Abstract
In the 1970s in France ‘popular memory’ became a key issue in cultural theory and practice. Michel Foucault, interviewed in Cahiers du cinéma stressed memory as ‘an important factor of struggle’ and, consequently, as cinematically productive, since defining a task for film-makers, an area of intervention.1 The movement of popular memory has been blocked, and by a whole series of apparatuses, cinema included: ‘People are shown not what they were, but what they must remember they were’; the point is to oppose that obliteration, the effects of those apparatuses, to return people their real memory, the terms of their struggle. ‘Popular memory exists but has no means of formulation.’ Thus the problem is one of a recovery and expression of history, with cinema seen as playing a potentially important part in its resolution, able to help towards that recovery and expression.
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Notes
Pascal Bonitzer, in ‘Entretien avec André Techiné’, Cahiers du cinéma no. 262–3 (January 1976) p. 55.
J. Jourdheuil, ‘Le quotidien, l’historique et le tragique’, Cahiers du cinéma no. 271 (November 1976) pp. 46–7.
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx—Engels Selected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1968) p. 99.
Jacques Rancière, ‘Fleurs intempestives’, Cahiers du cinéma no. 278 (July 1977) p. 18. The Cahiers critics themselves were later to take a distance from what was then seen as the ‘Cinema and History fetish’;
cf. J. Narboni, ‘Li’, Cahiers du cinéma no. 275 (April 1977) pp. 5–7;
J.-L. Comolli, ‘Le passé filmé’, Cahiers du cinéma no. 277 (June 1977) pp. 10–11 n. 6.
Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966) p. 710.
Cf. Raymond Bellour, ‘Énoncer’, L’Analyse du film (Paris: Albatros, 1979) p. 273; translation, ‘Hitchcock, the Enunciator’, Camera Obscura no. 2 (1977) pp. 68–9 (‘the two processes of identification which transfix the spectator: identification with the camera, identification with the object (the perpetual dialectic between being and having: identification and object-choice)’).
Claire Johnston, ‘Introduction’, Edinburgh ’77 Magazine (1977) P. 5.
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© 1981 Stephen Heath
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Heath, S. (1981). Contexts. In: Questions of Cinema. Communications and Culture. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16579-7_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16579-7_11
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