The Memory of the Image

Speaker details
Professor Max Silverman University of Leeds
Event contact
Anoushka Kulikowski (a.kulikowski@leeds.ac.uk) University of Leeds

Event resources

Presentation (powerpoint)

Abstract

In a famous passage from the Arcades Project Walter Benjamin reconfigures history by removing it from a linear and scientific framing and inserting it into the non-linear, spatial and poetic concept of the ‘constellation’ or the ‘dialectical image’. The chronological distinctions between past, present and future of the former paradigm are transformed into the overlapping nature of past, present and future of the latter. Following the influences of Bergson, Proust, Surrealism and montage theory, Benjamin detemporalizes memory and spatializes it so that it becomes a composite image. In an excellent discussion of Chris Marker’s La Jetée, Patrick Ffrench uses the felicitous term ‘the memory of the image’ to describe the way in which Marker reinvests the image with a complex layering of personal and collective histories. In this paper I will use Ffrench’s term as a way of reframing Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image and apply it to two films – Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma and Michael Haneke’s Caché - which reconfigure history in fascinating ways.