Page 171 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 171
Memory and Identity in Film
Nowadays we must often specify what we mean exactly when we talk
about memory: do we mean the memory, which we keep in our brains or
do we mean some digital data, which is stored on a hard drive somewhere
in cyber space? Although in probably all languages the figure of speech “I
remember” is still widely used, it is meant increasingly more often as an
inscription into a memory, which is uttered in some recollection residing
somewhere “outside” of our brains. In our digital era, when implications of
such an assumption have become obvious, we should look back to under-
stand the genealogy of this state of affairs, and to be able to analyse a struc-
tural composition of our so-called post-modern reality. The complexity of
meanings regarding the notions of memory has become more complicated
and yet simpler at the same time from the beginnings of the development
of the first photography and then film, as it entered human history and the
lexicon of ordinary language already in very early popular culture. Imag-
es, which represented the visual world more convincingly than any artist’s
work – not because they were better as images, but because they were rec-
ognised to be “truer” – have forever changed human perception. How was
human perception organised and how it functioned before this process of
change started, we are unable to say in detail, but we can take into account
many such written records as various philosophical texts, especially those
169
Nowadays we must often specify what we mean exactly when we talk
about memory: do we mean the memory, which we keep in our brains or
do we mean some digital data, which is stored on a hard drive somewhere
in cyber space? Although in probably all languages the figure of speech “I
remember” is still widely used, it is meant increasingly more often as an
inscription into a memory, which is uttered in some recollection residing
somewhere “outside” of our brains. In our digital era, when implications of
such an assumption have become obvious, we should look back to under-
stand the genealogy of this state of affairs, and to be able to analyse a struc-
tural composition of our so-called post-modern reality. The complexity of
meanings regarding the notions of memory has become more complicated
and yet simpler at the same time from the beginnings of the development
of the first photography and then film, as it entered human history and the
lexicon of ordinary language already in very early popular culture. Imag-
es, which represented the visual world more convincingly than any artist’s
work – not because they were better as images, but because they were rec-
ognised to be “truer” – have forever changed human perception. How was
human perception organised and how it functioned before this process of
change started, we are unable to say in detail, but we can take into account
many such written records as various philosophical texts, especially those
169
