‘No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate’—writes Marcel Proust in Swann’s Way (1928)—‘than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me’ (Proust 1928/2005, p. 51). The often-quoted reference to the wave of memories triggered by a madeleine dipped in lime-flower tea ideally marks the late-nineteenth century ‘discovery’ of memory. The passage also signals the beginning of the processes of individualization and psychologization that, according to Pierre Nora, denote a complete reconceptualization of memory in modernity (Nora 1989, pp. 13–18). In Nora’s view, in fact, Proust’s madeleine and Freud’s Oedipus designate two of modernity’s conspicuous lieux de mémoire (sites of memory): ‘We owe to Freud and Proust those two intimate and yet universal sites of memory, the primal scene and the celebrated petite madeleine’ (Nora 1989, p. 15). The Oedipus complex and Proust’s petite madeleine are indeed indicative of modernity’s broader reformulation of memory both across psychological sciences and culture at large. This entailed an original theorization of forgetting as inherent to remembering and a questioning of the unsettling impinging of the past onto the present for the individual and society alike. Proust’s passage already posits the difficulties that forgetting brings to remembering. Although behind the taste of the madeleine lies ‘the image, the visual memory’ linked to it, the memory itself struggles to reach consciousness, remaining obfuscated and ungraspable. A question lies behind the involuntary recollection of Proust’s protagonist:
The moment of remembering is also an encounter with what was forgotten and had remained unremembered. It is an encounter with the past through an unfamiliar trace that emerges unsolicited and unexpectedly. Beyond both Proust’s petite madeleine and Freud’s Oedipus lies what concerns remembering and forgetting alike. In the words of German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus,Will it ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depth of my being? (Proust 1928/2005, p. 53)
It is the supposition of memories that one believes forgotten and yet are ‘not utterly destroyed or annulled’ that radically reshaped the concept of memory at the turn of twentieth century, and brought to the fore one of the major difficulties still pertaining to memory today: how do we access memories that seem forgotten and what role do they play in remembering?Mental states of every kind, − sensations, feelings, ideas, − which were at one time present in consciousness and then have disappeared from it, have not with their disappearance absolutely ceased to exist. Although the inwardly-turned look may no longer be able to find them, nevertheless they have not been utterly destroyed and annulled, but in a certain manner they continue to exist, stored up, so to speak, in the memory. (Ebbinghaus 1885/1998, p. 1)
Today’s pervasive preoccupation with memory is both rooted in and a product of the tenets that redefined it at the turn of the last century, when private and public forms of remembering were inextricably woven together, rendering the modern individualization and psychologization of memory critical to the coming into being of the psychological notion of autobiographical memory and its cultural ramifications in the late-twentieth century. Hence, our discussion of contemporary ideas of memory starts by looking at its historical roots and at the assumptions that fostered the modern reconceptualization of memory both psychologically and culturally. In order to ground the present landscape of remembering, we have to ask what the individualization and psychologization of modern memory meant and further consider the ways in which the moving image infiltrated the discourse of memory in modernity, when it became a referent for its novel theorization.
Film’s optic procedures were invoked at the beginning of the twentieth century to talk about memory at the boundaries of biology and culture. The impression of shifting perspectives, speed and movement characteristic of the moving image replicated the pervading impression of ‘the rapid telescoping of images’, the accelerated tempo and the ‘multiplicity of economic, occupational, and social life’ that, according to Georg Simmel, denoted modernity and created ‘the sensory foundations of mental life’ for the modern individual (Simmel 1903, p. 325). Not only a medium for recording reality, the moving image offered a means for viewing the real anew and penetrating into its affective and emotional flow. In Walter Benjamin’s words, ‘we may truly say that with film a new realm of consciousness came into being’ (Benjamin 1927/2005, p. 17). Hence, extending Gilles Deleuze’s view, we can argue that with modernity film begins to stand as a way of thinking and as a way of remembering.
In considering the redefinition that memory underwent with modernity, we aim to revisit the relation between the cinematic medium and the ‘inner film of the mind’ and question the implications for such reciprocity. Of particular relevance is the role that the moving image played in the attempt to ‘authenticate’ puzzling psychological conditions such as hysteria and trauma. The relevance that we seek to outline resonates with the broader cultural appreciation of the moving image as a medium whose features both psychologists and filmmakers believed could be formally assimilated to those of memory. By suggesting continuity between mind and screen, modernity also maintained continuity between the memory image and the cinematic shot. The inner subjective contingency of remembering fraught with the gaps of forgetting found in the montaged image of film a correspondent on which remembering could be articulated. Such correspondence also extended from the individual to history rendering the moving image conducive for a representation of the past, which was no less fraught with amnesia and latency. The chapter outlines the modern reconceptualization of memory, and the implications of its individualization and psychologization pointing to the cultural, theoretical and experimental centrality of the moving image in such redefinition. This implies a consideration of the centrality of forgetting in psychological and psychoanalytical models of memory and a re-examination of key issues surrounding trauma and amnesia pointing to the relevance of the moving image in the assessment and theorization of such conditions.
1.1 Memory: A Modern Concept
The modern reconceptualization of memory is part of expanded historical and cultural shifts that involved new ways of perceiving, representing and narrating the self and its relations to the world. One of these shifts regards the Kantian concept of ‘empirical self consciousness’ and the emergence of a ‘science of the self’ (Berrios and Marková 2003, p. 13). This was founded on the notion of a spatio-temporal context particular to the individual that privileged the mind and one’s own representations of the sensory perception and cognitive understanding of experience. Within this context, the self was understood as both an organic and phenomenological construct. And film helped to explain such a construct. Hence, according to French scientist and philosopher Félix Dantec, one’s subjective experience is momentary, discontinuous and mutable as it unravels instant by instant ‘like the images of the film camera’ whose speed gives the impression of continuity despite the gap that separates each frame (Le Dantec 1901, pp. 166–167). The cinematic metaphor supports an idea of the self as an assemblage of disjointed sensations, thoughts, emotions and memories. These incessantly emerge as discrete images on the screen of the mind, combine and then disappear in a continuum of movement and impressions. Such conception of the self results from an increasingly secularized and scientific understanding of the mind and its processes including the organization of intimate memories (Danziger 2008, p. 105). This can be synthetized as a shift from a classical notion of memory as a mental faculty to that of a brain function that can be localized and understood, if only comparatively, in terms of other biological processes (Yates 1992; Draaisma 2000; Danziger 2008). Broadly speaking, the late-nineteenth-century physiological and psychological study of memory largely defined the approaches that still characterize today’s memory research (Hacking 1996; Danziger 2008). In particular, the neurological study of memory begun by Paul Broca has continued in the localization of brain processes with an emphasis on the physiology and functioning of memory. Ebbinghaus’s investigations in recall have paved the way to the experimental study of memory that informs laboratory psychology. By using numerical and phonic sequences in his experiments, Ebbinghaus identified three modes of remembering: voluntary conscious recall, involuntary conscious recall and non-conscious recall (Ebbinghaus 1885/1998, pp. 1–2), setting the premises for an understanding of the associative patterns in the retrieval of memories that are still pertinent today (Bernstern 2007, p. 20). A third approach focused on the study of memory dysfunctions (Hacking 1996), establishing the parameters for autobiographical memory. Common to all these approaches was an understanding of memory as an organic function, biologically determined, on which consciousness could be grounded. Indeed, modern psychology contended with the organic formation of memories and their recall in terms of sensory perception, stimulation and association at cellular level. Yet, beyond this attempt to frame remembering organically loomed another question: who remembers? Whilst asking what memories are and where they are stored entailed the physiological and psychological mapping of memory processes, to ask who remembers required a consideration of ‘the self’ as both the subject and the object of remembering.
A contradiction was, in fact, already felt between the affective and emotional individuality of remembering and a purely mechanistic explanation of memory’s processes in terms of excitation and retention of sensory stimuli. William James expresses such difficulty in his definition of what is ‘a memory’. James understands ‘a memory’ as the representation of
James refers to the writing of French psychologist Charles Richet, who had theorized remembering by explaining it in terms of nerves’ sensory stimulation and retention. According to Richet, an external sensation stimulated the nervous systems and memory retained a trace of the sensory stimulation. Associations caused by other stimuli could reactivate the trace kept in memory and produce a repetition of the original sensory stimulus as a mental representation (Richet 1886, p. 570, 1887, pp. 156–159). The relation between external sensation and the trace of the nerves’ stimulation and its later associative repetition was believed to constitute the basic principle for the formation of a mental representation (i.e. a sensory imagery), including memories. James suggests that the principle of stimulus association does not explain the concentration of information that makes up a memory as an entity that includes and exceeds the sensory imagery from which it stems. The complex conflation of sensation, emotion and knowledge that constitute a single memory, according to James, enshrines both the act of remembering and the subject that ensues from it.the fact to be recalled plus its associates, the whole forming one ‘object’ […], known in one integral pulse of consciousness […] and demanding probably a vastly more intricate brain-process than that on which any simple sensorial image depends. (James 1890/1998, p. 651)
The placement of the past in a continuum of experience is insufficient to define ‘a memory’, since what renders the past memorable is the fact that it is unique to the subject who has experienced it. Hence, the self appropriates experience and makes it her own not only cognitively but also emotionally: remembering concerns ‘the past’ which it is felt and known subjectively. The self and the past are intimately bound together in the unfolding of remembering in the very particularity of an individual’s sensory imageries and emotions. The emphasis on the subjective, intimate and emotional qualities of memories is indicative of an original interest in the personal connotations of remembering and the ways in which the individual appropriates experience and represents it to herself. In turn, this appropriation of the past maintains that the self is also, at least partly, her own past. According to French philosopher and psychologist Théodule Ribot, the self can be understood both in the immediacy of its present state of consciousness and in the continuity with the past that arises from memory (Hacking 1995, p. 207). At the same time, the knowledge of the past (as that which is invested with the qualities of pastness) is always, in James’s view, ‘mixed in with our knowledge of the present thing’ (James 1890/1998, pp. 605–606). Consciousness as the self-reflective act of grasping one’s existence in the immanence of the present, as Henri Bergson argues, already implies the impermanence of the lived moment and the reverting of any conscious self-reflection into remembering. A memory is, in other words, a re-presentation of the lived moment which, in the very instant in which the self becomes aware of it, is already past (Bergson 1908/2005, pp. 150–151). The perception of the present continuously shifts consciousness into the immediacy of something past: the presen...Memory requires more than mere dating of a fact in the past. It must be dated in my past. In other words, I must think that I directly experienced its occurrence. It must have that ‘warmth and intimacy’ which were so often spoken of in the chapter on the Self, as characterizing all experiences ‘appropriated’ by the thinker as his own. (James 1890/1998, p. 650)