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As a technology able to picture and embody the temporality of the past, cinema has become central to the mediation of memory in modern cultural life. The memory of film scenes and movies screens, cinema and cinema-going, has become integral to the placement and location of film within the cultural imagination of this century and the last. This book is a sustained, interdisciplinary perspective on memory and film from early cinema to the present. The first section examines the relationship between official and popular history and the constitution of memory narratives in and around the production and consumption of American cinema. The second section examines the politics of memory in a series of chapters that take as their focus three pivotal sites of national conflict in postwar America. This includes the war in Vietnam, American race relations and the Civil Rights Movement, and the history of marginality in the geographic and cultural borderlands of the US. The book explores the articulation of Vietnam. The final section concentrates on the issue of mediation; it explores how technological and semiotic shifts in the cultural terrain have influenced the coding and experience of memory in contemporary cinema. It considers both the presence of music and colour in nostalgia films of the 1990s and the impact of digital and video technologies on the representational determinants of mediated memory. The book also examines the stakes of cultural remembering in the United States and the means by which memory has been figured through Hollywood cinema.
perhaps that memory is never straightforwardly authentic or inauthentic. Spielberg’s film was mortgaged to a notion of authenticity that relied as much upon mediated memories – notably, the ranging registers of black and white photography and the various scenes and images that evoked previous films about the Holocaust – as it did upon the use of genuine Polish film locations or the presence of living Holocaust survivors. While
-Irish attitudes and an inevitable re-acquaintance with the discourses of their country’s colonial past. By dramatising these processes, Trevor’s stories enrich our understanding of the psychological and emotional impact of historical events on both migrant and host communities. Furthermore, they demonstrate how literary fiction, and the personal and collective narratives contained therein, has a valuable role to play in mediating memories of the Troubles in Britain. This, in turn, can inform the wider discussion of British–Irish relations and contribute to post
; that is, how the styles of the past provide a powerful means through which a film can be branded and marketed to audiences. Often ignored in this process is the deployment of film music, and hence this chapter will focus in particular on the use of music as a significant means through which memories of the past may be evoked in the present. Mediated memory As many of the chapters in this book
See e.g. Long on the ‘archival subject’ of modernity (2007: 1–8). 15 See Raymond Williams (1973: 12). 16 Cf. Scherpe (2009: 297). 17 See Jaggi (2001: 1); Harris (2001: 380–1). ‘At a time when everything is classified and marketed cynically, Sebald defies all genres’ (Bryan Cheyette, quoted in Jaggi 2001: 2). 18 See Brockmeier (2008: 347–8). 19 See also Hutchinson (2009b). 20 Originated by Hirsch (1997), ‘[p]ostmemory can be defined as the highly mediated memories of those who did not witness the traumatic event but who have inherited, by way of a cultural
bathing in Trafalgar Square and carted them off to Cannon Street Station, where they were fined $10. (Semple Jr, 1976 ) ‘Heatwave’ has been represented as temporary insanity for the national imaginary, it comes on fast and furious, and then is washed away by a deluge of stereotypical rain: the mediated memory template frames the lack of water in the UK setting as a rare but welcome aberration for urbanites and ignores the stories of rural communities. The deadliness of drought (slow
these memories, as acts of vicarious witnessing, different from other types of culturally mediated memory? Through tracing and analysing how creative writers use historical research in their work it is possible to explore in what ways, and on what terms, we remember and re-imagine the world wars now, or to ‘record the historically evolving relation of individuals and communities to sites and the associated transmutations of memory and identity’, as Anne Whitehead puts it.5 This book uses this procedural, archival analysis to ask a number of questions. What factors
mechanic explain that their vision of the machine was as a means of bringing strength to their community and a better life for the Vietnamese people. For most of those who view the film, it is a moving story of resilience. The artist’s impulse in these works, it can be suggested, was in part to mediate memories of the American war for the Vietnamese people, but more especially to present a different narrative for Americans. Le said, ‘People were surprised to find that in all my work, there is no anger, no accusation.’ He suggested that it might be because of the
boundaries of belonging to a group. People are 12 from empire to exile then tied into the collective by their endorsement of the representations offered, even if these are not based on directly shared experiences.51 A concept rather than an object, memory has no agency in its own right. It requires individuals to select, organise and articulate narratives; memory is therefore always mediated. Memory is also performative, brought into existence at particular moments in time by specific actors.52 Borrowing from anthropology, Jay Winter labels these agents of remembrance