Aesthetics of Recognition and Photofilmic Dynamics:
Remembering in the Cinema of Henri-François Imbert
Sébastien Fevry
Abstract
This article focuses on an aesthetics of memorial recognition and shows how this aesthetics is related to a photofilmic dimension that goes beyond the context of one particular media. The first section of the paper deals with a philosophical approach (Bergson, Deleuze, Ricœur) of the question of recognition in order to understand the aesthetic implications resulting from awareness of this memorial phenomenon. The second section, devoted to the work of the French filmmaker Henri-François Imbert, helps to indicate how moments of recognition involve an interlacing of images and specific media practices.
Résumé
L’article vise à développer une esthétique de la reconnaissance mémorielle en montrant comment cette esthétique est liée à une dimension photofilmique qui dépasse le cadre d'un média particulier. La première partie de l’article travaille la question de la reconnaissance d’un point de vue philosophique (Bergson, Deleuze, Ricœur) afin de comprendre les
implications esthétiques résultant de la prise de conscience de ce phénomène mémoriel. La deuxième partie, consacrée à l'œuvre du cinéaste français Henri-François Imbert, indique comment les moments de reconnaissance impliquent un entrelacs d'images et de pratiques médiatiques spécifiques.
Keywords
In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944), a young woman walks alone in the English countryside. It is during World War II, both in the film and in the real world. At this moment in the story, the heroine feels lost, knowing neither what the future holds for her nor what form her combat against the Nazis should take. As she arrives at the hilltop, and Canterbury Cathedral looms on the horizon, she stops short, apparently hearing noises around her, which, in fact, turn out to be a confused echo of laughter and music. These noises were already present at the film’s outset, in a prologue showing medieval pilgrims on their way to Canterbury. After a moment’s hesitation, the young woman identifies the sonorous clamor coming from another age. She recognizes the instruments, and a man who had thus far been hidden in the field tells her that these noises do not come from outside, but from inside, as if the young woman had recognized the echo of an eternal England already present in her.
From a photofilmic point of view, there is nothing accidental in Victor Burgin’s evoking this sequence from A Canterbury Tale in order to illustrate his conception of the sequence-image in The Remembered Film. Nor is it coincidental that the young woman’s face illustrates the cover of his book, so obvious is it that the scene on the hilltop shows the powers of memory, its capacity to plunge into buried layers in order to retrieve a past thought to be forgotten.1 The young woman, writes Burgin in “The Noise of the Marketplace,” “experiences the unexpected return of an image from a common national history and hears sounds from a shared past that haunts the hill.” (Burgin, 2009: 279)
In my view, this sequence is also a salient entry point for initiating reflection on the question of memorial recognition and an image dynamics that allows this recognition to be established. In the film, the young woman recognizes music and laughter of another age, even if she has never heard them before. The directors do not show a traumatic memory, incapable of being remembered, but a happy memory, finding a point of support in the past for turning its action towards the future. Once the young woman has received the illumination of another age, she is more confident of the rightness of her engagement in British civil defense.
This brief analysis underlines an emerging focus on what may be called an aesthetics of recognition, especially as these moments of recognition seem related to a real photofilmic dimension that goes beyond the context of one particular media. Already with Powell and Pressburger’s film, for example, we note how the the hilltop sequence connects movement to immobility: the narrative as well as the movement of images2 suspend the characters’ flow, allowing the heroine to listen to another age, which possesses its own mobility and which emerges on the screen by means of the soundtrack.
To outline this aesthetics of recognition further, I will begin by situating the question of recognition within the problematic of a memory open to action, before showing the aesthetic implications resulting from awareness of this memorial phenomenon. A final section, devoted to the work of the French filmmaker Henri-François Imbert, will help to indicate how moments of recognition involve an interlacing of images and specific media practices.
Towards a Revalorization of the Moment of Recognition
One of the ideas I would like to defend here is that the moment of recognition has often been underestimated in aesthetic reflections that have developed around the staging of memory, particularly in the cinematographic field. Underestimated does not mean ignored, but let us say that most of the time attention is paid to the process of recollection, to memory’s efforts, rather than to the moment when the person realizes and recognizes the reliability of her/his memories. From this perspective, it would appear that the moment of recognition is, in the end, secondary compared to the importance of the work of remembering.
To understand its relegation to a lesser status, it is useful to begin with a philosophical approach to recognition, following a line running from Henri Bergson to Gilles Deleuze. In
1896, in Matter and Memory, Bergson established a major distinction between two types of recognition, a distinction that is taken up again by Gilles Deleuze in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, the second work the philosopher devoted to the cinema. In Matter and Memory, Bergson distinguishes automatic recognition from attentive recognition. In the first case, there is no memory, strictly speaking. Automatic recognition belongs rather to the order of habit. As Bergson writes, “to recognize a common object is mainly to know how to use it.” (Bergson, 1929: 111) In this case, recognition is immediately prolonged in a motor enchainment, making very little appeal to the remembering process as such. The second kind of recognition, attentive recognition, is more interesting. Here the attention paid to the perceived object does not lead to an immediate action, but leads the mind to mobilize memory-images located in ever more distant areas of the past, in a remembering process that “may go on indefinitely;memory strengthening and enriching perception, which, in its turn becoming wider, draws into itself a growing number of complementary recollections.” (123) In short, whereas automatic recognition implies action and reaction, attentive recognition demands a halt in the continuity of actions in order to foster the deployment of memory-images.
This distinction is paradoxical, because while it installs recognition as a central phenomenon in any memory process, it also leaves the door open to a devalorization of the moment of recognition in itself, which is particularly evident in Gilles Deleuze’s The
Time-Image. Immediate recognition does not seem very productive to Deleuze, and even suspect on
the aesthetic level, in being linked to the question of the cliché and the stereotype:
A cliché is a sensory-motor image of the thing. As Bergson says, we do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it, we perceive only what we are interested in perceiving, or rather what it is in our interest to perceive, by virtue of our economic interests, ideological beliefs and psychological demands. (Deleuze, 1997: 20)
For Deleuze, automatic recognition is triggered by an image that involves no work of particular recollection, but, instead, a rather rapid motor enchainment in both the rest of the narrative and in the very mind of the spectator.
What shall we say about attentive recognition? A priori, it’s a productive recognition, since it sheds further light on the object, complementing its perception by images from the past. For Bergson, however, attentive recognition is a momentaneous suspension, always leading to a return to the action. Unlike the dreamer, in “whom recollections emerge into the light of consciousness without any advantage for the present situation,” (Bergson, 1929: 198) the characteristic of the man gifted with common sense is “the promptitude with which he summons to the help of a given situation all the memories which have reference to it; but it is also the insurmountable barrier which encounters, when they present themselves on the threshold of his consciousness, memories that are useless or indifferent.” (198) For Bergson, attentive recognition ends with a relaunch towards the world and a reinsertion into the present situation.
Compared to Bergson’s approach, it is important to underline that Deleuze unceasingly defers the moment of recognition, preferring the remembering process to it. For Deleuze, unending remembering, increasingly extended towards a virtual past or towards dreams and fantasies, is the process that best suits his definition of the optical-sound image as an image cut off from all sensory-motor links. From this perspective, the moment of recognition is unendingly deferred, because “attentive recognition informs us to a much greater degree when it fails than when it succeeds.” (Deleuze, 1997: 54) Consequently, the time-image is not so much illustrated in recovering a memory, but rather in “the disturbances of memory and the failures of recognition.” (55)
On the philosophical side, we see already how recognition tends to become a secondary moment in the memory process. Its devaluation is further reinforced by the interpretative framework that developed around the Shoah and established “traumatic recall” as the dominant mode of recollection, particularly under the influence of Trauma Studies, appearing in the early 1990s.3 The lines Deleuze wrote about memory disturbances are remarkably consistent with the psychoanalytical approach of Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman, who are interested in the phenomena of repetition and repression as they affect the bearers of traumatic memories. For Dori Laub, “while the trauma uncannily returns in actual life, its reality continues to elude the subject who lives in its grips and unwittingly undergoes its ceaseless repetitions and reenactments. The traumatic event, although real, took place outside the parameters of ‘normal’ reality, such as causality, sequence, place and time.” (Felman and Laub, 1992: 68-69) Seen in this light, traumatic recollection is the past event that cannot entirely accede to recognition, because its out-of-the-ordinary character is such that its full recognition, supposing that it be possible, would profoundly risk destabilizing he or she who remembers.
During the 1990s, trauma not only became a key paradigm for thinking about the Shoah, but its application was extended to many other memories, like those of Apartheid, slavery, or sexual abuses. As Andreas Huyssen underlines in Present Pasts, “the privileging of trauma formed a thick discursive network with those other master-signifiers of the 1990s, the abject and the uncanny, all of which have to do with repression, specters, and a present repetitively haunted by the past.” (Huyssen, 2003: 8) My aim is not to underestimate the importance of traumatisms in our history and contemporary culture, but rather to point out that this type of memory may tend to leave aside other memorial dynamics, which grant recognition a more central place. I agree with Huyssen in stressing that the traumatic mode should not dissimulate other relationships to the past.
Trauma cannot be the central category in addressing the larger memory discourse. It has been all too tempting to some to think of trauma as the hidden core of all memory. After all, both memory and trauma (…) are marked by instability, transitoriness, and structures of repetition. But to collapse memory into trauma, I think, would unduly confine our understanding of memory, marking it too exclusively in terms of pain, suffering, and loss. It would deny human agency and lock us into compulsive repetition. (Huyssen, 2003: 8)
Huyssen’s position clearly opens memory up to action and invites us to reconsider the question of recognition within this new framework. Already in The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau shows that memory “is mobilized relative to what happenssomething unexpected that it is clever enough to transform into an opportunity.” (de Certeau, 1984: 86) But it was above all Paul Ricœur, who in Memory, History, Forgetting, reinstalled recognition into the heart of the memory process with a much more pragmatic dynamics than that developed by Gilles Deleuze.
In Ricœur’s perspective, recognition is a veritable miracle, in the sense that the moment of recognition marks the triumph of memory over forgetting and permits she/he who remembers to assure her/himself of the reliability of her/his own memories.
I consider recognition to be the small miracle of memory. And as a miracle, it can also fail to occur. But when it does take place, in thumbing through a photo album, or in the unexpected encounter with a familiar person, or in the silent evocation of a being who is absent or gone forever, the cry escapes: “That is her! That is him!” And the same greeting accompanies step by step, with less lively colors, an event recollected, a know-how retrieved, a state of affairs once again raised to the level of “recognition.” Every act of memory (faire-mémoire) is thus summed up in recognition. (Ricœur, 2004: 495)
For Ricœur, memory is destined to be happy, not because it recalls happy moments, but because its work is always liable to be crowned by the moment of recognition, that moment when the present situation finally manages to coincide with the past trace of a remembrance. Once this coincidence is established, the mind can once again direct itself towards action and turn towards the world. Paul Ricœur thus reaffirms Bergson’s first position concerning attentive recognition, which suggests a temporary suspension that precedes a return to the world. For Ricœur, the moment of effective recognition marks recollection’s reinsertion into the flow of living action. In other words, unlike Deleuzeand yet without denying the possibility of memory’s failing to rememberPaul Ricœur fixes the idea of a happy memory as the “lodestar” of his phenomenological quest, as a memory open to action, whose high point is constituted by effective recognition. (494)
Memorial Recognition and Intersecting Images
What can we retain from this essentially philosophical approach? What aesthetic and media-based consequences would result from a revalorization of the moment of recognition? First of all, we see how the theory of recognition sheds light on the stakes of memory, which do not necessarily correspond to the modalities of traumatic memory. Already the sequence from A Canterbury Tale illustrates the happy memory Ricœur describes, since the heroine finds the sense of her engagement with history by listening to an ancient past. For Powell and Pressburger, recognition is not a means of fleeing the present through endless recollection, but rather a means of returning to history, experienced and better armed.
More fundamentally, I would like to promote the idea that an aesthetics of recognition often relies on a photofilmic dimension and that this kind of aesthetic is essential for understanding memory apparatuses that no longer directly connect to the lived experience of witnesses, pertaining more to phenomena linked to what Marianne Hirsch (2012) calls postmemory situations, i.e. situations where the artists, and the spectators too, appropriate the images of a past they have not really lived through, so as to integrate it into their own identity constructions.4
In my view, these movements of appropriation, based on effective recognition, are that much more required in an age of social media and image multiplication, especially if we couple this phenomenon with the progressive disappearance of witnesses who knew the horror of the great tragedies of the 20th century. More than ever, we find ourselves facing the need to select certain images from the past and to test their relevance and reliability in trying to see how they can transform our present. When we were still in the era of witnesses, the problem of recognition appeared with far less acuity, for it was obvious that we were in contact with a living memory, which could certainly falter or be mistaken, but which was relatively assured of memories lived firsthand. From this perspective, it is not astonishing that trauma became the key paradigm of memorial studies in the 1990s, since they were essentially based on testimony. Attention was not so much on recognition, but rather on the progression and difficulties of the act of remembering.
But the further we depart from the witness’ lived experience, the more the question of recognition comes to the fore, particularly in the evermore frequent cases of memory-images that are no longer linked to memory bearers. Indeed, in the age of the Internet, digital images, and globalized culture, when everything happens in a “global space of remembrance” (Hirsch, 2012: 230), there is a drastic augmentation in the number of images that are deprived of memory, and which circulate from one media to another without being assigned to a specific history.5 Digitized postcards, photo albums discovered in flea markets, some of whose pictures are published online, and films in Super 8 or 16 mm converted to numeric format: here is a constellation of photofilmic images that indicates the presence of a past separated from
memory. As Laura Marks explains in The Skin of the Film, “when I find a high school yearbook at a flea market, or when I contemplate Christian Boltanski’s wartime photographs of anonymous Jewish schoolchildren, I confront a virtual image that does not correspond to my experience, nor perhaps to anybody’s memory, yet it cries out to have a memory assigned to it.” (Marks, 2000: 50)
Consequently, faced with this mass of anonymous images, the question arises as to who will recognize these images. What memorial process can we apply to them in order to spark the small miracle of recognition and to assign them memories turned towards action? In her work,
Prosthetic Memory, Alison Landsberg defends the idea that images play a role in the
appropriation of memories beyond personal histories. For Landsberg, the cinema as well as other mass media can particularly communicate memory experiences to spectators who are strangers to the past conveyed by the films: “The turn to mass cultureto movies, experiental museums, television shows, and so forthhas made what was once considered a group’s private memory available to a much broader public.” (Landsberg, 2004: 11) In this sense, the concept of “prosthetic memory” is quite useful for understanding “the production and dissemination of memories that have no direct connection to a person’s lived past and yet are essential to the production and articulation of subjectivity.” (20)
Prosthetic Memory does not, however, deal with the question of recognition in the sense
defined by Bergson and Ricœur. For Landsberg, the appropriation of an external memory depends on the identification and sensory experience that the cinematographic narrative allows. Alison Landsberg ultimately identifies the viewing of a film with the production of a new experience (and hence of a new memory), which may mark the spectator as much as an event or memory from real life: “What people see might affect them so significantly that the images would actually become part of their own archive of experience.” (30)
Under these conditions, we understand why memory recognition is absent from Landsberg’s work, since the moment of recognition always intervenes after seeing the film, when its remembrance is mobilized in reaction to a political context, allowing a deeper involvement in debates and controversies in the public sphere. For Landsberg, recognition is, above all, part of a social and political order. The effect of films such as 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013) is to create “a sensuous engagement with the past,” (21) which fosters a collective and shared recognition of the wrongs inflicted on certain victims in history, as with, for example, the case of the memory of slavery in the United States.
The upshot of this is that we still lack a veritable aesthetics of recognition that would focus on the work of recognition not downstream, but on the level of the film itself. The photofilmic dimension has to be taken into account if we are to further elucidate this aesthetic. My hypothesis is that the film in itself may constitute a memory apparatus and produce recognition by intersecting images relative to the same past event. The idea is to promote a recognition at the second degree. In postmemory situations, faced with images without witnesses, which come from a past I have not lived in, recognition operates on a media level. It no longer strives to make a cognitive trace and a present impression coincide, but to make images of various natures, realized at different times, converge towards one sole point of identification, allowing the spectator to recognize the same object through the multiple prisms of a kind of visual kaleidoscope.6 Thus the film itself becomes an act of memory in leading the
spectator towards recognition of a past that is not necessarily his or her own, a recognition produced by the fortunate encounter of images communicating across the borders habitually accepted between photography, cinema, video, drawing and painting.
To give these ideas a more concrete aspect, let us examine a few moments of the filmed work of Henri-François Imbert, who participates fully in this aesthetics of recognition. The question that will guide me throughout this analysis will be what Bergson asked in Matter and
Recognition at Work in the Cinema of Henri-François Imbert
French filmmaker Henri-François Imbert is committed to reviving buried memories, and his principal films prove to be models of a aesthetics of recognition.7 I will concentrate on two of his main films: La Plage de Belfast (1996) and No pasarán, album souvenir (2003). In La
Plage de Belfast, the director discovers a film, a few minutes long, in a Super 8 camera picked
up at a flea market, and travels to Northern Ireland to find its owners. With No pasarán, the director recalls memories of Spanish Republican refugees in France after Franco’s victory in 1939. These exiles were locked up in concentration camps in southern France, with some of them being later handed over to the Germans by the French authorities and then transferred to the Austrian concentration camp, Mauthausen. On a formal level, the film’s originality lies in its development out of a series of postcards, found in the director’s grandparents’ attic, which were printed at the time of the action. Consequently, the film appears to be an investigation, wherein the director’s voice-over seeks to supplement the series of images and to retrace the story of the Spanish refugees.
Through these simple summaries, we see already that Henri-François Imbert’s work falls under the sign of a travel film: each film explores a specific territory, whether it be southern France or Northern Ireland. These travels may be understood as movements in space, which they in fact are, but at the same time, it is interesting to consider them from a memorial perspective. In passing from one witness to another, from a village to a station, Imbert adapts the slow advance of recollection to the geography. There is nothing surprising in that, since recognition has as much a spatial as a temporal connotation. Recognizing is also rediscovering, and, logically, looking for a lost past goes along with looking for the place where the events once occurred.
The moment of recognition, or at least a preliminary form of recognition, often comes at the end of this wandering. In No pasarán, that recognition is often developed by the rapprochement of a contemporary image and a past image. On several occasions, Imbert begins with a postcard and finds the photographed place in order to see what it has become today. The film is punctuated by moments that allow the public to physically feel this sentiment of recognition. The spectator is able to say: “Sure, that’s where it took place; I recognize the place that I saw before on the postcards.”
Yet these moments of identification must be carefully interpreted, for they orchestrate a subtle coupling between cinema and photography. For example, in discovering the former concentration camp at Amélie-les-Bains, which has become a campground today, the sequence begins with a shot in motion that shows the mountainous landscape surrounding the area. Once we arrive at the site of the former camp, the director abandons the camera and displays the old postcard of the camp, which he follows up with two black-and-white photos of the location today. At no time does the spectator view moving images from Imbert’s camera. No sooner has the image from the past been recognized in the present, than the present is itself drawn into the orbit of the past. This switching from one time to another is made palpable by the fact that the two images of the present appear in the same photographic form as the old postcards.
Fig. 1, Henri-François Imbert, No pasarán, album souvenir (2003
At this moment in the film, recognition is not altogether complete, since the director refuses to open recognition to the present time, or in other words, to movement and action. A closed circuit, seemingly established between the old postcard and the current image of the campgrounds, becomes in turn, a fixed image, cut off from all “becoming.” By this procedure, Imbert suggests that superimposing two images is not enough to establish an effective recognition. We thus return to Bergson’s question: at what moment does the memory process arrive at a “complete and fully conscious recognition?” (Bergson, 1929: 145)
Another variant of preliminary recognition appears in La Plage de Belfast. The idea here is that the image plays the part of a mirror, allowing individuals to recognize themselves despite the passage of years. Going up to Northern Ireland, Imbert finally identifies the owners of the Super 8 film that he found in the flea market. However, some doubt still remains. Is the family he found the same one that appear in the film shot some ten years earlier? The only means of checking this is to show the film to the family and to see whether recognition will operate, if the small miracle of memory will occur or not.
Unlike in No pasarán, this is not merely a question of comparing an old image and a contemporary image to find an effective resemblance. The process is more complex: the director installs his camera in the living room and films the family in front of the television screen as they view the old film shot. Consequently, the spectator does more than note a simple resemblance; he or she is also able to perceive the effect produced by the recognition, in observing the family members recognizing themselves on the screen. At this stage, we can point out a characteristic of the recognition process, namely that it is extensive: it is communicated to the family members before spreading to spectators. From the moment the family views the image as constituting their own memory, we, too, recognize that image as being theirs. And we in turn are convinced, except that our certainty is not communicated by the living room television, but indeed by the screen on which we see the film.
However, this sequence does not conclude the film. While we might have thought that identifying the family would be the endpoint of La Plage de Belfast, at this point the film is only two-thirds over. The idea emerges anew that recognition is not altogether complete and that there is the possibility of pushing it further still. Consequently, the same question is asked with insistence: at what moment does recognition become fully effective?
Thanks to its impressive coherence, Henri-François Imbert’s filmography allows us to answer this question specifically. Whether in La Plage de Belfast, No pasarán, or even in
Doulaye, une saison des pluies (2000)the director’s first feature-length filmthe narrative
ends using a similar structure: one of the persons in the narrative takes her/his turn behind the camera and films her/his family or her/his close relatives. Thus, in La Plage de Belfast, the little girl, a teenager today, uses the Super 8 camera to film her parents at the seashore. In Doulaye,
une saison des pluies, it is the long-lost Malian friend who takes his turn behind the camera in
order to capture images of his own family. In No pasarán, the Spanish refugees’ postcards are shown to Iraqi Kurdish refugees who languish in the Sangatte camp. In the film’s last sequence, the refugees film one another on a North Sea beach, with the cliffs of Dover on the horizon.
Fig. 5, La Plage de Belfast (1996)
Such sequences touch at the heart of Imbert’s approach and enable us to provide a concrete answer to the aforementioned question. For the French director, recognition is brought to a close by an effective action, which consists of relaunching the act of remembering. This entails recording images of the present time in order for them to take place in a future memory. This evokes the conception of memory developed by Gilles Deleuze in The Time-Image: “Instead of a constituted memory, as function of the past which reports a story, we witness the birth of memory, as function of the future which retains what happens in order to make it the object to come of the other memory.” (Deleuze, 1997: 52)
In each film, Imbert begins by providing images that allow a family or community to recognize itself in a past that is not necessarily familiar. As the voice-over in La Plage de Belfast explains, “Alec liked to film his family, but he had never shown them any of his films.” Hence Imbert’s intervention consists in reinscribing a continuity between the present and the past, but that continuity in turn demands a prolongation beyond the current situation. It is from the moment when I recognize my history as my own that I can plan to extend it, beginning from the present that I am in. Thus effective recognition represents a pivotal moment between a present recognizing itself in solidarity with the past, while opening itself out towards a future memory.
With regard to this conception of a memory opening into the future, its media dimension is obviously critical, since everything at stake in Imbert’s work involves providing people the opportunity to become, in turn, subjects of their history and to record their own memories through film: i.e., the teenager films her family; the illegals record their stay at the “reception” center. In La Plage de Belfast, the type of device used, a Super 8 camera, even allows us to give the new images the same texture as the old ones, which indeed confirms the idea that the present is filmed in the past, recorded in view of a memory to come. Finally, recognition arises in the spectator’s mind, since she or he is invited to recognize not simply an image of the past, but the memory practices that have made it possible for that image to be preserved in time and to reach her or him.
Through Henri-François Imbert’s work, we witness the first steps towards an aesthetics of recognition, aware that it should be envisaged not as a simple, isolated moment, but rather as a continuous gradation, from the simple visual identification of two images distanced in time to the mirror image before which a person or community is brought to recognize herself, himself, or itself. Analysis of Henri-François Imbert’s films also shows how the complementarity and the passage from one media to another alllows recognition to establish itself in the films. This is not a secondary, but a fundamental question, inasmuch as recognition is ensured, within the memory apparatus the films develop, through the networking of various images that reinforce one another in authenticating the past event.
Besides Henri-François Imbert’s work, I could have mentioned other films, such as
Searching for Sugar Man (Bendjelloul, 2012), centered on the rediscovery of a forgotten singer.
Other examples could be taken from graphic novels, such as Palacinche (Sansone, Tota, 2012), which use the photographic image to complement the drawing. In any case, it seems to me that, in its most contemporary forms, recognition is obtained through a photofilmic (or photo-drawing) convergence. The aim of this is not so much the accumulating of images around the same object, but rather the varying of supports and visual angles in order to perceive what remains and to establish continuity among the various aspects of an object or a person over the years.
Translated by Thomas Patrick Notes
1 Victor Burgin was also inspired by the film A Canterbury Tale in creating his video work Listen to Britain, shown in 2002 at the Arnofilni Gallery in Bristol. In this video, some images
were shot on the same location of the sequence showing the young woman on top of the hill.
2 On the interlacing of the filmic images movement and the narrative process movement, see
Jacques Rancière, Les Ecarts du Cinéma (2011).
3 For a contemporary overview of the evolution of Trauma Studies, see The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism (2014).
4 For Hirsch, postmemory work “describes the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to
the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came beforeto experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors which they grew up.” (Hirsch, 2012: 5)
5 For a broader reflection about media circulation, see Henri Jenkins (2006) and the concept of
convergence culture.
6 This idea fits with Burgin’s adaption of Baudelaire’s notion of a “kaleidoscope equipped with
consciousness.” See Victor Burgin, “The City in Pieces,” in Situational Aesthetics: Selected
Writings by Victor Burgin, 237.
7 For more informations about Henri-François Imbert’s filmography, see:
http://www.lecinemadehenrifrancoisimbert.com (assessed February 2014).
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Professor at the School of Communication in the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL, Belgium), Sébastien Fevry works in the field of Memory Studies, focusing especially on cinema and image. He has recently co-edited a collection of articles on the images of the Apocalypse in cinema (2012). His latest book, La comédie cinématographique à l’épreuve de
l’Histoire, has been published by L'Harmattan (2013). He is also the author of numerous
articles, including “Immigration and Memory in Popular Contemporary French Cinema. The Film as ‘lieu d’entre-mémoire’” (2014), published in Revista de Estudios Globales y Arte
Contemporáneo
