Contents:
It focuses on the most contested and controversial area of contemporary fiction cinema's representation of the past, the use of documentary images as a mode of imaginative reconstruction or re-enactment. The chapter presents an argument that has been made by Alison Landsberg, who has coined the term 'prosthetic memory' to describe the way mass cultural technologies of memory enable individuals to experience events through which they themselves did not live.
These arguments appear to have a particular salience for understanding the popularity and the larger cultural significance of films such as Forrest Gump , JFK , Glory , The Hurricane and Saving Private Ryan. The most striking uses of digital compositing and morphing in film is found in Forrest Gump , which digitally rewrites some of the most sensitive scenes of the American past. The widespread use of computer generated imagery in film, which allows filmmakers to fuse photographic and digital images — as well as documentary and fictional footage — in the same composited frame, is only one aspect of a rapid and accelerating movement toward replacing celluloid with the infinitely malleable medium of digital imaging, a movement that has made contemporary cinema the emblematic expression, not of the real, but rather of the hyperreal.
Perhaps the greatest champion of the realist vocation of the cinema, Bazin argued that the realism of cinema derived from its existential relation to the physical world: the same rays of light that fell onto the objects of the phenomenal world bounced off those objects and into the lens of the camera, there to be imprinted on the photographic emulsion which preserved that very same light like a fly preserved in amber. This privileged relation to reality that the cinema once enjoyed, and which it appears to have spontaneously sacrificed with its embrace of the hyperreality of electronic image creation, raises particular questions for the way history is represented in film.
For films that take history as their subject undertake a dialogue with the real in a way that other films do not. Historical films have real-world reverberations: recent films such as JFK , Braveheart , Glory , The Hurricane and Dances with Wolves have served as a catalyst for the reevaluation of the historical past; they have provoked governments and led to the opening of secret files; they have inspired national consciousness. The powerful effect of films that deal with war, suffering and injustice is intimately related to the way they connect us to their physical and social environments, to the way they connect us to the world, to history.
The ferocious controversies that surround films such as JFK and Forrest Gump appear to me to stem not only from the interpretations they offer of controversial historical events, but also, pointedly, from their departure from the conventions of photo-realism through their use of computer enhanced and computer generated images, by their seamless splicing together of fictional scenes and archival footage, and by their use of documentary footage to re-enact events from a fictional or speculative perspective, blurring the boundary between actuality and fiction.
Kennedy, George Wallace, John Lennon, Lyndon Baines Johnson and other historical figures that appear in Forrest Gump and JFK are the authentic traces of the past; the archival image can no longer be assumed to be an authentic record of past events. But then, will this distinction still matter to them? While memory, especially when contrasted with history, has gained in value as a subject of public interest and interpretation, history has become the very signifier of the inauthentic.
With the audio-visual media effortlessly re-presenting that site, however, the line where memory passes into history has become uncertain.
In this chapter, I would like to explore some of the implications of computer generated imagery for the cinematic representation of the past. For although the representation of history in film is a notoriously vexed subject, typically involving controversies over authenticity and accuracy versus the interpretive requirements of narrative form, the more narrow case of the alteration or embellishment of documentary images for the purposes of dramatic storytelling highlights some new questions. With its increasing use of morphing techniques and computer generated visual environments, the cinema would seem to be a medium that now refuses history in the traditional sense of origins, authenticity and documentation.
And yet, contrary to expectation, film in the present day appears to have strengthened its cultural claims on the past. The cinematic rewriting of history has, in the present cultural moment, accrued an extraordinary degree of social power and influence. Film appears to have acquired, more than ever, the mantle of meaningfulness and authenticity with relation to the past — not necessarily of accuracy or fidelity to the record, but of meaningfulness, understood in terms of emotional and affective truth.
Cinema, in effect, seems to evoke the emotional certitude we associate with memory for, like memory, film is now, to a greater extent than before, associated with the body; it engages the viewer at the somatic level, immersing the spectator in experiences and impressions that, like memories, seem to be burned in.
In many ways, these films seem to literalise the concept of prosthetic memory. They explicitly take on the role of offering an experiential relation to history, inserting their main characters and, by extension, their viewers, into what appears to be a physical, literal relationship to actual historical figures and events: in Forrest Gump, for example, the film splices the character of Gump into fictionalised interactions with historical figures captured in archival film images — Gump is seen shaking hands with JFK and Richard Nixon, standing on the University of Alabama steps with George Wallace and conversing with John Lennon.
Memory, in the traditional sense, describes an individual relation to the past, a bodily, physical relation to an actual experience that is significant enough to inform and colour the subjectivity of the rememberer. History, on the other hand, is traditionally conceived as impersonal, the realm of public events that have occurred outside the archive of personal experience. As Elsaesser writes,.
A new authenticity may be in the making. Or after the Challenger disaster, when the space shuttle seemed to explode into a starburst of white smoke over and over again, until we could no longer tell the television screen from our retinas? Elsaesser, however, seems wary of the experiential effects of mass media, arguing that the seemingly physical, experiential relation to the historical event and the historical past that mass technology affords may inhibit the narrative closure that storytelling and narrative history allow.
He asks what obscure urge is satisfied by the compulsion to repeat that seems to drive the mass media in its continuous presenting and re-presenting of historical trauma, a question that has gained in importance and urgency after 11 September In the optimistic account of prosthetic memory provided by Lands-berg, the somatic powers of mass technology to produce something like symptoms in the spectator create the potential for empathic identification, for new collective frameworks, for public spheres based on memory.
But although this idea is provocative and persuasive enough as regards memory and the media, it falls short of considering the wild card effect that digital imaging has on this conception of the authenticity of mediated experience. The key element in this fake war is phony news footage of the rescue of a young Albanian woman fleeing the smouldering ruins of her village.
Reviewers receive guidelines on what is expected of them. Reviewers will not be approached where a conflict of interest is detected. Complaints Complaints and concerns are immediately addressed by investigating the validity of the complaint and taking appropriate steps. Encouraging Academic Integrity We aim to ensure that research material published conforms to internationally accepted ethical guidelines.
An article will not publish without these documents. Pursuing Misconduct If misconduct is suspected before taking the matter further, we will first seek a response from those accused. Ensuring the Integrity of the Academic Record When it is recognized that a significant inaccuracy, misleading statement or distorted report has been published, we will endeavor to print a correction promptly and with due prominence.
If, after an appropriate investigation, an item proves to be fraudulent, we will ensure that the retraction is clearly identifiable to readers, aggregators, and indexing systems. Affiliate Program Join our affiliate program and earn commissions by linking to our titles on your site! Bloomington, IN iuporder indiana. Join our email list. Receive email notifications on new books and special sales. Thus content variantism is in fact the standard view. Most theories of remembering thus remain preservationist in spirit.
Another possible form of content variantism permits the addition of both second-order content and first-order content. Generationist theories of remembering entail this more radical form of content variantism. Generationist forms of content variantism raise the question of accuracy in memory in an especially vivid way: if the content of the retrieved representation can differ from that of the trace, which can in turn differ from that of the perceptual representation—or if, as the simulation theory claims, there need be no trace linking the retrieved representation and the perceptual representation—there would seem to be no guarantee that memory provides us with accurate representations of past events.
Generationist forms of content variantism do not, however, guarantee inaccuracy, and preservationist forms of content variantism do not guarantee accuracy, for the accuracy of memory has two distinct dimensions.
Crucially, neither sort of accuracy entails the other. A retrieved representation may be authentic, but, if the subject misperceived the relevant event, it may nevertheless not be true. A retrieved representation may be true, but, if the subject misperceived the relevant event, or if he accurately perceived an aspect of it other than what is given to him by the retrieved representation, it may nevertheless not be authentic.
Thus, while preservative forms of content variantism imply that genuine memories are always authentic, such memories are not always true. Cases of misperception, again, illustrate the possibility of authenticity without truth. Preservationists who wish to hold that genuine memories are always true must therefore impose this as an additional requirement, above and beyond what is required by the core of their theory. By the same token, while generative forms of content variantism allow that genuine memories are sometimes inauthentic, such memories are not always false.
Moderate preservationists likewise acknowledge that remembering is often highly flexible; for example, they may acknowledge that one can remember the elements of an event in an order other than that in which one experienced them Bernecker Assuming that the existence of traces is granted, a full account of remembering will have to describe the relationship between traces, the representations produced by retrieval, and the representations involved in perceptual experience. There have been cases reported of people who've compared their own life too much with the romanticized, idealized life depicted in films and television series. While the notion of quasi-memory may enable us to disentangle memory from personal identity, it remains to be seen whether it is empirically defensible Northoff A criterion of mnemicity must therefore distinguish both between successful and unsuccessful remembering and and between remembering, whether successful or unsuccessful, and mere imagining. Collective memory highlights the power of television and popular culture to influence politics and offer a glimpse into other people's social realities.
Cases of boundary extension discussed above or field-observer perspective switching Debus b; McCarroll ; Sutton b illustrate the possibility of inauthenticity without falsity. For these reasons, generationists do not hold that genuine memories are always authentic. But those who wish to hold that genuine memories are always true can impose this as an additional requirement.
To impose this additional requirement is to claim that memory is factive , in the sense that genuine memories are necessarily true, that is, that apparent memories that are not true are merely apparent. In philosophy, the view that memory is factive has been common. The standard arguments for the factivity of memory are linguistic, appealing to the apparent incoherence of asserting both that one remembers an event and that the event did not occur Bernecker ; cf. Assessing these arguments is beyond the scope of this entry, but note that they are controversial even among those who give linguistic arguments a great deal of weight De Brigard ; Hazlett Among naturalists, who often give linguistic arguments less weight, they are more controversial still.
From a naturalistic point of view, the goal of a theory of remembering ought to be to describe the process of remembering itself, regardless of whether we are intuitively inclined to classify its results as genuine or merely apparent memories.
If the same process may be responsible both for producing true memories and for producing false memories, then an adequate theory of remembering will not require that genuine memories are always true—in the terms introduced in section 2 , the relevant natural kind may include both true and false memories, regardless of whether our ordinary linguistic practice permits us to group them together.
In psychology, the view that memory is factive has been much less common. This is not very surprising, given that much psychological research on remembering focuses on unsuccessful remembering: understanding how unsuccessful remembering occurs provides important insights into the mechanisms responsible for successful remembering, just as understanding how perceptual illusions and hallucinations occur provides important insights into the mechanisms response for successful perception.
This is in effect to treat memory as counterfactive. The distinction between authenticity and truth enables us to see that constructive, generative remembering need not be characterized by falsity. The generative character of remembering does, however, point to the need for a more sophisticated criterion of truth S. Campbell While the fact that remembering is generative does not imply that memories are bound to be outright false, it does suggest that they are frequently false in some respects.
This, in turn, suggests that remembering need not be fully accurate in order to be fully adequate, thus pointing towards a need for a criterion that acknowledges that truth in memory comes in degrees. The question of truth in memory derives much of its importance from the role played by memory in relation to the self. There have been attempts to meet this objection by introducing the notion of quasi-memory , which is meant to be like the notion of memory without the implication of personal identity Buford ; Parfit ; Roache ; Shoemaker While the notion of quasi-memory may enable us to disentangle memory from personal identity, it remains to be seen whether it is empirically defensible Northoff The primary methodological problem is that arguments for and against the memory criterion tend to rely on thought experiments involving memory swapping and other such cases.
Moving away from these far-out cases, some philosophers have preferred to consider the implications of real memory disorders. Craver ; cf. Others have preferred to build on cognitive psychological theories of autobiographical memory. Schechtman , , for example, has argued that memory does not and need not provide simple connections between discrete past and present moments of consciousness, maintaining that what matters, as far as the sense of personal identity is concerned, is the way in which autobiographical memory summarizes, constructs, interprets, and condenses distinct moments from the personal past to produce a coherent overall narrative cf.
Goldie Such approaches also appear to involve a second change of subject, from episodic memory to autobiographical memory. The extent to which this actually constitutes a change of subject is debatable, for the relationship between episodic and autobiographical memory is itself a matter of debate. Some philosophers have held that all episodic memories are autobiographical Hoerl In developmental psychology, however, episodic memory, understood as a capacity to remember particular events, is often treated as emerging before autobiographical memory, which requires a capacity to organize individual events into coherent narratives.