3 - Facing the Past
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
Summary
In Chapter 2 I explored filmic strategies that offer alternatives to reconstruction in attempting to render the past on screen. Filmed objects were seen to contain potential pasts that generate circuits of virtuality, creating the possibility of both a temporal and spatial overflowing of the filmic text. Varda's postcards and old strips of film, Marker's photographs and monuments, and the myriad melodies and quotations, film clips, photographs and paintings that make up the museal fabric of Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma (1989-98): such memory objects, be they sonic or visual, elicit transversal readings or viewings of films. They offer up intertextual links to the past, thereby acting as a point of intersection between the memories of filmmaker, viewer and the broader collective sphere. In this chapter I want to look at another type of access to filmic remembering. In fictional as well as documentary films, the oral testimony of witnesses has long been employed as a device for figuring the past. It is a strategy that tends to draw our attention to individual subjectivities, focusing on the embodied experience of one person's remembering process. But as a conduit of filmic memory, I shall argue, the faces of testimony, like the filming of objects, offer productive and powerful ways of bridging private and social pasts.
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- Memory and the Moving ImageFrench Film in the Digital Era, pp. 87 - 122Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010