Film and Memory

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Memory, broadly defined as the past made present, is one of the defining academic fields of our contemporary world. Over the past four decades, memory studies have attracted wide scholarly attention and have sparked heated debates that had various political and social repercussions. This course aims to introduce students to these debates by exploring how memory has been approached and represented in global cinema. As some scholars note, the film has become the chief medium for carrying the stories our societies tell themselves about their past, present, and future. In addition, films offer us stories that materialize and visualize various theoretical issues that have been for years dominating the field of memory studies, including the representability of genocide, coming to terms with the past, individual and social trauma, history and memory, mourning and melancholia, guilt and collective responsibility, return of the repressed, and multidirectional memory. These and other issues will be discussed through a selection of global films that have been widely recognized as influential in this field. Accompanying these films are relevant theoretical and critical articles that will further illuminate the films and open them up for discussion. This seminar will be taught in English, and all films will be streamed on Canvas with English subtitles. The selected films belong to various epochs, cinematic traditions, and languages, from Akira Kurasawa’s 1950 Rashomon and Alan Renais’ 1959 Hiroshima mon amour to Roberto Benigni’s 1997 Life Is Beautiful and Michael Hanake’s 2005 Cache. Readings will include works by Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno, Dominick LaCapra, Tzvetan Todorov, Pierre Nora, and Andreas Huyssen.