Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Age of the Sequel: Beyond the Profit Principle
- 1 Before and After the Blockbuster: A Brief History of the Film Sequel
- 2 Screaming, Slashing, Sequelling: What the Sequel Did to the Horror Movie
- 3 ‘It's All Up To You!’: Sequelisation and User-Generated Content
- 4 Adventures in Indiewood: Sequels in the Independent Film Marketplace
- 5 Signifying Hollywood: Sequels in the Global Economy
- 6 Sequelisation and Secondary Memory: Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence: A. I. (2001)
- References
- Index
6 - Sequelisation and Secondary Memory: Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence: A. I. (2001)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Age of the Sequel: Beyond the Profit Principle
- 1 Before and After the Blockbuster: A Brief History of the Film Sequel
- 2 Screaming, Slashing, Sequelling: What the Sequel Did to the Horror Movie
- 3 ‘It's All Up To You!’: Sequelisation and User-Generated Content
- 4 Adventures in Indiewood: Sequels in the Independent Film Marketplace
- 5 Signifying Hollywood: Sequels in the Global Economy
- 6 Sequelisation and Secondary Memory: Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence: A. I. (2001)
- References
- Index
Summary
In the introduction to this book I noted a comparison between sequelisation and Sigmund Freud's theory of ‘the compulsion to repeat’ – which explained patterns of repetitive behaviour as a consequence of repressed trauma – as a helpful way to think about how the film sequel constructs remembering activities and memorialising scenarios by which spectators can access a previous text. However, manifestations of Freud's notions of compulsive repetition and remembering are apparent far beyond the individual spectatorial encounter, and can be found across a range of cultural practices around the world. Cultural theorist Andreas Huyssen has recently pointed out the global ‘explosion of memory’ discourses in the early years of the twenty-first century, which has led to ‘the emergence of a new paradigm of thinking about time and space, history and geography in the twenty-first century’. Might this new paradigm be sequelisation? How far do the relationships between memory, history, re-presentation and repetition within this category address the aims outlined in Huyssen's study? Huyssen argues that this paradigm is most evident throughout the numerous architectural memorials marking urban spaces around the world, whose purpose is to prompt collective remembering of past trauma.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Film SequelsTheory and Practice from Hollywood to Bollywood, pp. 130 - 152Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2009