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of the events are retellings, representations or fictional reinventions, which make the plot fiendishly complex. Almodóvar has spoken about the difficulties he had with the script, which went through twenty drafts (Almodóvar, quoted in Strauss, 2006 : 214). This complexity is not gratuitous, however; it partakes of an aesthetic common to Spanish films and literature about the repression of historical memory and the Spanish Transition. La mala educación is a film about the Transition that takes this aesthetic to breaking point. It harnesses it to place LGBTQ
Coinciding with the excavations of the Spanish Civil War’s mass graves (that began in 2000) film and the mass media are playing a crucial role in the construction and dissemination of ‘spaces of memory’ of the war that intend to compensate for the willed amnesia that characterised both the Franco dictatorship and the post-Franco years. 1 Spanish women filmmakers are documenting this public
of its treatment of memory and the uses of the past. Here we shall be concerned with the way in which the film treats the question of spectacle and performance, and its relation to direct experience. Jacquot is a film obsessed with spectacle. From the credit sequence we are introduced into a theatrical world, albeit one which is turned on its head. The film begins with the final curtain of a play
. I take it as axiomatic that fictionalised cinematic representations of the past are less concerned with historical accuracy than with appropriating aspects of the past to serve the needs of the present. Whether based on memories of lived experiences or on the research and imagination of cultural entrepreneurs, they act as potential ‘vectors of memory’ (Wood 1999 : 6), fashioning popular understandings of history and thereby contributing to a sense of collective identity
identity is to have recourse to memory, particularly the memory of origins. In independent Algeria, official memory has remained fixated on the war against the French. This makes it all the more important to look beyond the anti-colonial struggle and the FLN’s mythologising of the Algerian revolution as the founding moment of national identity. While history seems to begin in 1954 for the FLN, the pre-colonial epoch may be excavated for a
Part I Memory and history According to the philosopher Paul Ricœur, ‘narrative attains its full significance when it becomes a condition of temporal existence’ (1984: 52). In stating this, Ricœur foregrounds the importance of history and memory, the two narrative routes that assist and orient our navigation through time. Unlike certain other philosophers, such as Hegel, Ricœur did not, in fact, see
reconstructs the past, replacing memories that simulate first-hand experience. This has been called ‘prosthetic memory’. As Pam Cook explains, exercises in ‘prosthetic memory’ lay themselves open to charges of lack of authenticity, of substituting a popular version for the ‘real’ event, and to accusations that presenting history as dramatic spectacle they obscure our understanding of social, political and cultural forces. … Yet, in the very act of addressing audiences as nostalgic spectators and encouraging them to become involved in re-presenting the past, the media
3 Memory and the child witness in ‘art-house horror’ ‘Cinema can lay claim to the child, as the child lays claim to cinema’, writes Vicky Lebeau, citing the sequence where Ana (Ana Torrent) and her sister Isabel (Isabel TellerÃa), two girls living in the post-war Spain of the 1940s, watch James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) in a makeshift cinema in VÃctor Erice’s El espÃritu de la colmena: ‘the sequence yields one of the most compelling images of children’s look at the screen, or the look of the child caught up in the wonders, and horrors of the moving image
‘All these memories’: Career Girls 8 Still keeping us on our toes, Leigh followed the ensemble playing and emotional sweep of Secrets and Lies with a carefully crafted miniature. Career Girls focuses on just two young women, Hannah (Katrin Cartlidge) and Annie (Lynda Steadman), who used to be flatmates when they were students in the mid-80s and, having not seen each other for six years, spend a weekend together at Hannah’s London home. It turns out to be a weekend full of coincidences and unexpected blasts from the past. Leigh makes no attempt to obscure these
During the 1980s the spectre of the Vietnam War haunted the sites of cinema and popular culture in various forms. Whereas a rich body of scholarly research exists on cinematic iterations of the Vietnam war as trauma, the discursive dynamics between memory, ideology and genre in relation to enemy image construction are somewhat underdeveloped. This article utilises genre studies, conflict studies and trauma theory in analysing how the representations of film villains interact with the construction of cultural trauma and national identity. Considering the American action thriller to be an important site for processes of commemoration and memorialisation, the discursive construction and formal articulation of national trauma are theorised within the genre. Additionally, a thematic and textual analysis was conducted of a sample of forty American action thriller films. The analysis illustrates how the genre operates through a structure of violent traumatisation and heroic vindication, offering a logic built on the necessity and legitimacy of revenge against a series of enemy-others.