New Literary History

Lefebvre, Martin.
On Memory and Imagination in the Cinema
New Literary History - Volume 30, Number 2, Spring 1999, pp. 479-498

The Johns Hopkins University Press

Martin Lefebvre - On Memory and Imagination in the Cinema - New Literary History 30:2 New Literary History 30.2 (1999) 479-498 On Memory and Imagination in the Cinema * Martin Lefebvre In animo sit quidquid est in memoria Augustine (Confessions 10.17) Memory and Imagination It is undeniable that memory, in the larger sense of the term, plays an important role in the act of spectating (the act of watching a film). For example, in order to construct a narrative form and comprehend the characters' actions, the spectator must be able to recall faces, places, and situations from one segment of a film to another. Further, cognitive science has shown us how greatly the understanding of discursive forms depends on prior knowledge, memorized through such knowledge structures as frames, scripts, MOPs (Memory Organization Packets), and so on. As a result, it is becoming more and more difficult for semioticians to conceive of memory outside the artificial intelligence paradigm. But one must be careful not to reduce memory in its totality to this model, which accounts only partially for the work done by human memory and for its semiotic or representational function. In fact, computer memory does not represent, it re-presents or reproduces data. Information stored in computer memory is stable and not subject to transformation. In contrast, human memory can represent, that is it can translate data into a semiotic system and, by the same token, transform it and render...