memory, history, forgetting - paul ricoeur

Amazon Books.


Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the production of historical narrative.

Memory, History, Forgetting, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora.

A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, Memory, History, Forgetting provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's Time and Narrative and Oneself as Another and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation.

“His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events. . . . It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”—Library Journal“Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”— New York Times Book Review 

 Best book on history so far this century July 17, 2007

By Rev. Cherrycoke

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This, the last book written by the great French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, is an amazing achievement. Readers be warned: this is no easy romp through historiography or memory studies. It is a deeply philosophical meditation on the meaning of history and historicism as an act of remembering, an act of inscribing time, a way of participating in Being, and a way of negotiating competing claims for justice and acts of witnessing. Typical of Ricoeur's argumentation, the book sets out competing definitions (representation vs. recollection, explanation vs. understanding, phantasm and eikon, mneme vs. anamnesis, habit vs. memory, evocation vs. search, retention or primary memory vs. reproduction or secondary memory, reflexivity vs. worldliness, etc.). It does not resolve these oppositions, but painstakingly shows the aporias centralized in the opposition of terms and posits a tentative ethical response. Ricoeur is too smart to posit easy solutions to some of the most profound questions of human existence--mainly, what is history and how can it provide any foundations for knowledge and ethical action in the world? The erudition of this text is massive; Ricoeur references hundreds of theorists and philosophers from Plato to Foucault, from ontology to cognitive science. Predictably for those of us who have grown to respect the humanity of Ricoeur's position, the writing is never arrogant, never one-sided, always on the side of humane negotiation, life, human flourishing. In contrast to politicized polemics of academic historicist theory, this book recognizes, articulates, and teaches one about the almost overwhelming complexity of history as an idea, as a form of memory, and as evidence for witnessing and justice. In contrast to easy but hip pronouncements about the end of history, history as just another form of fiction, and history as "always political"--all implying that history is a tainted vehicle of ideological coercion that we can somehow do without--Ricoeur asks what else we *have* to connect our recollections of meaningful events to any kind of social action and collective sense of being.

If you want an education in some of the major positions in historiography, this book will give it to you, but it is no survey. It is a philosophical work, one that attempts to convey both the difficulty of the question and the necessary tenuousness of any real, ethical solution. Graduate students should be made to read this book if only to teach them what intellectual thought should look like--thought that works its way slowly and carefully through ideas instead of zooming through sources in order to construct a macrocosmic but sexy "new idea."

The incredible care with which analysis is conducted in each of this book's sections makes it impossible to summarize it meaningfully. Ricoeur wants to connect memory, history, and social remembrance in such a way that they avoid the easy, and often dangerous, sidetracks of commemoration or historicism as mere explanation. He wants a humanized history based in lived memory that can be used to create common ground between people as well as viable evidence in the negotiation of justice claims. Whether he gets this is debatable, but the attempt is honorable.

playing with memories: essays on guy maddin

Google Books.
Playing with Memories is the first collection of scholarly essays on the work of internationally acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin. It offers extensive perspectives on his career to date, from the early experimentation of The Dead Father (1986) to the intensely intimate revelations of My Winnipeg(2007). Featuring new and updated essays from American, Canadian, and Australian scholars, collaborators, and critics, as well as an in-depth interview with Maddin, this collection explores the aesthetics and politics behind Maddin's work, firmly situating his films within ongoing cultural debates about postmodernism, genre, and national identity.

Pevere’s selection as forewordsmith is no doubt a nod to his early role in the mythologisation of Maddin’s career (something the filmmaker assuredly no longer needs any help with), a fact that is revealed in the book’s third chapter, written by Pevere. In “Guy Maddin: True to Form”, it emerges that Pevere was party to the Toronto International Film Festival’s acceptance into its program of Maddin’s filmmaking debut The Dead Father (1986), and its rejection of his debut feature, Tales from the Gimli Hospital (1988), a rejection which ultimately served Maddin’s self-mythologisation and promotion rather well.

In “Thoroughly Modern Maddin”, David L. Pike argues that Maddin is a “garage” (Church, p. 97) or “retro-modernist” (Church, p. 116), his vampiric obsession with cinematic modernism’s glory days – even commencing his analysis with a quote from Maddin that opens “I do feel a bit like Dracula in Winnipeg” (Church, p. 96) – suggesting a unique relationship between Hollywood and Canadian cinema. It also distinguishes Maddin from such varied fellow pasticheurs as Todd Haynes or Quentin Tarantino.

From Senses of Cinema, Cerise Howard, March 18 2012

Playing with Memories

Church’s introduction to Playing with Memories begins with a quote from Maddin’s unfilmed treatment The Child Without Qualities, an ur-text rich in autobiography that is returned to regularly in both books. This isn’t the last we hear from it in this essay either: “Sometimes he intentionally separated himself from his favourite toys,and played with the memories of them. And then played with the memories of the memories. There were inexhaustible powers of renewal within these two homes for the CHILD WITHOUT QUALITIES.” (Church, p. 1)(2)

There is an explicit organisational principle expounded in Church’s book. As he explains: “In a nod to the collage-like qualities of Maddin’s movies, both new and previously published essays appear […], sketching various lines of exploration that form a detailed image of his oeuvre and the responses it has garnered” (Church, p. 17).

Reflecting the richly inter- and extra-textual nature of Maddin’s cinema, many of the pieces in Playing with Memories cite the same sources – certain ones, like The Child Without Qualities, several times over. Notably, they also regularly reference one another, making for a richly dialogical exploration of Maddin’s cinema, if one uniformly originating from a point of admiration. (Maddin certainly has his detractors, some even venomous, and it might have been interesting, if indecorous, to grant some of them a say in this volume.)

Playing with Memories opens with a foreword by Geoff Pevere, who asserts that “These days, on those rare occasions when people talk about ‘the Canadian cinema’, they cannot help but talk about Guy Maddin” (Church, p. xii). He muses over the nature of Maddin’s Canadianness, situating it – in what I consider a stretch – in Maddin’s “sheer beaverishness” (Church, p. xii) – the beaver being a Canadian national emblem. His claim then is that Maddin’s cinema is Canadian by simple dint of his utter bloody-mindedness, in his obstinacy in persisting with what is often a most uncommercial vision.

Pevere’s piece is the oldest in the book – Careful (1992) was Maddin’s newest release at the time – but he already nails a key element of the director’s cinema: “Maddin’s work, if nothing else, is a series of elements locked, much like the clumsy duels he loves, in the form of head-butting, dialectical opposition” (Church, p. 50). Words to this effect also come up time and again in other contributors’ essays.

In his 2002 essay, “Reinhabiting Lost Languages: Guy Maddin’s Careful”, Will Straw gives prominence to Don Gillmor’s observation that Maddin, in his trajectory from Tales from the Gimli Hospital, via 1990’s Archangel, through to his third feature Careful, has replicated the course of cinema’s early history:

Maddin’s oeuvre, viewed in sequence, is like the first term of a film-history course, beginning in the silent-film era: spare, unsynched dialogue, odd movements, black-and-white stock, claustrophobic sets […]. WithCareful we are moving into the 1930s, using the two-strip Technicolor of Maddin’s childhood, colour that didn’t look real. Everything looked like a movie. (Church, p. 61) (3)

But Straw, indebted to Keir Keightley (4), notes that in recuperating long abandoned genres and aspects of filmic style, Maddin is performing the very sort of archaeological work that film scholars have largely forgone. I think it’s pretty clear, though, that that is simply a happy by-product of Maddin’s filmmaking. Church thinks so too. Back in his introduction, he notes, citing the example of the Bergfilm (the German mountain film), a form adopted in Careful, that Maddin excavates bygone genres “whose place as a container of cultural memory is long past, allowing [him] to obsessively transform [them] into a mnemonic for more personal issues.” (Church, p. 9)

Straw is much less on the money when he claims that “investment in the ponderous rituals of classical cinema is one of the qualities of Maddin’s films which work against the interpretation of them as surrealist” (Church, p. 61, emphasis mine). This is something I’ll take up below.

Balancing that error of judgement, however, Straw astutely observes that family is a cause of perversity, and never a refuge from it, in Maddin’s cinema. This is also true of the concept of “home”, whether that be Maddin’s actual childhood home, extensible to the family hair salon run as an adjunct to the family house, and his father’s home-away-from-home, the Winnipeg Hockey Arena, as well as the greater, increasingly fabled city of Winnipeg.

In his 2001 essay “Fire and Ice: The Films of Guy Maddin”, Steven Shaviro reduces Maddin’s cinema to 29 bullet points, some of which present an almost lone voice championing Maddin’s little loved and famously self-loathed Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997). Some of his other bullet points forthrightly rebut one another, as when he avers that “Maddin’s images belong to a cinema of spectacle, or a ‘cinema of attractions’ (in Tom Gunning’s well- known phrase), rather than to any sort of narrative impulse”, only to rejoin it immediately at the head of his next point with “At the same time, Maddin’s films are chock full of narrative, even to excess” (Church, p. 71).

Using Shaviro’s essay as a springboard, Beard contributes “Maddin and Melodrama” to Playing with Memories, an updated article from 2005. Beard’s chief assertion in this essay is that Maddin works with “melodrama” – those are Beard’s scare quotes, not mine, suggestive of the contrariness of Maddin’s adoption of the most heightened of registers to pitch narratives in so deadpan and absurd a fashion that it’s not often easy to grasp what he’s problematising or ironising in the first place. Beard, though, makes an important distinction, positioning the excessiveness of Maddin’s melodrama as “symptomatic not of an ideological sickness but of a cultural one” (Church, p. 88, emphasis in the original), a malaise at odds with society’s tendency to disallow the expression of “fundamental aspirations and primal feelings, in its repression of innocence, pathos and yearning” (Church, pp. 88-89).

Meanwhile, insider knowledge is brought to bear in essays from two of Maddin’s best friends and mentors, Stephen Snyder and George Toles. Toles has been a major collaborator with Maddin across his career as a scenarist of some of the purplest dialogue ever committed to celluloid.

Snyder contributes a piece on how sexuality is tantamount to an affliction in Maddin’s cinema. He argues that, following the inspirational example of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s L’Âge d’Or (1930), the consummation of this desire is most… undesirable.

Toles reflects on the nature of his collaboration with Maddin, asserting that when that unholy alliance began, he found his most fruitful scriptwriting strategy to be pretending to be Maddin when he wrote, because “[t]he ideas and impulses that came to me were so much more deliciously unsavoury, unsightly, and extreme when I saw them swimming merrily up from Guy’s unconscious rather than my own” (p. 145). Toles’ list of Maddin’s firm filmmaking requirements also makes for enlightening and amusing reading: “Keep the dialogue fragrant, like honeyed wine” (Church, p. 146), for example.

Along this line, Donald Masterson contributes “My Brother’s Keeper: Fraternal Relations in the Films of Guy Maddin and George Toles”. He finds something akin to sibling rivalry in Maddin and Toles’ working relationship, uncovering plenty of echoes of the director’s troubled relationships with his older siblings in his films, not least the trauma he experienced in the wake of his elder brother Cameron’s suicide (committed on Cameron’s girlfriend’s grave, no less – Guy has clearly not been the only Maddin with a flair for melodrama!)

Dana Cooley’s “Demented Enchantments: Maddin’s Dis-eased Heart” is a highlight of the book. She argues that “Maddin’s forays into the forgotten realms of film exquisitely perform [Walter] Benjamin’s hopes for the medium, fusing form and content, theory and practice” (Church, p. 175). She goes on to explore the antecedents of Maddin’s ostentatiously tragic cinema in the baroque, allegorical Trauerspiel – “sorrow play” – a form popular in 18th century Germany, astutely arguing that “Maddin often makes the abstract of allegory literal” (Church, p. 177). She gets it right too, I feel, when she claims that “for Maddin, film acts more as a séance [sic] than an exorcism” (Church, p. 183), declaring that she “find[s] the idea of the uncanny [in Maddin’s films] a productive one” (Church, p. 179).

Elsewhere, Carl Matheson suggests that Maddin’s narratives can and should be read as dreams (though he insists he has to rebut his central thesis with the case of My Winnipeg [2007] before even really getting his argument fully underway!) Milan Pribisic analyses Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002), positioning it as a “theatre film”, a cross-pollinated product of a dialogue between (at least) two art forms and demonstrative, in a coinage worthy of Toles, of a “palimpsestuous originality” (Church, p. 168). And Saige Walton’s “Hit with a Wrecking Ball, Tickled with a Feather: Gesture, Deixis and the Baroque Cinema of Guy Maddin” considers the phenomenological reception of Cowards Bend the Knee: or, The Blue Hands (2003) and Brand Upon the Brain!(2006), and examines how “Maddin and the baroque partake in highly gestural displays of emotion” (Church, p. 213). In so doing, she charts the course of affect from its origins in the extravagant hand gesturing found on-screen through to the receptive, and affected, viewer.

While Walton’s essay successfully straddles the delicate line between theory which illuminates both cinema and itself, and theory which exploits its subject as proof of a particular concept, Darrell Varga’s “Desire in Bondage: Guy Maddin’s Careful” is far less successful in its examination of the director’s third feature as filtered through Nietzsche’s writings on tragedy. I’m afraid I feel none the wiser about Maddin’s cinema after reading Varga’s contribution and am not convinced it warranted inclusion in the book.

Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson’s “‘I’m Not an American, I’m a Nymphomaniac’: Perverting the Nation in Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World” is, to be honest, a bit of a trifle. Born expressly of student responses to screenings of Maddin’s near-crossover-hit from 2004, it does nevertheless impress by highlighting that Maddin’s outré cinema is on the Canadian curriculum! But it is to Easton and Hewson’s credit that their essay engages in a queer reading of a Maddin film, in which respect it is surprisingly singular in this volume. It does, however, seriously overreach in its reading, not least when suggesting that the confederation of Canada in 1867, and the same-year addition of “nymphomania” to The Oxford English Dictionary, might be more than mere coincidence.

Beard’s second contribution to Playing with Memories, and its final chapter, is a very entertaining interview with Maddin himself (one of many undertaken by Beard in preparation for his monograph).

dog star man prelude (1961) & 23rd psalm branch (1966) - stan brakhage

The act of seeing with one´s own eyes. 9 minutes from the beginning of one of the most beautiful films ever made, Stan Brakhage´s Dog Star Man. (Be patient - the images only start to flow after one minute black.) A creation myth realized in light, patterns, images superimposed, rapid cutting, and silence. A black screen, then streaks of light, then an explosion of color and squiggles and happenstance. Next, images of small circles emerge then of the Sun. Images of our Earth appear, woods, a part of a body, a nude woman perhaps giving birth. Imagery evokes movement across time.

In relation to 23rd Psalm Branch which unfortunately is not available on Youtube, the following extract from David E. James's Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker  is very relevant to memory and the correlation between its layering and its recollection. Google Books.

"Brakhage also subjected the historical images of fascism, war, and concentration camps in 23rd Psalm Branch to an analogous 'disfiguring' treatment. What would it mean to achieve a state of mind in which one could see the images of mass death in Auschwitz or Treblinka as just 'light bouncing off objects'? Or the incinerating flash of an atomic bomb as just one more occasion for the ultimate visual rush? Its achievement would mark the indiscernability between a final release from the traumas of the mid-twentieth century history and the repression that would allow this trauma to return in new, unrecognizable forms of the same (like, say, the Vietnam Ware). 

But it should be noted, Brakhage only effaced these images, he did not erase them. Like Alain Resnais, whom Deleuze discussed in relation to the passage through the imagination of the mass death in Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Brakhage's film points to the inescapable admixtures of repetition and forgetting, anguish and abstraction, that characterize contemporary nodes of memory. As Deleuze wrote, in Resnais's films, 'memory is clearly no longer the faculty of having recollections; it is the membrane which ... makes sheets of past and layers of reality correspond.' Seen from this perspective, Brakhage's film is not just about the politics of memory of history in light of the present; it is an exemplification of that memory itself, in all its political ambiguity."

Tyrus Miller, Brakhage's Occasions: Figure, Subjectivity, and Avant-garde Politics. p.191.

A final statement:


Stan Brakhage, 1933–2003
By J. Hoberman Tuesday, Mar 18 2003


A Modern Hero

A great and courageous artist, Stan Brakhage died at age 70 after a long illness on March 9. To call him a filmmaker scarcely does him justice. The 300-plus movies Brakhage brought into the world, more or less single-handedly, over the course of his 50-year career provide an alternate history of motion pictures. Brakhage's vast, largely self-financed, scandalously underappreciated oeuvre has points of contact with surrealism, action painting, home movies, cinema verité, and various schools of poetry. But mainly it's the demonstration of a distinctively American heroic modernism.


Brakhage began making 16mm movies as a Denver teenager, taking as his model Jean Cocteau's metaphor-strewn film-poems and Maya Deren's psychodramas. His breakthrough came a few years later, once the consciousness behind the camera became the protagonist of his films—arguably the most subjective ever made. In his movies and his not inconsiderable writings, Brakhage took an expansive view: Seeing involved memories, inchoate fantasies, and even "closed eye" vision. Filmmaking was a means of unlearning convention. For two decades, Brakhage's intuitively shot and brilliantly edited movies focused mainly on his wife and their five children in their Rocky Mountain cabin. These were home movies raised to the zillionth power—silent and rhythmic, based on an invented language of percussive shifts in exposure or focus, multiple superimpositions, refracted light, and staccato camera moves. Toward the end of his life, Brakhage's work turned more abstract—not a term he liked—as he began painting directly on film.


Brakhage filmed the birth of his first child in Window Water Baby Moving (1959) and the Pittsburgh morgue in his harrowing The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes (1971). He made a multilayered, self-consciously Joycean, naturally psychedelic epic about a man, himself, climbing a snowy mountain, in Dog Star Man (1964–66). He created a profoundly moving meditation on war in 23rd Psalm Branch (1966–67), a feature-length 8mm movie that laboriously cut bits of World War II atrocity footage into the majestic onrush of the Colorado landscape; he made another masterpiece by using a clunky glass ashtray as a prism in The Text of Light (1974). And these are just a few.
As a personality, Brakhage was a gregarious loner with a knack for provocative hyperbole and a propensity for presenting himself as a black-clad Paladin. Generous in his praise and uncompromising in his integrity, he was a touchstone for many. His death stops a seemingly endless creative flow even as it raises questions about the future of film itself. Movies, he often said, are an art "constructed from cobwebs." But as long as Brakhage lived, the awesome breadth of his accomplishments in, and dedication to, those ephemeral motion pictures seemed to forestall the medium's essential fragility.

nostalgia (1971) - hollis frampton

"In (nostalgia), Frampton is clearly working with the experience of cinematic temporality. The major structural strategy is a disjunction between sound and image. We see a series of still photographs, most of them taken by Frampton, slowly burning one at a time on a hotplate. On the soundtrack, we hear Frampton's comments and reminiscences about the photographs. As we watch each photograph burn, we hear the reminiscence pertaining to the following photograph. The sound and image are on two different time schedules. At any moment, we are listening to a commentary about a photograph that we shall be seeing in the future and looking at a photograph that we have just heard about. We are pulled between anticipation and memory. The nature of the commentary reinforces the complexity; it arouses our sense of anticipation by referring to the future; it also reminisces about the past, about the time and conditions under which the photographs were made. The double time sense results in a complex, rich experience." - Bill Simon

(nostalgia) is a 38 minute 1971 film by artist Hollis Frampton (1936–1984). The film is composed of still black-and-white photographs taken by Frampton during his early artistic explorations which are slowly burned on the element of a hot plate, while the soundtrack offers personal comments on the content of the images, read by fellow artist Michael Snow. Each comment/story is heard in succession before the related photograph appears onscreen, thus causing the viewer to actively engage with the 'past' and 'present' moments as presented within the film.The Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington described it as an "avant-garde classic [with] considered eloquent and evocative explorations of memory and family". ^[1]In 2003, (nostalgia) was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". It is available on the DVD collection Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947-1986 (2008).

"(nostalgia), beginning as an ironic look upon a personal past, creates its own filmic time, a past and future generated by the expectations elicited by its basic disjunctive strategy." - Annette Michelson

"In (nostalgia) the time it takes for a photograph to burn (and thus confirm its two-dimensionality) becomes the clock within the film, while Frampton plays the critic, asynchronously glossing, explicating, narrating, mythologizing his earlier art, and his earlier life, as he commits them both to the fire of a labyrinthine structure; for Borges too was one of his earlier masters, and he grins behind the facades of logic, mathematics, and physical demonstration which are the formal metaphors for most of Frampton's films." - P. Adams Sitney

"(nostalgia) is mostly about words and the kind of relationship words can have to images. I began probably as a kind of non-poet, as a kid, and my first interest in images probably had something to do with what clouds of words could rise out of them... I think there is kind of a shift between what is now memory and what was once conjecture and prophecy and so forth." - Hollis Frampton

"(nostalgia) is a film to look at and think about, not a film that seizes your mind and forces its sensations on you. It liberates the imagination rather than entrapping it. It raises questions about the nature of film, the tension between fact and illusion, between now and then. It advances our understanding of film magic, and for this I am grateful." - Standish Lawder

In his 1971 short film, (nostalgia), American artist and writer Hollis Frampton oveturned the conventional narrative roles of words and images. In his account of an artists's transformation from photographer to filmmaker, Frampton burns photographs he had taken and selected from his past along with one found photograph. A calm voice tells a story about an image, but the story is about the following image, not the one shown. Confounding comprehension still further, the narration begins and ends during the photograph's combustion; smoke and ashes get in our eyes while we are trying to make sense of the image and the narration--trying to remember the story that fits the image, trying to remember the image that fits the story...Frampton's (nostalgia) is a formal masterpiece, long overlooked and understudied. It emerges from a body of film work that is rarely screened, the prints damaged and difficult to locate. Frampton's work is valued in artist filmmaking and film theory circles, but it has never taken its rightful place at the heart of modern art theory. This study will introduce a new generation to a critical moment in art history--when (nostalgia) confirmed both the essence and fragility of cinema itself.Afterall Books are distributed by The MIT Press.

Amazon Books.

Moore's brainstorming yields a welcome volume on Frampton, one that digs deeply into his own writings and theorizations and succeeds in presenting (nostalgia) both as a formidable artistic artifact of the early 1970s and as an autobiographical document on Frampton's own conceptual concerns.

momento (2000) - christopher nolan

Many medical experts have cited Memento as one of the most realistic and accurate depictions of anterograde amnesia in any motion picture. Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch called Memento "the most accurate portrayal of the different memory systems in the popular media," while physician Esther M. Sternberg, Director of the Integrative Neural Immune Program at the National Institute of Mental Health, identified the film as "close to a perfect exploration of the neurobiology of memory." Sternberg concludes: "This thought-provoking thriller is the kind of movie that keeps reverberating in the viewer's mind, and each iteration makes one examine preconceived notions in a different light. Memento is a movie for anyone interested in the workings of memory and, indeed, in what it is that makes our own reality."

Clinical neuropsychologist Sallie Baxendale writes in Memories aren't made of this: amnesia at the movies: "The overwhelming majority of amnesic characters in films bear little relation to any neurological or psychiatric realities of memory loss... Apparently inspired partly by the neuropsychological studies of the famous patient HM (who developed severe anterograde memory impairment after neurosurgery to control his epileptic seizures) and the temporal lobe amnesic syndrome, the film documents the difficulties faced by Leonard, who develops a severe anterograde amnesia after an attack in which his wife is killed. Unlike in most films in this genre, this amnesic character retains his identity, has little retrograde amnesia, and shows several of the severe everyday memory difficulties associated with the disorder. The fragmented, almost mosaic quality to the sequence of scenes in the film also reflects the 'perpetual present' nature of the syndrome." Wiki.

What is memory anyway?

There are several ways that writer-director Christopher Nolan could explain these plot holes. Here's one: If Leonard repeats something enough, he can condition himself to remember it. That's how he remembers he has short-term memory loss; that's how he remembers his argument with the cops about the second rapist. Unfortunately this means the story is reduced to "He can't make new memories—except when he can," and the already-murky plot turns to mush.

A better—and by no means mutually exclusive—argument is that Leonard's condition isn't physical at all but psychological. Leonard is capable of making new memories and does, at times (he remembers the insulin story, although the protagonists get smudged, as if in a dream). Mostly, though, he chooses to forget everything in order to a) bypass pain; and b) give his life meaning. But if his condition is a defense mechanism brought on by his wife's rape, shouldn't he have shaken out of it before the third insulin injection killed her? And if his short-term memory loss was brought on by the pain of his wife's rape, why does he choose to remember the rape? Is he torturing himself? Is he torturing us? And is his memory loss after his wife's death different than his memory loss after his wife's rape?

More and more, Memento looks like an Escher painting. If the source of the waterfall is the pool beneath the waterfall, how does the water flow up? If Leonard can't remember (except when he can), and it's all a defense mechanism to avoid painful memories (except for the most painful ones), then when did he begin to forget? And why? Slate.

ten quotes from gaston bachelard's the poetics of space: the classic look at how we experience intimate place

“I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”


“Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.” 


“We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.” 


“When the image is new, the world is new.” 


“For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.” 


“Here is Menard's own intimate forest: 'Now I am traversed by bridle paths, under the seal of sun and shade...I live in great density...Shelter lures me. I slump down into the thick foliage...In the forest, I am my entire self. Everything is possible in my heart just as it is in the hiding places in ravines. Thickly wooded distance separates me from moral codes and cities.” 


“Actually, however, life begins less by reaching upward, than by turning upon itself. But what a marvelously insidious, subtle image of life a coiling vital principle would be! And how many dreams the leftward oriented shell, or one that did not conform to the rotation of its species, would inspire!” 


“We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.” 


“The philosophy of poetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past, in which its preparation and appearance could be followed.” 


“We must listen to poets.” 

pastiche: cultural memory in art, film, literature

Ingeborg Hoesterey

Amazon Books.

"Sherman is interested in a layering of cultural memory that includes women's fears, and not necessarily in realistic depiction"

"Moore's architectural pastiche was indeed an agglomeration of visual 'delicatessen', of solums and ironic citations and trivial pursuits that came together as illusionistic play and playful narrative about the persistence of historical memory."

"One could easily add Wings of Desire to the cinematic memory behind the visual style of Zentropa."

"'quite earthly immortality of those who after their death remain in the posterity of immortality (Kundera)'"

"The recitation of Old Testament narratives as they have populated our cultural memory."

"Self-reflexivity and active intertexuality, [are the] driving forces behind the work of cultural memory... the integration of cultural memory was effected by the quoting of a particular work of visual art or style .."

Traces the rise of the pastiche in the arts and popular culture.

In the last two decades cultural theorists and artists have redefined a genre of artistic expression that for centuries was regarded as both elusive and notorious: the pastiche, or pasticcio. Today, highly engaging manifestations of the genre minor can be found in architecture, painting, and mixed media installations; in film, literature, and performance modes ranging from the operatic to rock event; and in supposedly trivial discourses such as advertising.

Postmodern pastiche is about cultural memory as a history of seeing and writing. One of the markers that sets aesthetic postmodernism apart from modernism is artistic practice that borrows ostentatiously from the archive of Western culture, which modernism, in its search for the unperformed, tended to dismiss. Contemporary artists are re-examining traditions that modernism eclipsed in its pursuit of the "Shock of the New" or—in the case of architects—the functionalism of the International style.

Ingeborg Hoesterey, Professor of Comparative Literature and Germanic Studies at Indiana University, is author of Verschlungene Schriftzeichen: Intertextualität von Literatur und Kunst in der Moderne/Postmoderne; editor of Zeitgeist in Babel: The Postmodernist Controversy; and co-editor of Intertextuality: German Literature and Visual Art from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century and Neverending Stories: Toward a Critical Narratology. 

Review - Cercles.

Georges-Claude Guilbert Université de Rouen

To begin with, the subtitle of this book, Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature, is misleading. The book is much more than that, and pastiche is much more than that, as indeed the book demonstrates. 

Ingerborg Hoesterey is Professor of comparative literature and Germanic Studies at Indiana University. She has published a great deal on art, and I remember reading with tremendous interest a collection of essays she edited back in 1991, entitled Zeitgeist in Babel: The Postmodernist Controversy. Hoesterey studied art history in Berlin, and literature at Harvard, and both those backgrounds very much permeate every page. The reader is never quite permitted to steer away from Germanic concerns, even when the author strives for universality. But that is no hindrance to the enjoyment provided by the book, nor is it a flaw to speak of. 

As everyone should, Hoesterey begins with dictionary definitions. Call me Old School, but this has always seemed very commonsensical to me, in the best sense of the word, though many scholars seem to view the method as below them. This book being a product of the twenty-first century, the word “postmodern” crops up very early in the introduction; and quite rightly so, as it would be difficult to discuss pastiche without examining its current principal haunt: postmodern artistic productions. Very soon afterwards, Hoesterey quotes Fredric Jameson; but she soon reassures us, as it becomes clear that she does not quit agree with his views on pastiche and the postmodern. Jameson’s theoretical position is steeped in Marxist aesthetics, she reminds us, perhaps to the point of invalidating his art criticism. One of the valuable points the book does not fail to make is that one should not hesitate to separate postmodern paintings or books from the notion of a postmodern era. 

Hoesterey continues with a “discourse history of pasticcio and pastiche”, summing up the fascinating origins and evolution of the word and the concept through Italy and France, from painting to literature via music and back again. She does remind the reader, however, of the difficulty of establishing an absolute truth (whatever that is) about the meaning of the word and the definition of the genre. It is obvious that she is immensely cultivated, having read Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida, talking as she does about “forests of origins”. It is not altogether clear, though, why she insists on calling pastiche a “genre mineur” (half ironically?), and why in French, since “minor genre” seems to do the trick – but maybe some subtleties have eluded me. In a postmodern context there is no such thing as a minor genre anyway.

The book moves on to a clever succession of elusive words in bold type followed by short texts (from four to thirty lines), which is entitled “the semantic environment of pastiche: a glossary”, although I am quite certain it is a pastiche. I cannot resist listing them here, as they are bound to draw the reader in, rather than spoil the suspense: adaptation, appropriation, bricolage (Hoesterey has read Lévi-Strauss), capriccio, cento, collage, contrefaçon, fake, farrago, faux, imitation (pity she doesn’t quote Colton – or was it Wilde? – about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery), montage (she has read Benjamin), palimpsest (she has read Genette), parody, plagiarism, recycling, refiguration, simulacrum (she has read Baudrillard) and travesty. 

On pastiche in the visual arts, Hoesterey is unbeatable. She mentions only a few examples, but they are, it seems to me, an extremely adequate selection: the Austrian artist Leopold Forstner, the Irish artist Stephen McKenna, and the Italian artist Carlo Maria Mariani. It does not matter if you don’t know them, plates are provided that speak for themselves – with just a little welcome help from Hoesterey, who speaks of pastiche as “a challenge to the canonization of the classical” before tackling the American photographer Cindy Sherman. Sherman gets a bit more than a page, and a reproduction. Confidently waiting to find her as I read the book, I was slightly disappointed. But Sherman’s pastiche strategies are decoded, and again the plate is well-chosen (her rendering of the Judith and Holofernes motif). She finds her way into the book later in the Cinematic Pastiche chapter, anyway. Very logically, after Sherman, Hoesterey writes about the American painter Mark Tansey. Tansey’s art not only pastiches high brow and low brow graphic art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it also incorporates theory, to the vertiginous point where you simply don’t know how you’re going to theorize his art any longer (Auseinandersetzung?). Every one of his paintings is a mise en abyme, most famously the one which shows Derrida and de Man dancing / fighting on the brink of an abîme (abyss), whose Conan Doyle hypotext Hoesterey establishes (Derrida Queries de Man, 1990). There is also, of course, the one which displays “Barthes, Baudrillard, and Lacan [gazing], Narcissus-like, at their reflection in the water while Derrida opens his coat to exhibit a modelled bare chest, the gesture as signifier rather than signified” (Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1987). Jeff Koons and David Hockney also make an appearance, but Tansey makes them look almost naïve and – God have mercy – spontaneous. 

Hoesterey might be just a trifle less convincing when she addresses design and architecture, though what she writes of Ricardo Bofill cannot really be questioned. Naturally she calls the unavoidable man to the rescue, Charles Jencks, without whom postmodern criticism wouldn’t be quite what it is. And when she conjures up the Caffe Bongo in Tokyo, it makes you very much want to fly to Japan and have a look at it. Her mini essays on pastiche in cinema are brisk and to-the-point, and once more I like her choices, on the whole: Blade Runner, Wings of Desire, Caravaggio, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Blue Velvet… Though I must admit I could have done without Zentropa (Europa). Maybe it’s just me; call me stupid and illiterate, but I have yet to see what the fuss is about. Everybody’s raving about Lars von Trier, who will soon run out of shelves to deposit his awards on, and to me he remains a charlatan, a poser busy making pseudo-intellectual films full of pretentious rubbish. I am 100% behind Hoesterey when she commends the work of the late Derek Jarman, a pure genius if ever there was one. I agree with her praise of Peter Greenaway or David Lynch, but I refuse to even try to see what might be interesting about the would-be pastiche of Lars von Trier. I call it rip-off, in every sense of the word; and believe me, I know I am an endangered minority on this one. But don’t let me get carried away. Mercifully, Hoesterey ends her brief exploration of cinematic pastiche with Quentin Tarantino. Pulp Fiction, she writes, “is already historic, a stroke of genius that is hard to follow”. Quite.

Then, Hoesterey deals with literary pastiche. She appropriately starts with Jorge Luis Borges, the author of Pierre Ménard autor del Quijote, the ur-pastiche, what Jean Franco calls the ur-text of contemporary Latin American pastiche. As I always say, if Flaubert is the grandfather of the postmodern in literature, Borges and Nabokov are its joint fathers. Borges is followed by Donald Barthelme, Milan Kundera, Ilya Kabakov, Christoph Ransmayr, A.S. Byatt, Umberto Eco, Patrick Süskind, Tom Stoppard, Terry Eagleton, David Lodge, Heiner Müller, Roberto Calasso, Julian Barnes (Flaubert’s Parrot – of course), and Avital Ronell. There were two writers in that list I’m ashamed to say I’d never heard of. I would not have made the same choice as far as Barthelme is concerned (Conversations with Goethe), but then I am not a Germanic Studies specialist. I am, though, utterly scandalized by the conspicuous absence of John Barth.

To conclude, Hoesterey convokes Wittgenstein, Lyotard and Baudrillard to glance at popular culture. She confesses that she is not a specialist, which is just as well, because she then writes quite seriously: “What I do know is that the old opposition of high and low culture has been challenged in many quarters by popular music culture, once the vernacular that appealed only to the taste of the masses.” You don’t say. She is soon forgiven, however, when she asserts: “Even a cursory familiarity with Madonna’s styles leaves no doubt that the Material Girl is an artist at deconstructive practices, whether it is [sic] the ironic disjunction between performance and lyrics or rapidly changing pastiche moves that dismantle what they seem to fetishize.” I couldn’t agree more. Don’t you know, some of us have built entire careers on that sort of statement.

Cercles©2001