Memory and the Moving Image: French Film in the Digital Era (review)

This excellent book addresses two deceptively simple questions in four extended chapters: 'How can films show the processes and mechanisms of memory? And what do the processes and mechanisms of moving images do to memory?' (p. 2, emphasis original). Isabelle McNeill focuses mainly on recent films by Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, and Agnès Varda. She places the issue of memory in the sociopolitical context of Henry Rousso's refoulement of history (collaboration, Algeria), and in the first chapter gives a crisp account of theories of memory, with a particular emphasis on Bergson, Derrida, and Deleuze. Chapter 2 is a powerful meditation on the role of objects in memory work, anchored in the artist Macha Makeïeff 's statement in Varda's Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse … deux ans après (2002) that 'les objets nous contiennent', the subjective and the objective becoming blurred. McNeill argues that spaces of cultural memory, whether museums or films, or a combination, as in Varda's recent installations, lead to productive overlaps between personal and collective memory. This is particularly the case for filmmakers who use the medium autobiographically, foregrounding their self as other, as when Varda films parts of her body in close up in Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000), destabilizing the notion of the author as subject. Chapter 3 explores a key issue for a study of cultural memory, that of testimony. McNeill focuses on the role of the face in such films, pointing out how women's faces function as 'privileged objects of cultural, and particularly cinematic, memory' (p. 99, emphasis original). Using the work of Giorgio Agamben, she shows how the face becomes the 'site of community and the collective' (p. 101). Her analysis of sequences from Yamina Benguigui's film Mémoires d'immigrés (1997) to illustrate this point is compelling; she argues that the focus on the face helps to create both 'a dynamic mnemonic circuit in which the past's virtuality is constantly being actualised in the present' (p. 108), and a '"dream space" of mnemonic mediation, where individual memory […] spills over into the collective sphere' (p. 121). The final chapter focuses on urban space as a memory map, in which the city is seen as a cartography of shared individual and collective memories. Although McNeill references a number of films to explore this idea, arguably the most interesting is her discussion of Michael Haneke's Caché (2005), in which the legacies of the colonial past are embedded in threatening city spaces, and an enigmatic videotape comes to haunt the protagonist. In answer to the questions she poses, McNeill shows convincingly and sensitively how memories are shared collectively in films, and how certain films are uniquely placed to explore this through totemic and/or museal objects, the human face, and the city as affective map. As she neatly puts it, 'our collective habits are always already inhabited by others' (p. 162). The role of films and related visual media is key in this respect; they allow us to 'recognise our common ground in the radical otherness of the past and the mnemonic encounters of the present' (p. 162).