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Cultural Memory On Memorial Day weekend 2001, the world watched with anticipation as the first blockbuster of the summer film season, the Disney-owned Touchstone Pictures’ Pearl Harbor, opened nationwide. Boasting the largest initial production budget in Hollywood history, Pearl Harbor promised to exemplify the kind of immersive, hyperstimulating spectacle that has defined large-scale historical filmmaking in recent years. Even before the film was released, reviewers began discussing Pearl Harbor’s relative merits and adherence to the historical record— factors such as its omission of embarrassing details about inexperienced Navy antiaircraft gunners shooting down their own planes, its “compositing ” of real-life characters, and allusions to previous images of Pearl Harbor, including iconic still photographs that reportedly served to guide the film’s production design. Reviewers made comparisons to previous World War II spectacles such as Saving Private Ryan with its famed use of documentary-style camera work and graphic violence, a strategy that was explicitly replicated in Pearl Harbor for the forty-minute, action-filled centerpiece sequence depicting the attack. The release of Pearl Harbor on Memorial Day weekend also coincided with a series of self-conscious attempts to weave the film and its reception into a larger fabric of national commemoration. Press materials indicated that Pearl Harbor marked the first time the U.S. Navy allowed filming in the actual waters around the USS Arizona Memorial where the bodies of hundreds of sailors killed during the attack remain entombed. The theatrical release of the film was also paired with a day of special programming on the Hearst Corporation’s History Channel, promising to provide “The Real Story of Pearl Harbor” by screening films such as Unsung Heroes of Pearl Harbor, One Hour over Tokyo, and Tora, Tora, Tora! The National Geographic Channel, likewise, aired the films Legacy of Attack and National Geographic behind the Movie: Pearl Harbor, which offered a historically grounded supplement to the fictional narrative of the feature film.1 And the day after the film’s release, the American Movie Classics channel presented “A Day of WWII” featuring eight war movies, hosted by the cast of Pearl Harbor and a special “Cinema Secrets” segment devoted to the making of the film. Within these juxtapositions one finds the continual slippage among spheres of authority, truth, and fiction that characterize the struggle for 2 ] 50 · Technologies of History control of even the most mainstream historiographical discourse. In addition to inviting viewers to experience a lifelike and emotionally engaging rendering of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the film’s broader cultural milieu continually reminds them of its constructed nature. This includes revelations about the film’s intertextuality, behind-the-scenes documentaries, actors appearing out of character, and of course, the inevitable pronouncements by scholars and witnesses regarding the film’s faithfulness to the historical record and its uncanny simulation of physical and emotional experiences. It is through this clash of historical signifiers and contradictions that the “history” of this event is constituted. It is certainly no accident that so many historiographical films and TV shows revolve around moments of trauma, loss, uncertainty, or historical crisis. While this tendency highlights the powerful therapeutic potential of cinema and television, it may also reveal the limitations of the “cultural therapy” it purports to mobilize. The same traumatic events and crises continue to reemerge as the subject of Hollywood’s most elaborately reconstructed history films. This repetition suggests either that historical trauma is not “curable” through the means available to film and television or, perhaps more likely, that the exorcism of cultural trauma is only part of the cultural significance of this type of work. Try as it might, Hollywood holds no more of the secret to reducing “history” to a single narrative than the most definitive of academic histories. Creative Forgetting As theorists of cultural memory have argued, the writing of history does not end with the creation of documents, narratives, or analyses. People consume and process written, filmed, televised, and played historiography within a web of cultural forces and interpretive contexts. The meanings that are encoded into a particular historical work may be decoded quite differently when they are received by an audience or reader. Further, historical meanings evolve over time, reflecting, among other things, the extent to which our relation to the past is conditioned by present circumstances . As reception studies of television have questioned assumptions about the passive spectatorship of TV viewers, memory studies provide a way of looking at historical reception, what people remember about the...

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