Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema (review)

What is the relationship between cinema and memory? This is Russell Kilbourn’s basic question in his wide-ranging account of movies and remembering. A preliminary answer seems obvious. The cinema has developed a particularly compelling technique for the representation of memory, visualizing what it must be like to remember in the form of the ‘flashback’ – the ‘external’ depiction of the otherwise ‘internal’ act of remembering. But is it an adequate representation? Kilbourn contrasts the flashback in classical ‘Hollywood’ film style, which functions primarily to maintain temporal, spatial, and narrative coherence, with the flash-back in modernist ‘art cinema,’ which tends to disorient the viewer, producing the effects of uncertainty and incoherency. The flashback, then, as a model of memory, is presented by Kilbourn as the formal battleground for competing accounts of the act (and art) of remembering. And the cinema is presented as the key medium to consider when we ask what memory is.

From one perspective, though, we should say that all narrative representation is, in a manner of speaking, a ‘flashback.’ Stories, whether fictional or factual, are typically a recounting of events, registered by the use of the past tense (which, some literary historians have argued, is the most common tense of narration). This ‘temporal duality,’ as Gérard Genette has described it – this distinction between ‘story time’ and ‘narrative time’ – is, it should seem, a natural one: the time of recounting is the present; the time of the recounted is the past. ‘Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.’ The Homeric invocation, which begins the Iliad and which (let us say) inaugurated the Western literary tradition, is a call for a recounting of the past – it is an appeal to memory – but it is also a demand that memory be given a manifest form, to make the past available to those in the present. The past (Achilles’s angry acts, which ‘brought countless ills’) and the present (when the goddess is asked to ‘sing’ about that anger) are contrasted but also combined, in a manner that has made representation one of the central problems of Western thought: a seemingly natural distinction, between the past and its present recounting, is made to feel unnatural by the formal and technical act of narration.

Homer’s poems were spoken (or sung), given form by the human voice, generating the sense that the past was located in (the minds of) individuals in the form of ‘memories.’ As such, past events have come to be seen as ‘retrievable,’ available for present expression, for re-presentation, in some form or other. This has had the effect of blurring the distinction between present and past. Eric Auerbach famously argued, in Mimesis, his classic history of realistic representation, that Homer’s epic poems, while recounting past events, were presented with such force and immediacy that one could imagine that the events were occurring at the moment of their telling – made present in a somewhat confounding fashion to those listening. Auerbach describes Homeric prose effects: ‘Clearly outlined, brightly and uniformly illuminated, men and things stand out in a realm where everything is visible; and not less clear – wholly expressed, orderly even in their ardor – are the feelings and thoughts of the persons involved.’ Homeric technique, Auerbach argues, is ‘an externalization of phenomena in terms perceptible to the senses.’ We may, on this telling, draw a clear line from the ancient birth of realism in Western art to the cinema.

Kilbourn is sensitive to the historical aspect, but he argues that the problem of memory has become especially acute in the modern era, characterized by technologies of representation that seem to reproduce the past in especially vivid form. He claims that memory has been ‘de-ontologized,’ by which he means that it is now primarily artificial, ‘constituted, legitimized and “naturalized” through and by means of primarily visual media, most significantly...