Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
Summary
In his exploratory analysis of the subjective experience of remembering films, Victor Burgin remarks that, ‘in a scene equally available to us all, that means the same to us all, there is an opening onto a destination towards which only one of us will be drawn’ (2004: 65). I believe Burgin is right to emphasise film's ability to create an intimate connection with the spectator, in which filmic signs bond with fragments of personal memory in unpredictable and potentially unique ways. Burgin gives the term ‘sequence-image’ to the fragment of remembered film and illustrates the concept with a description of two scenes from different films that have become inextricably linked in his memory:
The narratives have dropped away, like those rockets that disintegrate in the atmosphere once they have placed their small payloads in orbit. Detached from their original settings each scene is now the satellite of the other. Each echoes the other, increasingly merges with the other, and I experience a kind of fascinated incomprehension before the hybrid object they have become. (p. 59)
Like Burgin's choice of the term ‘sequence-image’, which echoes film terminology (the ‘sequence shot’), the above passage suggests that the remembering of film itself takes on a filmic form. Reminiscent of creative gleaners, as I suggested in Chapter 2, our minds pick up fragments and bring them together in ways that resemble montage, whether in the form of its traditional cutting and pasting, the pulsing oscillation of the Godardian video suite, the selection of a sequence of video windows in a postcard, or the digital fusion of Chris Marker's musée imaginaire.
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- Memory and the Moving ImageFrench Film in the Digital Era, pp. 160 - 164Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010