![]() ![]() In the hands of the Surrealists-Buñuel himself, but also, in Peter Wollen’s telling, the ethno-cinematographer Jean Rouch-cinema is the art form of the unconscious: unwanted, but explosive, memory. For the Constructivist film-makers, who rejected the conservative poison of ‘theatrical’ narrative, chronicity was central Vertov’s ‘We: Variant of a Manifesto’ invited its audience ‘to flee-out into the open, into four-dimensions (three + time)’. Like all storytelling, cinematic narrative is deeply linked to the work of memory, as the shared etymology with ‘history’ suggests. Formally, film mimics memory: bringing up before our eyes scenes that happened-that were enacted before the camera-some time ago. Cinema’s relation to memory extends beyond the representation of subjective recall. Dealing with what Buñuel describes offers potentially rich material for the screen: in cinematic language, distortion, lapses and hesitations might be evoked through a camera’s unreliable point of view, jumps in action or fade to black Godard’s collage work with different forms of film and video to suggest how the screen might convey flashes of clarity or recollection. Our sense of self is tied to the past we remember, to everyone and everything we have known. The psychiatrist asks him a couple of routine questions and then says: ‘So? These lapses?’ ‘What lapses?’ the man replies. Sometimes, too, resorting to humour to ward off panic, I tell the story about the man who goes to see a psychiatrist, complaining of lapses in memory. Finally his friend gets so annoyed that he slaps him and walks away. He stammers, hesitates, waves his hand in the air, gropes for synonyms. ![]() Imagine (as I often have) a scene in a film where a man tries to tell a friend a story but forgets one word out of four, a simple word like ‘car’ or ‘street’ or ‘policeman’. ![]() He had discovered with age that his memories were not always accurate, and found himself telling stories about things that never happened, like the wedding of his friend Paul Nizan at the church of St Germain des Près, with Sartre as the best man. Describing the early stages of amnesia in the opening to My Last Breath, Luis Buñuel warned his readers that what would follow was not a tight, factual recounting of his life but something more chaotic, digressive and, yes, false. ![]()
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