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.
narration in which Hamlet the proto-intellectual will clarify the act of sovereign succession and rewrite the official history. Yet Hamlet’s ‘excessively goal-orientated consciousness’ (in terms of theatre direction at least), ensures that both prior to and during ‘The Mousetrap’ itself, in casting himself as a ‘minor’ dramatist he unwittingly emerges as what Deleuze might term a ‘despot of the invariant’.53 Because Hamlet approaches adaptation from a homogenised perspective there is no allowance for the recursive ‘catch’ of ‘The Mousetrap’ or the surprise of the ‘power of
will make sculptures), one comments, ‘You live in a place, you should learn something about it’. In their archaeological resurrection of the ‘buried’ and ‘forgotten’ they set the tone for the film’s interest in sites of memory and their relationships to official history, as well as to its critique and expansion via ‘learning’ about place through its stories and uncovered
, Gentrification and the enterprise culture, p. 112. 8 Dai Smith and Gareth Williams, Fields of praise: the official history of the Welsh rugby union 1881–1981 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1980); Martin Johnes, Soccer and society: South Wales, 1900–1939 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002); Grant Jarvie and Graham Walker (eds), Scottish sport in the making of the nation: ninety minute patriots (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1994); Jack Sugden and A. Bairner, Sport, sectarianism and society in a divided Ireland (Leicester: Leicester 213 214 Horseracing
), pp. 2–3. 2 The Manchester Guardian , “Chemicals in war”, 25 May 1945, p. 4. 3 Kiely, Politics of Labour ; R. Kiely, Industrialisation and Development: A Comparative Analysis (London: UCL Press, 1998); H. W. Arndt, Economic Development: The History of an Idea (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987). 4 S. Constantine, The Making of British Colonial Development Policy (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1984), ch. 7; D. J. Morgan, The Official History of Colonial Development (London
as C.F.G. Masterman’s, and official histories, military or otherwise, of the war that were bound to appear in the years to come. ‘But the real history’, the review predicted, ‘the one that men and women will want, will be something quite different. It will be the record, broken, perplexed and partial of what individual soldiers were really thinking and feeling; the reflection and refraction of the tragedy in human souls.’29 This book has attempted to put a mirror to the soul of the war as it triggered responses within men and women possessed of certain aesthetic
way of making use of this biographical knowledge is to bring to a pleasing union the conjectural history we have been viewing and the official history we had been familiar with beforehand. For example, perhaps the greatest surprise of both Elizabeth and The Tudors had been that the monarchs looked nothing like we had expected, with a young and beautiful Elizabeth and a thin and beardless Henry
Britain’s colonies. Notes 1 The Times , “Marines landed at Trinidad: disorders spreading” (23 June 1937), p. 15. 2 The Times , “Another warship at Trinidad, three strikers shot” (26 June 1937), p. 13. 3 Constantine, British Colonial Development Policy ; Havinden and Meredith, Colonialism and Development ; Morgan, Official History of Colonial Development ; Butler, Industrialisation . 4 Bolland, On the March
Civil Series of the official History of the Second World War, and published in 1950. Titmuss examined the strains of evacuation and air raids and concluded that pre-war fears of mass panic, mental breakdown and social disorder were wholly confounded; rather, the behaviour of the civilian population was consistent with mental resilience and a strong capacity to adjust to changed circumstances, even when these brought mortal danger, major disruption to living patterns and multiple daily stresses.8 In confining his observations on civilian morale to the effects of
everyday. Thinking of the ironies, and subversions of ‘official’ history in Mistry’s novels, one is reminded of Cedric Watts’s comments on the uses of satire in Conrad’s The Secret Agent, one of Mistry’s apparent templates for Such a Long Journey. Watts says: In the satiric tradition, representations of vice and folly are heightened; the reader expects not a faithfully complex rendering of reality, but a selective and distorted rendition vindicated by the resultant intensity and magnification of some salient features of actuality. Corruption looms comically large