ABSTRACT
This chapter considers an editing technique and some dialogue from the opening scene in order to suggest how, rather than destroying memory, Dead Man actually works with the mnemonic skills that film requires of its spectators and establishes a complex set of relationships between time, story and memory. In Dead Man the sound and the editing operate together to produce an analogous struggle over time and an opening-up of memory spaces through repetition. While Dead Man is certainly a subversion of the Western it is equally a film about remembering colonialism and the West. Dead Man offers a model of memory-work as part of the process of belonging, in this instance, learning to belong in worlds in which remembering the presence of colonialism in the post-colonial is an ethical necessity. Europe thus disappears and, America forgets that it has forgotten its history of colonisation.
