An existence bereft of memory is illusionary and an individual without any memory- short term and long term - lives in the present without notions of the past, or hopes of the future. For such a person, time does not matter and there exists no sense of self worth or identity. Everything becomes temporary and every moment lived only experienced in the present. Since memory cannot exist without time, time cannot exist without memory - they are inherently conducive to each other. Thus a medium like film that has the ability to ‘capture’ time, changes our notions of its temporality according to the kind of discourse it is presented in.
Throughout the history of films, the idea of memory - collective and personal, artificial and authentic have been represented through different ideologies, ‘auteuristic’ expressions, abstract nuances, nostalgic representations and poetic reconstructions.
The aim of this paper is to examine how certain films represent and morph - personal and collective memories into artificial ones in their attempts to deal with the irreversibility of time with its temporal implications. Films like Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) and Mirror (Andrey Tarkovsky, 1975) explore collective historical memories juxtaposed with personal memories, and much recent films like Vanilla Sky, (Cameron Crowe, 1997) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2003) that reinvent personal memories within the subconscious to create prosthetic memories.
Of course, many films deal with the idea of self-identity explored through personal memories and historical significance, national identity, and trauma through collective memories. However, it was necessary to isolate these mentioned above to focus on the idea of artificial memory and reconstructed time to bring clarity to the issues that will be examined through the course of this essay. After all, film in itself represents a form of prosthetic memory and through its history as a medium- has contributed significantly to a shifting perspective of human identity and reality.
Hiroshima Mon Amour is set in Hiroshima, and details a love affair between a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) and a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) who is filming a movie about peace. The film recounts the events of World War II, the German occupation of France and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In the context of Hiroshima, she revisits her own past of her German lover (Bernard Fresson) a soldier who is shot, while she is denounced associating with him.
In a non-linear style and almost ethereal manner, the film showcases an innovative flashback structure which de-constructs the fragmented timeline. Fractured pasts and present seemed to co-exist, merging memories with reality to create an almost hypnotic tone throughout the film.
The film can be understood on several levels. On the surface, there is a superficial plot of two lovers, a French woman and a Japanese man, who spend two evenings together. The first evening, of which we the viewers only catch a glimmer, is a pleasant one, whereas the ensuing twenty-four hours, on which the film focuses, are haunted by the couple's knowledge that their time together is fleeting.
On another level, the film reveals its origin as a documentary, for the memories of the Hiroshima tragedy resonate throughout the film, whether in its presentation of actual newsreel footage or from the environs of the actual Hiroshima, in which the movie is shot. The archival footage of the aftermath of the attack reveal images of a city in ruins, grotesquely disfigured and injured survivors, mutilated animals and a reservoir of human suffering, even carried over to innocent children born many years after the war.
On yet another level, the film is a deeply personal one, of one woman's efforts to comprehend the events of her past and their mirrored projections upon the present. It is a woman's internal search for herself as she is caught between a secret past which of which even her husband and children are not aware, the past whose memories are finally fading away. The woman is conflicted between her desire to both remember the past and to forget it. In revealing her past to her lover, although she has only known him for a day, she indirectly confronts her own memories.
She may have transformed herself, from the utterly broken spirit of the past into a happy woman with a family and a career, yet the painful vestige of those memories still lingers. Likewise, Hiroshima, which has been re-built less than a decade after the bombing into a pleasant tourist attraction, cannot erase the remnants of its painful past.
The protagonist is a woman without identity, who does not even possess a name in the film, whose future is uncertain and whether it lies in Hiroshima or France, she cannot determine. In this sense, since the scale of the human tragedy at Hiroshima is often too great to comprehend, its symbolic representation in the allegorical memories of the woman's life offers a more intimate and sympathetic connection.
Throughout the film, the couple drifts apart but comes together again, clearly amorous of one another, yet both grasp the reality of the situation, that the woman must soon depart for her home and family in France, never to return again. They acknowledge that they should part company yet find themselves unable to do so repetitively. By the end of the film, the couple reaches an indecisive crossroads and the film's story has loops back to its beginning, ending as it began.
Hiroshima Mon Amour juxtaposes fact and fiction forcing the viewer to confront some of the crucial problems concerning the construction of a past with which one can live, especially in regard our (limited) capabilities for representing that past to another. It is a notion that relates to a different kind of connection to the past, in which recollection is about confrontation with absence and forgetting. Resnais instead chooses to initiate the forgetting of historical memory in the withdrawal of the destroyed Hiroshima from our consciousness and the forgetting of personal memory through the evaporation of the woman’s own personal traumatic memory.
To live is to accept the memory of the past, to make a truce with it, since only after being in a state of trauma does one actually start living, and living is to accept the past and forget it. Therefore, in forgetting- one is actually remembering (or living with the memory of something).
The film examines the affinity of the past on a personal and collective level, why one retains a construction of a past in the face of the relentless pressure of temporal erasure. It acknowledges this pressure ‘wins’, that there is no way to defeat the power of forgetting.
Furthermore, the reconstructed past through the images of the disaster by protesters in the film shoot are indirectly an illusion. Thus, this illusion of the indexical nature of reality or any re-creation of it inevitably reveals its own artificiality, and therefore the manifestation of prosthetic or artificial memories within this semblance of history in the film.
While Resnais focuses on ‘forgetting’ to remember the traumas of personal and historical memories through the language of film, Tarkovsky’s autobiographical and most complex film structurally- the Mirror inverts this notion of coming to terms with the past through remembrance. It is a kind of remembrance that indulges in childhood memories, to be able to relate to the anxieties and traumas of war. Thus, the collective historical memories clash with the fluidity of the childhood memories creating a certain sense of poetic distanciation.
Like Resnais’ film that fuses fiction and reality, the Mirror also a non linear narrative is layered and operates on different levels- blending scenes of recreated childhood memory with historical newsreel footage and the author’s contemporary existence.
The story revolves around the narrator/protagonist Alexei’s (Tarkovsky’s persona) relationships with his mother, his ex-wife Natalia and his son Ignat. To create a dreamlike aura, Tarkovsky uses the same actress to play the role of the narrator’s mother in her youth and his wife (Margarita Terekhova), similarly, using the same boy to play the narrator in his youth and his son. (Ignat Daniltsev).
The filmmaker presents nostalgic periods of Russian and world histories that are filtered through Alexei’s personal history. For example, the documentary archival footage of the Red Army crossing Lake Sivash, the Spanish Civil War, Russia-Germany in World War two, the Cultural Revolution, the atomic bomb, the Chinese Maoists waving their passports from the Soviet-Chinese conflict of the 1960’s etc . these are all actual facts with historically significant moments which are estranged and rendered oblique, when juxtaposed with his personal recreated childhood moments.
His intermixing of chronological stock footage with non-chronological personal histories further wrenches the linearity of the temporal events. These found film segments move forward in time while the personal histories go back-and-forth through the time-memory mesh, where time is no longer linear or linked. The sense of time’s universality is violated by personal memories that penetrate into past histories and a sense of virtuosity parallels one of actuality- and what is most personal becomes universal.
Tarkovsky gives us a taste of the different flavors of memory that time carries along in the film. They are a mix of pure perception, pure recollection and involuntary memory which he interweaves in the historical fabric of the private lives of its characters.
In Mirror, the interpenetration of present realities (circa 1975) with past memories (1930s and mid-40s) creates a perplexity about the juxtaposition of non-chronological fragments, stressing the indivisibility of time and the infinite possibility of a perception that journeys beyond the borders of the screen.
The film achieves a sense of temporal unity through the confusion between ontological states, an inseparable feeling of being in a here-and-now simultaneously with a there-and-then, in short, a sense of not being so much in the present but more in the past.
Tarkovsky combines historical and personal time by inter-cutting childhood memory and political and cultural history- from pre-war period of the 1930’s to wartime to the postwar period of the 60’s. The archive footage of events that have occurred within the narrator's lifetime are presented with the contemplative detachment of historical events, considered but not participated in, that contrast the extreme intimacy of the personal memories.
Furthermore, the oneiric intensity of the childhood scenes and his evocative use of nature, elaborate in creating the dreams and memories that blend as a filmic whole.
His persona of Alexei, finds solace in his memories of childhood to be able to deal with his adult life and the trauma of historical memories of the past and the current times in his estranged relationships.
Tarkovsky, like the French philosopher Henri Bergson believed in the concept of human time one that was divorced from linear, objective clock-time. He looked to the inner world of consciousness and memory for answers to philosophical and moral questions and his film reflects a kind of nostalgia for a time gone by. Inevitably, through his reconstruction of childhood memories spring artificial memories, since however authentic a memory is - its recreation in itself on celluloid is not real, and although his childhood memories are inspired from reality, it’s the reconstruction that breaks away from its authenticity.
Both Resnais and Tarkovsky’s films reveal a sensibility of an era that was prone to wars, thus it is inevitable that their work reflects the trauma of those times. Our contemporary post modernist culture reflects a different sensibility that manifests in art forms as we evolve through time, especially film.
Our association with the past, our cultural disposition in the present and outlook to the future has considerably been altered compared to the ideologies a couple of decades ago. In other words, our evolving society, technology and the changing times are reflective in the work of arts, in this case - film so to speak. In our neo-capitalist environment today, the understanding of time and memory has different implications than they did fifty years ago, and this is evident in our preoccupation with the future, with it all its scientific and technological achievements.
Films like Vanilla Sky and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are one of the many films that explore the idea of alternate/simulated realities, blurring the boundaries between real and artificial memories manifested in the wake of scientific discoveries. This is what Jean Baudrillard had in mind when he used the term "hyperrealism" - a world where reality is represented as more perfect than real. He refers to the hyperreal as "The generation by models of a real without origin or reality," such that one can no longer tell the difference between what is real and what is a representation of the real.
In Vanilla Sky, (remake of Alejandro Amenábar's Abre Los Ojos- Open Your Eyes.1997) for example, the protagonist induces his brain with‘lucid dreams’ a process which offers a ‘cryonic union of entertainment and science’ allowing him to recreate his reality according to his wishes. In the context of ‘hyper-realism’ it is here that the notion of prosthetic memory takes shape, a memory whose existence has no basis in reality.
The story revolves around David Ames –a handsome playboy millionaire who survives a fatal car accident that leaves him badly disfigured and semi-paralyzed. He manages to have his face restored by plastic surgery, and finds himself being interrogated by a police psychologist for his alleged involvement in the bizarre murder of his girl friend - Sofia Serrano (Penelope Cruz), who morphs into another woman Julie Gianni (Cameron Diaz). His confusion could also be a kind of memory impairment caused by frontal lobe damage following his accident, in scientific terms known as - confabulation, which in its basic level means the production of a false memory. However, at first it seems that Ames is involved in a bizarre conspiracy, but in a dramatic twist, it turns out he actually died was put in cryonic storage, having chosen to have a virtual reality experience while in suspension -presumably by having his brain wired prior to the point in his life before the accident.
In reality (within the narrative) he tries to reconstruct his face through cosmetic surgery but no avail and eventually commits suicide. But before killing himself he signs a contract with a company called L.E - (Life Extension) that guarantees an existence even after his death - a ‘lucid dream’ that allows him to imagine anything, manifest anything. Since David is madly in love with Sofia whom he technically has met only once in his lifetime- he imagines a whole relationship with her.
Unfortunately, some wires gets crossed in his brains, and his memories of Sofia confuse with Julie whom he briefly had an affair and who commits suicide driving her car off the bridge with both of them in it. Whether it’s the unpredictability of the human psyche, brain damage, the mind’s fragileness or some confusion because of unresolved issues or guilt-we are never quite sure, in any case, his ‘dreams’ turn into a living nightmare, one that he cannot wake up from, and that is what occupies most of the basic premise of the film.
Factually, David himself is not aware of that he is living a dream, and the audience is never made aware of it either, as the narrative unfolds, we only realize his malaise at the end of the film, when ‘tech support’ comes to the rescue to straighten things out. Until then, the film in a non-linear fashion, weaves in and out of his artificially recreated memories to his real ones, turning into a labyrinth of alternate worlds inside his mind.
The film also brings us to question the logic of temporal coherence; for example, the idea of memories continuing to exist after death opens a new world of discourse. Since we have an innate understanding that time ceases to exist with the end of an individual’s life, this idea takes a new dimension when we realize that that David’s memories continue to exist even after his death. Memory is therefore displaced or rather suspended in time and space, transcending its limitations of existence within the frail human body.
The film’s departure into science fiction at the end affirms the idea of virtual reality- revealing the power of the subconscious and the mind’s infinite possibilities. As Baudrillard emphasized that the ‘charm of science fiction puts models of simulation in place to give them feelings of the real, of the banal, of lived experiences, to reinvent the real as fiction, precisely because it has disappeared from our life. Hallucination of the real, of lived experience, but reconstituted and without substance, de-realised in advance – and therefore ‘hyper-realized’.
As we know that memory is a fragile yet vital component of identity, any manipulation or interference or loss of it can lead to a frenzied state of confusion. Interestingly, just as authentic memories have a tool (lucid dream process) to recreate themselves through inclusion, as in the case of Vanilla Sky, the removal of authentic past memories can lead to creation of artificial memories.
In other words, prosthetic memories are created from the storage or inclusion and distortion of past memories in Vanilla Sky, inversely in The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the protagonist creates new artificial memories that originate from the removal of his past memories and in both cases, the incoherence of their state of minds is portrayed through the non- linear narratives.
In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the story revolves around a couple - Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) and Clementine Kruczynski. (Kate Winslet). Joel is timid and reserved, focused and conservative, while Clementine is quite the opposite, loud and open-minded- she is a free spirited mild alcoholic. Believing they have found true love they fall in love with each other. It all goes fine for a while, until they begin to bicker over petty things, slowly drifting apart. Clementine being her usual impulsive self goes and erases Joel from her memory. When he finds out about it, although he is not supposed to, he goes to Lacuna Inc. (a company that removes memories like bad teeth) and does the same.
Most of film’s premise is based on the Lacuna team erasing his memories of Clementine. At first, he re-experiences all the fighting, misunderstandings, and the pettiness, being happy to get rid of it. But then the happy memories of being together and everything that inspired his love for her in the first place begin to disappear and he realizes he’s made a mistake and wants to keep it all. Unfortunately, with nowhere in his brain to hide Clementine, he puts her memories deep where his childhood and repressed thoughts exist, but she's still found and soon enough he bids her farewell in his subconscious. After both their memories have been erased, fate brings them together and they somehow get attracted to each other again. When they realize that they have already known each other, they decide to put it all aside and start afresh.
The film’s fractured narrative is full of layers that go from Joel’s real meetings with Clementine in the present, to the couple’s memories in the past and his artificial memories with her in them as they are being erased- all in a blend of surreal imagery.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind not only explores the idea of how personal memories - good and bad makes up an individual’s identity, but how our fast evolving culture relies on external technologies to erase unwanted memory as a quick solution. The crowded Lacuna clinic is reflective of the kind of society we exist in. In this sense, the increasing reliance on external technological as means of remembering is also equally problematic. Likewise, in constructing identity as well, there seems to be a decreasing reliance on personal experiences as the basis of our identities.
As Landsberg discusses in her article, that the concept of prosthetic memory emphasizes how our memories work in intricate and significant tandem with a technology-driven consumer society. Schacter references this idea in his studies in cognitive psychology that demonstrate how “forgetting memories over time is an economical response to the demands placed on memory by the environment in which we live.” In other words, prosthetic memory itself becomes a kind of psychological survival tactic, just as a prosthetic culture works to ensure the survival of our entire social system.
In lieu of the role of memory and its importance on an individual and collective basis, all the four films discussed in the essay bring forth not only the notion of prosthetic memory but also the displacement of time- real and synthetic. Furthermore, all four movies forsake a normal story development, intermixing past and present, avoiding rationality and indulging in creative anachronism.
Most importantly, they all collectively have non-linear narratives that seek to portray the invalidity of time and simultaneously its irreversibility that is manipulated in each film. Furthermore, film in its basic sense is divided into isolated static frames that are ‘instants’ of time- in effect, which when projected produce the illusion of continuous time and movement. If we are to understand this notion and apply it to the overall continuum of these films – the non-linear aspect of the narrative isolates the external logic of the film to reveal each scenario independent of itself. Thus, through the breakdown of temporal coherence, the films reinstate the nature of dreams, the subconscious and virtual realities in which time is neither relevant, coherent nor continuous.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Parkin, J. Alan – Memory and Amnesia –An Introduction. Second Edition. University of Sussex. Blackwell Publishers. 1987.
• Schacter, Daniel L. - Searching for Memory: the Brain, the Mind, and the Past. New York: Basic Books, 1996.
• Doane, Mary Ann – The Emergence of Cinematic Time- Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Harvard University Press. Cambridge. 2002.
• Tarkovsky, Andrei - Sculpting in Time. Translated by Kitty Blair Hunter. University of Texas Press, Austin.1986.
• Baudrillard, Jean - Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila F. Glaser. University of Michigan Press. Ann Arbor.1994
• Johnson, Vida, T. and Graham Petrie. The Film of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994.
• David George Menard - A Textual-Analysis of Tarkovsky's Mirror in Nostalgia: A Compilation of Essays. University of Calgary Press. Alberta 2001
• COMS 304/F- Coursepack. Film, Time, Memory.
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