ABSTRACT
For some time now filmmakers worldwide have been preoccupied with issues of individual memory and collective recollection. We used to think of cinema as a mere witness of historical events, able to transform the flow of time into series of images and transport these images to coming generations. At best, film offered us insights about how certain ages wanted to see themselves in past, present, and future and how this seeing informed their repertoires of representation. At worst, cinema stood out as a privileged tool of emotional manipulation, a technology falsifying the real, recasting contingent histories as fate and nature, and in this way denying competing visions of the past and its future. Today, cinema no longer seems to serve as a mere servant of historical memory or an eyewitness of future pasts. Rarely do we consider it as a tool helping us to approach the past as a distant reservoir of insights and lessons; nor as a versatile technology that, by providing narratives of historical time, can help legitimize the present and incite alternative visions for the future. Instead, in our time of fast-paced image flows and networked communication, mediated images themselves—whether moving or still, whether captured on celluloid or digitally processed—assume the task of doing the work of memorialization and historical imagining for us; they become rather than merely facilitate memory in an of themselves.
