Films of Memory

Abstract

Films have a disconcerting resemblance to memory. They register images with lens and emulsion in a process better understood but often no less astonishing than the physiological processes of eye and brain. Sometimes film seems even more astonishing than memory, an intimation of memory perfected. Two of the journalists present at the Lumiere brothers' "Salon Indien" screening of 1895 wrote that motion pictures bestowed a kind of immortality upon their subjects (Jeanne 1965: 10-12). But for many of the first viewers of films, what struck the imagination even more forcefully than the images of living people (who were regarded in the same light as performers) was the participation of the inanimate world in recording its own traces — the evocative minutiae of experience which the mind could only roughly register. It was such ephemeral images as the steam from a locomotive, the brick dust from a demolished wall, and the shimmering of leaves that seemed the real miracles of filmic 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 and sequential logic are always hidden from view. In the 19th century C.S. Sherrington described a sixth sense which he called "proprioception," that consciousness of our own body which confirms our physical identity (Sacks 1984: 46; 1985: 42). We might well consider memory our seventh sense, that record of an antecedent existence upon which our intellectual identity precariously rests. Memory is often apparently incoherent, and a strange mixture of the sensory and the verbal. It offers us the past in flashes and fragments, and in what seems a hodgepodge of mental "media." We seem to glimpse images, hear sounds, use unspoken words and reexperience such physical sensations as pressure and movement. It is in this multidimensionality that memory perhaps finds its closest counterpart in the varied and intersecting representational systems of film. But given this complexity, and equally the aura of insubstantiality and dreaming which frequently surrounds memory, we may ask whether in trying to represent memory in film we do something significantly different from other kinds of visual and textual representation. We create signs for things seen only in the mind's eye. Are these nevertheless signs like any other?