films of memory macdougall

FILMS OF MEMORY

DAVID MACDOUGALL

THE MIND'S EYE

Films have a disconcerting resemblance to memory.They register images with lens and emulsion in a processbetter understood but often no less astonishing than thephysiological processes of eye and brain. Sometimes filmseems even more astonishing than memory, an intima-tion of memory perfected. Two of the journalists presentat the Lumiere brothers' "Salon Indien" screening of1895 wrote that motion pictures bestowed a kind ofimmortality upon their subjects (Jeanne 1965: 10-12).But for many of the first viewers of films, what struck theimagination even more forcefully than the images ofliving people (who were regarded in the same light asperformers) was the participation of the inanimate worldin recording its own traces — the evocative minutiae ofexperience which the mind could only roughly register.It was such ephemeral images as the steam from alocomotive, the brick dust from a demolished wall, andthe shimmering of leaves that seemed the real miracles offilmic representation (Sadoul 1962: 24; Vaughan 1981:126-7).

And yet memory offers film its ultimate problem:how to represent the mind's landscape, whose images andsequential logic are always hidden from view. In the 19thcentury C.S. Sherrington described a sixth sense whichhe called "proprioception," that consciousness of ourown body which confirms our physical identity (Sacks1984: 46; 1985: 42). We might well consider memoryour seventh sense, that record of an antecedent existenceupon which our intellectual identity precariously rests.

Memory is often apparently incoherent, and a strangemixture of the sensory and the verbal. It offers us the pastin flashes and fragments, and in what seems a hodge-podge of mental "media." We seem to glimpse images,hear sounds, use unspoken words and reexperience suchphysical sensations as pressure and movement. It is inthis multidimensionality that memory perhaps finds itsclosest counterpart in the varied and intersecting repre-sentational systems of film. But given this complexity,and equally the aura of insubstantiality and dreamingwhich frequently surrounds memory, we may ask whetherin trying to represent memory in film we do somethingsignificantly different from other kinds of visual andtextual representation. We create signs for things seenonly in the mind's eye. Are these nevertheless signs likeany other?

THE TRANSLATION OF MEMORY

Films which focus on memory do not of courserecord memory itself, but its referents, its secondaryrepresentations (in speech, for example) and its correla-tives. In films, objects survive from the past, peoplereminisce, and certain objects evoke or resemble those ofmemory. We end by filming something far removedfrom memory as it is experienced, but instead a mixtureof dubious testimony, flawed evidence and invention.Films of memory could thus be said to represent only theexternal signs of remembering.

How then are these signs to be read? For the

Visual Anthropology Review Volume 8 Number 1 Spring 1992 29

filmmaker, how audiences read them is largely a matter oftrial and guesswork, since the minds of viewers are asclosed to direct inspection as those of the people filmed.Nor do films, once made, communicate an unequivocalmessage. They produce different readings in differentviewers, and as time passes are open to continual re-reading. If memory itself is selective and ideological,films of memory redouble this and add further codes ofcultural convention.

Physical objects might be thought to be least subjectto such vagaries, providing films with a kind of indepen-dent baseline for memory. This indeed is the rationale ofmany museums. But objects which survive from the pastare not the same objects that they were in the past, andthey can thus stand for the memory of themselves onlyobliquely. Unlike an object seen in a photograph, whichbears a parallel relation to other objects around it in aspecific past context, the patina of age on an old objecttends to exaggerate its status as a sign. This sign is oftenconfused with authenticity. But the least authentic thingabout museum reconstructions of the past is that theauthentic objects displayed in them are too old. At thetime represented, many of them would have been new.Thus, whether displayed in museums or filmed in therecent past, the actual objects of memory are unreliable asexpressions of memory. They can only be touchstones forits retrieval or construction.

Despite this, many films equate memory with surviv-ing objects, including photographic images of the past.With the original sources of memory forever beyondreach, filmmakers are tempted to use the surviving pho-tographic record as if this were memory itself. Thusdocumentary films and television programs persistentlylink interviews with photographs and newsreels, whichare presented quite illegitimately as the memories of thespeakers.

Such images nevertheless play an important part inour own memories, influencing how we think about thepast. They take their place in our culture as physicalartifacts, not mere media "messages." Many publicfigures whom we see on television are as substantial to usas the images of people we see in daily life. And as FrankTillman has argued (1987), exposure to photographicimages has altered the way recent generations imagine the

world. We have always been able to think visually, butuntil photography we were unable to think photographi-cally. As for most recent historical events, we remembernot the events themselves (we were not present at them)but the films and photographs we have seen of them. Butthese may create a commonality of experience morepowerful and consistent as social memory than the expe-riences of many of the actual participants. As EdmundCarpenter has commented, modern media, and particu-larly television, extend the images of our dream world(1976:58).

These public images can serve society at large in theway that family photographs serve smaller communities— as emblems of significant events and transitions,constructing a concept of the past but also providing waysof overcoming it. They may assist in what YannickGefrroy (using Freud's term Trauerarbeit) describes asthe "work of mourning" the lost past (1990:396fl). Theydo so through repetition and reduction, for representa-tion usually entails both of these. Television news (likeits predecessor, the newsreel) rings changes on an essen-tially unchanging catalogue of disasters, political meet-ings, sports events, and wars, and it is this limited set ofthemes, with minor variations, which reassures us thatthe world goes on as before. But the process is notwithout emotional cost: like all mourning, viewing therecent past, particularly its horrors, includes a measure ofguilty relief at our own survival.

In films of memory, however, there is a frequentcollapsing of memory and its sources. The distinctionbetween photographic records and photography's placein people's minds is rarely made. Thus, among the varietyof signs that films employ for the objects of memory,photographs and archival footage tend to be used the leastcritically and most misleadingly.

THE SIGNS OF MEMORY

Films of memory draw upon a distinctive repertoireof signs. Perhaps most common, and what might betermed signs of survival, are images of objects which havea physical link with the remembered past. These memo-rabilia serve half as symbols of experiences, half as physi-

DAVID MACDOUGALL IS AN ETHNOGRAPHIC FILMMAKER. HIS MOST RECENT FILM, WHICH HE CO-DIRECTED WITH JUDITH

MACDOUGALL, IS PHOTO WALLAHS, A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT LOCAL PHOTOGRAPHERS IN A NORTH INDIAN HILL STATION. IT

IS AVAILABLE FROM FLELDWORK FLLMS, 1 2 MEEHAN GARDENS, GRIFFITH (CANBERRA), A .C .T . 2 6 0 3 , AUSTRALIA.

30 Volume 8 Number 1 Spring 1992 Visual Anthropology Review

cal proof that they occurred, and like Kane's "Rosebud"they often turn up amidst a clutter of other, less familiarobjects. They are "astonishing" and precious not somuch for their visual resemblance to remembered objectsas for the fact that they are perceived, like Proust'shandful of dried lime blossoms, as the "very same"objects.

These objects are remnants of a larger whole, some-times declaring their connection to it only by the damagethey have sustained: a tree whose broken branches tell ofa storm, or a bullet-riddled helmet, or the wrinkles on theface of a person being interviewed. Old photographs andfilms belong to this group of signs not only as historicalobjects which bear the marks of handling, foxing andprojection, but also (though more loosely) through thedirect indexical link which their imagery—their photo-chemical "marking" — bears to past events.

If objects do not survive to be filmed, films ofmemory often resort to signs of replacement — similarobjects and sounds and, at the farthest extent, reconstruc-tions and reenactments, such as those of docudramas. Ifpressed lime blossoms are unavailable, new lime blos-soms will do. In this way, a train rumbling through amodern railway yard becomes a 1940s train to London orAuschwitz. Journeys and the retracing of steps areespecially favored by films of memory because revisitingplaces — like viewing photographs — produces emo-tions of both retrieval and loss.

At one remove from replacements in kind are re-placements in form: what we might call signs of resem-blance. These offer a looser, iconic link with their objects,filling in the missing pattern of the past by analogy —not, as it were, by striking the missing note, but bysupplying its harmonic. They make possible major shiftsof magnitude: a day's work or a short trip can now speakof a life's journey. This principle can be seen in RomanKroiter's films Paul Tomkowicz: Street-Railway SwitchMan (1953) and Stravinsky (1965), which "frame" lifehistories in a man's last day's work and an Atlanticcrossing, and Renata and Hannes Lintrop's Cogito, ErgoSum (1989), in which an elderly Estonian's daily physicalstruggle becomes a metaphor for his long resistance toSoviet rule. Resemblance, on any of several metaphoricaland metonymic levels, allows a broad range of associativeimagery to be brought into play. A cut to an eagle orseagull, for example, is rarely simply an evocative touch.In films, birds singled out for attention seem inevitably

to carry an extra burden of aspiration, loneliness, hope ordespair.

Among signs of resemblance, music is the analoguepar excellence for emotion, and not surprisingly films ofmemory are choked with it. In these films music servesdoubly for emotions imputed to the subject and meantto be aroused in the viewer. In addition, music is used byfilms of memory for its historical associations. Becausemusical styles "date" and are culturally specific theymake ideal aural icons. A piece of music can almostalways be found to fit a particular historical and socialmilieu. In the past, ethnographic films seemed invari-ably to use gratuitous (although culturally accurate)indigenous music for this single validating purpose. Inmainstream documentary films, accordions, Charlestonorchestras and honky-tonk pianos become the equiva-lent cliche'd accompaniments for archival footage ofvillages, nightclubs and working-class neighborhoods.

The conventions of film music persist despite theirnaivete* and the obviousness with which they are used tomanipulate audiences. Even in Ken Burns' recent andcarefully-wrought American television series, The CivilWar (1990), period music is marshalled throughout asthough better to authenticate photographs and quota-tions from the period. Although the music in the serieshas been defended as adding textual complexity, it hasalso been criticized for conditioning the audience to viewhistory with a simplistic melancholia (Henderson 1991).By contrast, the British series, The Great Depression(1981), sometimes uses only the sound of a projectorover compilations of archival footage. This device maybe equally artificial, since even silent films were originallyaccompanied by music, but at least it has the merit ofdrawing attention to the contingent physical qualities ofthe film materials rather than cloaking them in an auraof fateful grandeur.

Although music is generally employed to "double" aspecific historical setting, it can sometimes be cast againsttype, as Humphrey Jennings demonstrated in Listen toBritain (1942), when he juxtaposed Dame Myra Hessplaying Mozart at a wartime London concert with theeffects of Hitler's bombing. A more common alternativeis to seek out music which is culturally and historically asneutral as possible, representing (it is hoped) nothing somuch as pure emotion. Music may function in thisfashion if it is new or has lost its original connotationsthrough re-use. Electronic music is often chosen because


it is cheap and anonymous, while Andean flutes and panpipes have been used so typically to evoke memory thatthey are now part of an international style, stripped ofother cultural meanings.

THE SENSE OF ABSENCE

The si^ns we have considered so far are those mostoften found in conventional films of historical reminis-cence. They bolster the illusion of a recoverable past.They have coalesced to produce a cinematic sub-genrewhose ritual ingredients are aging faces (usually ofinterviewees), fetish-objects from the past, old photo-graphs, archival footage and music. This formula is usedwith equal impartiality in everything from brief televisionitems to twelve-part series and documentary features. Itis a sub-genre which purports to tell us our "true,"unwritten history through the testimony of both ordi-nary people and famous eye-witnesses. It has a tendencyto be elegaic, as though remembering were in itself avirtue. The age of a speaker is an important index ofauthority: the increasing reverence with which historicalevents are viewed as they recede into the past is transferredto those who remember them. Few films of this genre askchildren what they remember about last week or last year,and few admit that the old may be forgetful or devious.Indeed, reminiscence is seta as a burgeoning richnesswhich, if only it could be gathered up quickly enough,could tell us everything worth knowing about the past.Although such an approach acknowledges that memoryis cultural, it tends to surround its own interviewees witha spurious neutrality (Nichols 1983).

A few films of memory employ one further class ofsigns, which we may call signs of absence. These providea way of confronting the problems of forgetting andwilful distortion, as well as the larger abyss betweenexperience and memory. Although films of memoryoften claim legitimacy as a way of salvaging first-personexperience, they rarely address slippage in the memoriesof their informants. At the very least, signs of absenceplace memory in the context of forgetting, and define thepast by its irreducible distance from the present.

Signs of absence often make ironic use of objects andtestimony, positioning the audience uncomfortably byasking them to make judgements and comparisons, tosearch for and interject meanings. Here the sign for a lost

object becomes not its surrogate but what has displacedit. These signs define memory by its true opposite, anembodied absence. An empty factory thus represents afully operating one. A market square teems not withpeasants and bullocks but with youths on motorbikes. Inanother variation, first-person testimony is challenged(and reversed) by its positioning in a film — Nixon's airof ingenuousness, for example, in The Trials ofAIgerHiss.Or it may be offset by the internal evidence of a shot (whatWalter Benjamin called "dialectical" images), as in thepresence of an overseer with interviewed workers in AmosGitai's film Ananas, or signs of duress in televised state-ments by hostages and prisoners of war.

Some films go further still. Beyond the carefullycounterpoised "now" and "then" of Resnais' Nuit etBrouillard (1955) or the verbal and visual evidence ofErwin Leiser's Mein Kampf(\960), Claude Lantzmann'sShoah (1985) not only asks us to query first-persontestimony but to look at empty roads and fields whereatrocities took place and search them for what happenedthere. We look in vain for the signified in the sign. In thisconstant reiteration of absence we are brought to thethreshold of one kind of knowledge about history. In thefailure of the sign we acknowledge a history beyondrepresentation.

THE REPRESENTATIONS OF THE MIND

If memory forms an aspect of thought, it is possibleto regard films of memory as efforts to approximate theprocesses by which the mind represents experience toitself. These films harness the memories of the filmsubjects, the filmmakers and, more indirectly, the filmviewers. In a discussion of photographic imagery, VictorBurgin (1982: 194-8) has referred to M.J. Horowitz'sclassification of thought into "image," "lexical" and"enactive" categories (1970:69-82). Horowitz based histripartite structure on Jerome S. Bruner's "three systemsfor processing information and constructing inner mod-els of the external world" — what B inner called the"iconic," "symbolic" and "enactive" (1964). Both sys-tems resemble, whether directly or indirectly, the signclassifications developed by C. S. Peirce and RomanJakobson, and seem elaborations on them. Althoughthese modalities of mental representation are usuallyintermingled in actual thought, they correspond very

32 Volumes Number 1 Spring 1992 Visual Anthropology Review

well to the strategies by which films render memory inimages, words and physical behavior. Indeed, we maynot fully understand how films use these elements, andhow they ultimately affect us, until we have a betterunderstanding of the processes of mind.

By " image" Horowitz means not only visual imagery,but the ability to recall sensory experience generally. It ispossible to remember a specific smell or sound, or even"hear" in silence an entire Mozart symphony. Thus,although in films we are limited to sounds and visualimages (forays into odorama and smellavision notwith-standing), Horowitz's concept of "image" is best under-stood as sensory thought.

The visual imagery of the mind appears to be bothmore complex and less systematic than the visual imageryof cinema. We might compare two of its operations tothose of the voluntary and involuntary muscles of thebody. Some images come to us unbidden, the material ofdreams and daydreams. They are specific and sharplydefined: a face, perhaps never consciously noted before,has the living detail of a face actually seen, or viewed ona movie screen. But images recalled through consciouseffort are more often indistinct and elusive. It is acommon experience to find the faces of loved ones themost difficult to recall. The more actively one pursuesthem the more effectively they sidestep the mind's gaze,as though long familiarity had rendered their object toocomplex and heterogeneous for a single image to suffice.Films condense such multidimensional thinking intoconcrete imagery, stripping the representation of memoryof much of its breadth and ambiguity.

The counterpart of Horowitz's "lexical" thought isamply represented in films, although usually in a morestudied form (such as commentary) than in the scribbleddemotic of daily experience. Actual thought more typi-cally consists of broken fragments of language and a senseof meanings hovering between the verbal and preverbal.Among the few films which attempt to duplicate this isCle'ment Perron's Day After Day (1962), which departsfrom conventional film writing to give us muttered piecesof nursery rhymes and sudden announcements ("Thedeparture has been delayed indefinitely") as the accompa-niment to monotonous piece-work in a paper mill. Thereis also something rather like it in the headlong rush ofnotions and placenames in Auden's poetry for the filmNight Mail (1936).

In representing sensory and lexical thought, films

might be thought to have encompassed the essentialelements of memory, for images, sounds and words tendto dominate our conceptions of our own consciousness.This assumption appears to be endorsed by many cur-rent social and political documentaries, which reducethese two categories to a simple format of archivalfootage (the sensory) and interviews (the lexical). Itseems taken for granted that this not only representsmemory adequately but also, quintessentially, history.

However, Horowitz's third mode of thought, the"enactive", is neither image nor word, but gesture —experience recalled, one might say, in the muscles. Weimagine an action through the feel of it — for example,the sense of moving a hand in a familiar motion, such asstirring coffee. One might call this the kinaestheticdimension of thought, familiar to ourselves but onlyobservable in others when it is translated into actualphysical movement, just as lexical thought is only observ-able when translated into speech. That the images ofwords on a page are translated into an enactive version ofsound production is perhaps well demonstrated byEdmund Carpenter's observation that throat surgerypatients are forbidden to read because "there is a naturaltendency for a reader to evoke absent sounds, and thethroat muscles work silently as the reader scans the page"(1980: 74).

Enactive memory finds its primary filmic counter-part in images of physical behavior, especially behavior ofan habitual kind. Of the three categories, the enactive isperhaps the mode of memory closest to the indexicalsign, for its form is that of an imprint or direct extensionof previous experience. It is evident in certain gestures—when, for example, artisans are at work and the memoryof their craft seems to reside "in their hands." Suchgestures can express not only the memory of an habitualactivity but an attitude towards it, as when a cook breakseggs with a flourish that combines both pride andexpertise.

Enactive memory may take precedence over visualor lexical memory. In a French television report a mandescends a stairway in a building in which he wasimprisoned in total darkness for over a month. Althoughhe can tell us in words the exact number of steps (thereare thirty-one) and we can see the steps ourselves, it is infact the movement of his feet which tells us most con-vincingly that he knows when he has reached the bottom.

We may postulate that of all the modalities of


thought, the enactive is most closely associated withemotion: that, for example, the memory of shame ortriumph is largely an enactive, physiological response,although linked to a visual memory of the situation inwhich it arose. The dynamics of film editing mayconstitute, after the portrayal of "habitual" gesture, asecond level on which films reproduce the qualities ofenactive thought, although precisely how this operatesdeserves further investigation. Eisenstein characterizedthe effects of montage as "psycho-physiological" phe-nomena, and described how in the film The General Line(or Old and New, 1929) a series of increasingly shortshots of farmers mowing with scythes caused members ofthe audience to rock from side to side (1929: 80). Attheir junctions, film shots produce kinaesthetic responsesin the viewer; and much film editing may represent atranslation of movement and gesture from enactivethought into a succession of juxtaposed images. Editingalso creates imaginary geographies — cinematic land-scapes of the mind in which we as spectators walk andtake our bearings. It is one of the objectives of films ofmemory to create such spaces, as analogues of the spatialdimensions of memory. Other aspects of enactive memorymay be represented in films through the synestheticeffects of movement, light, color and texture.

Horowitz's three modes of mental representationcan thus help us to identify correspondences between theprocesses of memory and filmic representation. To theseshould perhaps be added a fourth category — that ofnarrative thought. More than simply a property of theother modes, narrative has, it seems to me, good reasonto be considered a further primary constituent of thought.Time, which provides the continuum on which memoryis registered, here underpins the arrangement of thesensory, lexical and enactive into sequences. Narrativegoverns the disposal of objects and actions in time,without which most memory, and even language, wouldbe impossible. Although a certain part of thought isapparently incoherent (even if, perhaps, the product of adeeper logic) there is little we can think of withoutassigning it a narrative history or potential. We thinkwithin a set of narrative paradigms in which objects haveorigins and futures, and in which even simple actions areconstructed out of a succession of lesser ones. Thishierarchy of mental structures is reflected in thesyntagmatic structures of many popular cultural prod-ucts, from folktales to films.

FILM & THOUGHT

It is often asserted that the conditions of film-viewing induce a dreamlike state in which the self isstripped of its defenses. Films seem like dreams becausewe watch them helplessly, deprived of our volition.However, another explanation for this effect may be thatfilms create a synthesis of varied modes of representationwhich closely mimic the modes of mental representa-tion. Although films are visual, they are also aural,verbal, narrative and enactive. They slide through differ-ent cognitive registers in a way that we find strikinglyfamiliar, so that even people who have never seen filmsbefore quickly find them comprehensible, despite cul-turally-specific codes of narration and editing. One mayspeculate that although experiments in artificial intelli-gence are widely based on linguistic and mathematicalmodels, film may well offer a more convincing simula-tion of mind and memory than either of them.

The connections between cognition and film under-lie many of the conventions of the cinema (as in the"psychological" editing ofFritz Lang or Alfred Hitchcock)but without, it seems, often being explicitly acknowl-edged as such. The reluctance to identify narrativityclosely with actual processes of thought produces anambiguity in the point of view of many films, as thoughfilms could somehow think themselves without referenceto an identifiable consciousness. Films of memory,particularly documentaries, often seem uneasy abouttheir own narrativity. Fiction films seem less troubled.Some, like Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour (1959) andFellini's 8 1/2 (1963), clearly seek to reproduce certainprocesses of thought through visual imagery and interiormonologue. Others do so more obliquely, throughstrategies of identification with third-person characters,who recite or reenact their memories, as in Citizen Kane(1941) or — extraordinarily, since the narrator is sup-posed to be dead —- Sunset Boulevard (1950).

Non-fiction films of memory more often seek tostand outside the narratives provided by their humansubjects. Instead, they situate these stories in a structurewhich at times relies on them for narrative impetus butotherwise seeks to create its own narrative about anhistorical period or political issue. There is a generalpresumption of interest on the part of the audience, butprecisely why they should be interested (or why thefilmmakers are) is often never made clear.


There is a certain amount of journalist hubris in sucha position. Frequently the presence of testimony itself istaken as its own sufficient justification. This approachdominates film portraits of famous people, such as Por-trait of Nehru (1965), in which an interview was virtuallyforced upon Nehru, and John Else's study of RobertOppenheimer, The Day After Trinity (1980), in whichthe film's authority and that of its subject seem curiouslyundifferentiated. Memory is used., but the fundamentallink between constructing the past through reminiscenceand constructing the audience's present experiencethrough film is never made. We may thus conclude thatmany films of memory are uncertain about their owndiscursive status: in making the assumption that theirsubjects' reminiscences are worth knowing they some-how dispose of having to define, or speakfrom, their ownparticular interests. There is thus a certain emptiness atthe heart of such authorship, a fundamental lack ofconviction. It may well be that the common tendency toadopt a celebratory stance towards memory is a symp-tom, and a masking, of that uncertainty.

Processes of thought and memory are generallyapproached more directly in autobiographical documen-taries, which constitute a rapidly growing sub-genre offilmmaking. From the early work of Jonas Mekas andStan Brakhage to later films such as Chris Marker's SansSoleil{ 1982), these films show a concern for the workingsof memory and the problem of how film can represent it.However self-absorbed and self-serving they may be,they are explicit about their uses of the past. Reminis-cence is rarely treated as omniscient or transparent, andwhen photographs are used, as in such films as CorinneCantrell's In This Life's Body (1984) and Antti Peippo'sSijainen (1989), they are presented as fragmentary docu-ments, to be interrogated and filled with meaning.

These filmmakers are often dubious about the trans-lation of memory, just as anthropologists have becomemore cautious about the possibility of cultural transla-tion. They confront in the most personal way the"crime" of representation, the gap between si^ns andtheir objects. Most makers of films of memory confrontthe same problem, but often (it appears) in a differentspirit. If they regret the sparseness of detail or theinarticulateness of filmed first-person testimony, theirresponse is not to indicate the significance of this gap butto try to improve upon it. The unattainable richnesstrapped inside their subjects' memories is supplanted by

the addition of much illustrative material. The viewer isdrawn into a collusion in which the varied signs ofmemory are brought into play. These are not the abstractand regenerative symbols of literature, but images fromthe physical world. In fiction films (Robert Bresson's, forexample) such representation is sometimes saved fromthe Hteralness of its images by a kind of minimalism, anexclusion of the too-explicit. In documentary the closestequivalent of this is perhaps the use of the single, muteobject saved from childhood, or the perfectly enigmaticphotograph, like that which Anitti Peippo shows us ofhis apparently happy family in S ijainen. But at this pointwe must ask whether films of memory are really engagedin representing memory at all. They may instead havemoved outside the more verifiable significations of otherdocumentary film texts and into a domain of evocation.Here film could be said to leave representation behindand to confront the viewer once again with the primarystimuli of physical experience.

FILM, RITUAL & SOCIAL MEMORY

Social memory in small communities is a matter ofconsensus, a version of the past accepted by variousgroups for reasons of convenience and solidarity. Theparticularities of social life prevent any one person fromsharing precisely the same perspective or experience asothers. Social memory is thus "social" in an active sense:negotiated, provisional, and indicative of relationships.But increasingly, access to common experiences andsources of information in modern society tends to createa monolexical culture, condensing useful fictions likesocial memory into realities. When momentous eventsoccur it is quite common the next day for people hardlyto speak of them, for by then they are already public iconsand "news" to no one. This instantaneous production ofsocial memory creates public perceptions which arewidespread and seemingly unassailable, but also, becauseof their very rigidity, brittle and subject to suddenreversals. As the Iraq-Iran and Iraq-Kuwait wars show,the victims of today easily become the villains of tomor-row.

The images of film and television combine thedurability of artifacts with the force of oral tradition.They are concrete reports from the physical world. In apreliterate society these reports are conveyed by art, ritual


and word of mouth (all ephemeral) and become a con-stantly revised "tradition." With the advent of writing,printing, photography, and electronics they becomefixed, even petrified points of reference. As WalterBenjamin (1936) observed, they also take on moreexplicitly political functions. Yet as film and televisionendlessly recapitulate past events they also regain some ofthe functions of ritual. Certain images of the past keeprecurring and, like famous still photographs (thenapalmedVietnamese girl; the Andean flute-player in The Family ofMan) lose their historicity (their status as photography)and become cultural symbols.

Marc Piault has noted that the controllers of ritualuse it to inculcate an orthodox "tradition" which rein-forces their own power, but in the process of constructingsuch a tradition ritual simultaneously makes possible itstransformation by creating a stage for the confrontationof conflicting interests (1989). One might suppose that"fixed" media representations, which share with ritualthe power of authority and repetition without offeringsuch a stage, might avoid such a challenge. Indeed thisseems to be widely assumed by their "controllers." Fromearly in this century governments have seen film andother mechanically reproduced images as a safe means ofinculcating patriotism and historical o rthodoxy. In 1917General Ludendorff wrote to the Imperial Ministry ofWar praising the superiority of photography and film as"a means of information and persuasion," an actionwhich eventually led to the founding of the giant UFAstudio (Furhammar & Isaksson 1971:111-12). And inhis well-known statement of 1922, Lenin told his Edu-cation Commisar, Lunacharsky, "Of all the arts, for usthe cinema is the most important" (Leyda I960: 161).

This trust in photographic iconography is in somemeasure confirmed by the way in which modern concep-tions of the October Revolution are still defined andcontained by Eisenstein's images of it. It is quite com-mon for compilation documentaries dealing with theperiod to mix indiscriminately newsreel footage withscenes from the film October (1927). Such uses of fic-tional footage have occurred often, perhaps most notablyin the American wartime film series, Why We Fight. Thelogical extension of using film to construct history is totailor history to its filmic representation, as was done in1934 in Nuremberg for Leni RiefenstahTs Triumph of the

W7//(1936), perhaps the world'sfirst great "media event"and the outgrowth of such propaganda exercises as themanipulation of the Reichstag fire and the mythologizingof the story of the Hitler Youth hero, Herbert Norkus(notably, through the film Hitlerjunge Q#«c(1933)). Butin doing so the creators of an orthodoxy also created a toolfor its destruction. Here film images, despite theirapparent permanency and consecrated meaning, haveproven as open to challenge as earlier forms of ritualizedpersuasion.

In 1942, after viewing Triumph of the Will FrankCapra (soon to be the producer of the Why We Fightseries) decided to "use the enemy's own films to exposetheir enslaving ends" (1971: 332). He realized that byaltering the context in which the footage appeared itsmeaning could be reversed. He thus began exploiting the"stage" which the original producers had created. Sincethen scenes from Riefenstahl's film have been endlesslyrepeated, but they have in effect become part of a trans-figured view of German history, imbued with quitedifferent ritual significance.

Thus, like ritual, the focal narratives of history pro-vide a medium for political contestation and change.Social memory, although it may be powerfully shaped byfilm and television, is clearly as vulnerable to revision asthe traditions of earlier times. In a description whichinterestingly parallels Piault's, Edward Burner and PhyllisGorfain (1984: 56) assert that such narratives "andsimilar cultural texts... are frequently national stories andrarely remain monologic. They do serve to integratesociety, encapsulate ideology, and create social order;indeed, the story may become a metaphor for the state,and poetic means may be used for political purposes. Butbecause these narratives are replete with ambiguity andparadox, an inherent versatility in interpretation arisesthat allows for conflicting readings and dissident, chal-lenging voices."

Yet a residue of a clearly physical nature remains infilm images which is not available in verbal narratives,and its importance should not be underestimated. Filmimages may be reinterpreted in a variety of new contexts,but the unalterable record of appearance and place con-tained in them may ultimately prove to have a moreprofound effect upon our "memory" of history than theinterpretations we attach to them.


NOTE

This paper is an expanded version of introductorycomments made at the final discussion of the Vth"Regards sur les Socie'te's Europe'enes" Seminar de-votedto "Memory," heldin Budapest, July 8-15,1990.A related version of this article will appear in French as"Films de me'moire" in Journal des Anthropologues(Special Visual Anthropology issue, nos. 47-48, Spring1992).

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