ABSTRACT
This paper reflects upon Jean-Pierre Meunier’s term film-souvenir and how it enables us to conceive of different possible alliances between filmic practices and memory. Drawing from audiovisual testimonies and the work of contemporary filmmaker and media artist Atom Egoyan, the essay suggests that film-souvenir goes beyond Meunier’s designation of the term as a specific filmic consciousness and even beyond its commonly accepted translation of ‘home movie.’ The French term opens up our understanding of film as always already related to memory, continually emphasizing the persistent nature of cinematic practices as not only driven by a desire to reproduce and learn or to immerse and phantasm, but also to remember.
