claiming the universal right to have rights.

Stranger Things, Nostalgia, and Aesthetics

<i>Stranger Things</i>, Nostalgia, and Aesthetics

How does a film remember? Cinematic memory as a living constellation in El escarabajo de oro o Victorias Hämnd

ABSTRACT The film El escarabajo de oro o Victorias Hämnd (2014), directed by the Argentinean-Swedish duo Alejo Moguillansky and Fia-Stina Sandlund, presents clashing storylines, histories, merged film genres and conflicting aspirations within a transnational film production set in Argentina. It stages a performance founded on real circumstances, where two filmmakers (Moguillansky and Sandlund) begin working on a biopic based on the life of Victoria Benedictsson, a 19th-century Swedish feminist writer, but then, partly in secrecy, the main character changes to her contemporary, Leandro N. Alem, an Argentinean revolutionary politician, while all gets tangled up in a fictional story of a treasure hunt. The film crosses boundaries between documentary and fiction with its maze of rogues, tricksters, and unreliable narrators, opening up stories within stories. In the performance of the documentary filmmaking process, there is a constant struggle over memory: whose (hi)story gets to be told and from what angle. In this article, cinematic memory in El escarabajo de oro o Victorias Hämnd is delineated through the performative gestures of reenactment and voice-over narration as aesthetic strategies that promote a non-linear, multidirectional perception of remembering. I suggest that the film offers an alternative way to approach cinematic memory, not attaching the act of remembering to an individual, a group or a nation, but to the film form itself. The film engenders cinematic memory as a living constellation, where diverse historical temporalities exist simultaneously and interact freely. In the film, cinematic memory is constantly being created and recreated in the here and now.

Paratextual Encounters of Four Kinds: Blade Runner and Cinematic Memory

This paper considers a series of Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) paratexts in order to examine the different kinds of memory work they perform and activate depending on the technologies and traditions of representation with which they engage and the contextualizing forces of the sites in which we experience them. Terence Broad's artwork, Blade Runner—Autoencoded (2016)—a version of Ridley Scott's film produced from the memory of an artificial intelligence—is privileged in this analysis, which also considers the Tyrell Corporation miniature, Syd Mead's concept drawings, and the trailer for Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017).

Archives of Memory: Vietnamese American Films, Past and Present

Vietnamese American filmmaking must be seen in the context of a community's diasporic formations. As such, it maps out a politics of representation that encapsulates the issues of community and history that invariably striate the ways in which Vietnamese American films and videos have been produced, distributed, received, and archived. This article focuses on the role of the Viet Film Fest, in Orange Country, California, as a major site for the archiving of South Vietnamese and Vietnamese American cinematic memory. In examining how this vital archive is shaped by both transnational politics and local practices of commemoration, Duong proposes its status as an archive of memory for a refugee community that wants to rectify how its members have been represented by U.S. and Vietnamese national cultures in film, both in the past and in the present moment.

Where is my home, my nation?: Cinematic Memory of the Women who were Abducted During the Partition of India in 1947

This paper is an intense engagement of the partition saga and the experience of women in the process of the remaking of ‘Nations’. It aims to narrate the memories of survival and aftermath lives of abducted women who faced horrendous acts of violence in wake of evolution of ‘partition’ times. The tales of horror inflicted the arrival of nationalistic rhetoric on the bodies of women presents the gendered notions of nationalism and its horrendous expressions. Interspersed with readings from literature on the subject of partition with an analysis of discourses mostly from eleven selected films from Hindi cinema, this paper highlights the textual understanding of the films in the context of the idea of nation and sufferings of women in the nation building process. It revisits the patriarchal inflictions on the body of a woman in the larger context of the dark desires of macho-nationalism through the intersectional analysis of texts and subtexts of the selected Hindi films.

Excavating La Moneda: cinematic memory and post-dictatorship documentary in Chile

ABSTRACTNearly three decades after the end of the civic-military dictatorship led by General Pinochet, the documentary cinema of Chile has systematically embraced this country’s public memory project, exposing state-sponsored atrocities and their perpetrators, recovering survivors’ memories of loss, suffering and resilience, while continuing to challenge the collective conscience of Chileans. Post-dictatorship documentary in Chile has featured changing approaches, aesthetics, and themes, while persistently interrogating the relationship between the nation and its collective memory in the afterlife of the dictatorship through a filmic formal strategy of cinematic memory. Cinematic memory is defined here as a film’s deliberate use of style to articulate a distinctively filmic procedure of remembering experiences subjected to a politics of erasure. Thus, Chilean post-dictatorship documentaries seek an encounter with cultural memory via a filmic approach that can be described in terms of the Benjaminian metaphor of excavation. These post-dictatorship documentaries unearth tenuous material traces of the past through cinematic memory by focusing on the embodied return of survivors and other witnesses of atrocity to La Moneda, this nation’s government house, one of Chile’s most significant sites of memory.

Contemporary comic books and Hollywood noir: remediating cinematic style and cultural memory in The Fade Out

ABSTRACTThis article explores Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ recycling of film noir images and tropes in The Fade Out, a twelve-issue comic book series that borrows heavily from photographic and cinematic materials (including publicity stills and actors’ head shots) to craft a ‘remediated’ vision of old Hollywood that is simultaneously deceptive and truthful about the harsh realities of working in an industry popularly known as the ‘Dream Factory’. The nightmares that haunt the narrative’s protagonist, Charlie Parish, tied to his military past as well as to his relationship to a dead starlet named Valeria Sommers, are referred to by the narrator as ‘half-remembered images’, a fitting description of the way in which Phillips’ own drawings – his nearly ‘perfect’ reproductions of earlier photos and movie scenes – are actually incomplete without the kind of historical contextualization that this series demands. By juxtaposing panels from the comic book with those original images, the author reveals how, beneath the nostalgic surface of The Fade Out, a deeper message about cultural memory and historical archiving is being articulated. Mixing real-world figures (e.g. screen icons such as Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Clark Gable) and fictional characters who nevertheless call to mind actual people from Hollywood’s past, this comic book series invites us to speculate on the demands of the star system as well as on the possibility that our own fading memory might make such distinctions (e.g. between ‘real’ and ‘fake’) less clear in the years to come.

‘Not Like the Stories I am Used to’: East German Film as Cinematic Memory in Contemporary Chile

This paper is concerned with East German films which deal with the subject of Chile in the aftermath of the 1973 coup d’état in a contemporary Chilean cultural framework. Conceived in the charged political atmosphere of the Cold War, this material is valuable in Chile today because it reflects East Germany as a cultural and social environment for Chilean émigré artists during the 1970s and 1980s. The author explores the films’ potential as a form of cinematic postmemory for younger Chilean audiences, focusing on two feature films, Die Spur des Vermißten (1980) and Blonder Tango (1985). Do young Chileans accept these images as truthful and do they inspire a rethinking of the controversial subject of the Pinochet regime? The results suggest that the DEFA films, due to their narrative and aesthetic textures, present this audience with challenging perspectives, uncover misconceptions and evoke empathy with antagonistic social and political agents. Based on this case study, the author argues that the DEFA films are audio-visual materials which can be highly productive in cultural and educational contexts and can complement efforts to revive collective memory in Chile.

The Spectral Duration of Malayalam Soft-porn: Disappearance, Desire, and Haunting

This paper examines the spectral nature of the genre of Malayalam soft-porn that emerged in the late 1980s but has now disappeared with rapid changes in the industry. I argue that the memory of soft-porn bleeds into the present, as if in an attempt to negotiate retroactively with the end of the celluloid era and to recoup the memory of the form that has been pronounced dead and gone by the end of 2000s. By examining the modes through which cinematic memory carries the charge of the immanent past into the contemporary moment both in terms of narrative strategies and the physical space of the cinema, I look at S.P. Theater in Trivandrum, the film Kanyaka Talkies and the installation Kuliyum Mattu Scenukalum by Priyaranjan Lal, all of which reflect the form of soft-porn as remnants of the past that haunt the present in significant ways. S.P. Theater, located in the outskirts of the city of Trivandrum, insistently maintained its status as a popular destination for soft-porn aficionados even after the form had fizzled out in the industry. On the other hand, the film Kanyaka Talkies traces the life of a fictional soft-porn theater that was converted to a Church. One of the crucial moments in the film features the installations that would later become part of Lal’s Kuliyum Mattu Scenukalum to reflect the inner contradictions in the built space of the Church/Theater. Between the fictional rendering of the soft-porn theater in the film, and its “real” variant in the form of S.P. Theater, I argue that the current cinema-scape is marked by a lingering ghostly presence of a recently deceased film form.

Haunting memories of war in Chinese cinema and diaspora: Visions of national trauma, power and autoethnographic collage

The transgenerational ghosts of trauma from war, death and injustice within Chinese twentieth century history are carried through the remembrances and silences of mediated, diasporic visions of memory. These ghosts are visible through Chinese cinema at the intersection of modern China’s national interests, issues of power and the transnational distribution/production of official memory. These relations also suggest an insistence to produce particular national, unified identifications within the collective imaginations of spectators across generations in the Chinese diaspora. While some national wounds are ‘chosen’ and remembered (for example, Western colonialism, Imperial Japanese invasion), other collective traumas continue to be disavowed through cinematic memory productions. In response to these issues of historical rewriting and memory production, I propose alternate ways of seeing cinema through a critical autoethnography that juxtaposes other mediations of memory. I explore how this approach to cinema spectatorship enables diasporic subjects to interrogate how affective trauma transmits unconsciously across generations.

Militant Buddhism and Post-War Sri Lankan Cinematic Memory Work

Since 2009, several Sinhala films, such as Matha (2012) by Boodee Keerthisena, and Ini Avan (2012) by Asoka Handagama, have revisited the memory of the last phase of the thirty-year Sri Lankan civil war. Using as a touchstone Sarath Weerasekara's Gamani (2011), a film that claims to be based on the “true story” about the LTTE's massacre of a group of Sinhalese villagers, this paper explores the “uses and abuses” of memory (Jelin) in state—sponsored post—war cinema. Through an examination of the film, this paper will show how the Buddhist discourse contributes to a hegemonic memory culture, pushing subaltern testimonies and memories of war into the periphery. It will examine the role of Buddhism, depicted in cinematic memory work, in the project of post-war nation-building in Sri Lanka.

Camera Arriving at the Station: Cinematic Memory as Cultural Memory

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.

KINO ATMINTIES MUZIEJUS: DEIMANTO NARKEVIČIAUS PAMINKLAI

The paper aims at describing the problem of historical memory such as it emerges in the films of the contemporary Lithuanian video-artist Deimantas Narkevičius. The questions raised are whether it may be conveyed through cinematic means and which techniques in particular may well preserve and nourish it. In the oeuvre of Narkevičius, the problem is closely tied to the autoreflexivity of the medium itself, since cinema allows recalling events both personal and “universal” and moving them from one context to another, forcing them to lose their documental status in the process. Yet no manipulation of document and history may pass without consequences, and all historic images, traumatic narratives and translating between different languages and experiences reveal ruptures in the narrative texture. This, in turn, makes us question the possibility and probability of memory itself. These questions are in the forth of Narkevičius’ films, yet they are posed wordlessly, through images alone, thus making the spectator wonder as to whether cinema might have its own techniques of working with the memory, history, and forgetting.Editing is the main cinematic technique used in the process, and the “Role of a Lifetime” of Narkevičius, to quote his another film, proves to be one of the Great Editor. Editing empowers one with the means of control over cinematic discourse and thus provides a very particular type of cinematic memory. Instead of merely showing things, the editor has control over what shall and shall not be seen. Yet Narkevičius chooses not to merely tell documentary stories about a life long gone. Instead, he reviews the once-traditional ways of looking (soviet filming techniques, film and TV genres) aiming at revealing their own inner instability, forcing them to display their own ruptures and discontinuities. A strategy like that closely resembles such practices of the Soviet Lithuanian art as the so-called “Quiet Modernism” or “Aesop’s language”; yet the overall status of Narkevičius’ work is under the question. Is such a strategy merely a suggestion of a way of remembering? Or, is it a convenient and institutionally approved way of opposing the mainstream? The films analysed here provide no definite answer; however, they do prove that the means of the medium play a significant role in how we perceive and understand our past.

Cinematic Memory and The Americanization of The Holocaust

Abstract Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German (2006), while grounding itself in WWII, casts a wide net as it attempts to examine the role of memory, the difficulty of assigning guilt, determining justice, defining the past, and writing history. Its nuanced treatment of these issues is enhanced by its complex ethnic characterizations and its contextualization among a group of WWII American cinematic classics. This ultimately leads to a shift in viewer reception aimed at creating greater understanding and empathy.

Expertise, Criticism and Holocaust Memory in Cinema

This essay offers a critical examination of two recent Holocaust films that exemplify contrasting approaches to Holocaust representation: Peter Forgacs’s 1997 The maelstrom: A family chronicle and Quentin tarantino’s 2009 Inglourious basterds. One film is historical; the other translates history to figurative exaggeration. The essay explores how The maelstrom positions viewers within the constructed subjunctive spaces of the film, while Inglourious basterds positions viewers as spectators of history as comic book. Looking at these films together illuminates competing rhetorical claims to expertise in film production and reception, and, in the context of Holocaust memory, the levels of expertise required of viewing audiences. Moreover, the analysis reveals that rhetorical aporia no longer dominates inventional possibilities for cinematic memory construction of the Holocaust.

The tale of two turns: Khrustalev, My Car! and the cinematic memory of the Soviet past

ABSTRACTThe essay offers a reading of Aleksei Iu. German's film Khrustalev, My Car! (1998) as a memory event. Khrustalev, My Car is discussed together with two other films about the Soviet past, The Cold Summer of 1953 (Aleksandr Proshkin, 1987) and Island (Pavel Lungin, 2006). Showing deep but reversible transformations of the central characters, each of these films develops in two turns: first from citizen into victim, then from victim into citizen. Crucial to this reading of Khrustalev, My Car! is a narratological analysis that distinguishes between several levels of narrated reality: what the narrator claims has happened in his fictional world; what he suggests could have happened; and what he could not possibly know but dreams about. Starting with the narrator's wet dream, culminating in the imagined scene of the gang rape of the father and ending with the wishful dream of the father's (and others') return from the camp, the film develops as an articulated, analytically unfolding work of mourning.