Ivana Keser
Cinema and Remembrance: Archive and Medium of Rumination and Reflection
F
ilms that deal with memories usually belong to documentaries or feature films, but films that most fundamentally problematise the different modes of representation of memory are actually essay films. Essay film resists definitions as part of a set category and that, just like a literary essay, can be described as a form in itself. The stories in these films are not teleological or continuous, but rather puzzle stories that deal with the construction of collective memories through societal prestructuring of the individual’s memory as a starting point. Drawing on Plato and his Theory of anamnesis that he developed in his Dialogues where he equates learning with remembering, for film essays or cinema of remembrance we can say that “we can only reach the truth by recollecting what we already know but we forgot”. The filmmakers Jonas Mekas, Jean-Luc Godard, John Gianvito and Chris Marker are authors who make (re) constructions of memories in their films. All of the movies represented as authors of cinema of remembrance share an open structure. They belong to reflexive film, the one that does more than simply represent its subject. Film that deeply examines its own methods: filmmakers’ atitudes and perspectives. Cinema of remembrance provides a viewer not only with the content and form of memory, but also with its own directions for use. Such films require recipients to actively participate in the movie. Namely, essayistic mode of filmmaking as an essay flows in different directions and reaches multiple destinations, as seen in example of Jonas Mekas’ film Walden, Diaries, Notes, Sketches (1969).
The film material in such films does not submit to the previous formulated goal, the one the author has already foreseen in his story, but instead the author questions: “What can I do with the footage or reproduction aside from the reason it was made for?” – Thus, before the film editing an author in such a position is in front of his film material as a very first audience member, as we can see in the film (Histoire(s) du cinéma (1999) by Jean-Luc Godard. Cinema of remembrance is also marked by rumination that forces the filmmaker to turn a matter over and over in the mind, to consider, to contemplate, to meditate, to ponder, which is obvious in Gianvito’s film Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (2007), the visual meditation through graves, monuments, memorial places, made without presence of witnesses, without statements or a narrator. Films of memories are characterized by rhisomatic nature: constant moving, wandering thoughts, with no final goal, intention of power posession or spreading a final and dominant discourse. Chris Marker’s film Remembrance of Things to Come (2001), memorial film on photographer Denise Bellon is such a visual archive. Film which is actually a montage of photographs from Denise Bellon’s photo-reportage from the period between two world wars, the proof of Marker’s obsession for documenting history which does not officially exist. •
Extended abstract of the lecture held on July 2, 2010 in Zagreb Mnemosyne – Theatre of Memories
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