Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No2 (2011) 1 Memory Screens
Teresa Forde
Introduction
The concept of memory screens is an overarching term exploring the relationship between forms of media, viewers, practitioners and memory. The notion of memory screens alludes to the ways in which memories become remembered, layered, forgotten and transformed. The range of articles in this volume reflects the relationship between memory and history, both public and personal.
The link between personal recollection is explored in relation to audiences, critics and film-makers themselves. A number of the articles discuss installation and home movies or autobiography in order to explore family images and memories in a wider context. Wilson’s ‘Remixing memories in Home Movies’ considers the status of the image within an both a shared installation setting and in a personal context. This account considers the status of vintage home movies and the process of returning or looking back to images from childhood, and images of family members who are remembered. The staging of such images is also considered in the context of new technologies and how or why these might be shared in a reflective and inclusive manner. For Charleson, in ‘Video Installation, Memory and Storytelling: the viewer as narrator’, family home movies become a starting point for participation in the experience of remembering. Charleson focuses on the idea of the viewer or audience as actant, producing meanings in relation to home movies so that a network of meaning and representation is established between movies, the artist and viewers. Chamarette considers the notion of the spectral body in relation to the work of Agnes Varda, focusing particularly on her installation pieces which explore issues of mourning and temporality. The place of Varda’s own creativity and mourning becomes a form of motile gesture with which viewers may participate.
In ‘Television and memory: history programming and contemporary identities‘, Bell considers the extent to which documentary programming contributes to a sense of individual, family and national identity and the extent to which oral testimony is a key
Image & Narrative, Vol 12, No2 (2011) 2 contributing factor in the construction of such identities. Memory (re)construction
within historical documentaries enable viewers and participants in the programmes to embark upon their own remembering, including identification with survivor narratives and descendants’ perspectives in programmes such as Empire’s Children. In ‘Television Dramas as Memory Screens’, Forde considers the extent to which fictional television dramas and biopics construct characters and narratives of identification and familiarity. Drawing upon the notion of personal biography and the possibilities re-encountering and constructing memories of such dramas, Forde explores the extent to which these programmes provide memory screens of reflection, obstruction or revelation.
Montgomerie and Reck, in ‘The Lives of Others: re-remembering the German Democratic Republic’ consider the construction of identity within films looking back and depicting East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In considering films such as Goodbye Lenin, they explore the extent to which there is a nostalgia for the material culture of ‘Ossies’ within former East Germany, known as ostalgie. This penchant for nostalgia is set in contrast to an alternative narrative which recognises surveillance practices which provides a very different account of the past. In ‘Nostalgic [re]remembering: film fan cultures and the affective reiteration of popular film histories’ Hunt considers the ways in which film magazines construct potentially nostalgic memories in relation to the history of specific films. The establishment of allows fans to also (re)construct memories and re-engage with pleasurable or affective experiences through reading these popular film magazines.
These articles are concerned with the ways in which forms of media enable and promote memory construction and, equally, with the ways in which such memory screens are established at a personal level and within a wider public realm.
