The Burden of the Past and the Lightness of the Present: Dealing with Historic Trauma through Film

Abstract

In the Introduction I announced that this book will be concerned with both history and memory. In the films discussed in this chapter: Éloge de l’amour (In Praise of Love, 2001) by Jean-Luc Godard, Ararat (2003) by Atom Egoyan and Weiser (2000) by Wojciech Marczewski, memory, understood as a process of recollecting, reliving and representing past occurrences, dominates over history, conceived as a result of the memory’s work, as something possessing a definite shape: crystallised. The process of recalling the past and coming to terms with it also dominates in them over living in the present, enjoying the here and now. However, the present hugely affects what is remembered and how. The relationship between history, memory and the present, as depicted in these three films, will be the focus of my investigation. The main common denominator are their characters who, more than with their own experiences, are preoccupied with a past which they inherited, so to speak. Marianne Hirsch refers to such a past using the word ‘postmemory’:

In my reading, postmemory is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation… Postmemory characterises the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose relationship of the second generation to traumatic experiences that preceded their births, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated. (Hirsch 1997: 22)