Navigating Memory: Temporal Anchoring and the Modular Subject

Abstract

Intersecting with contemporary cinema’s treatment of contingency and temporal experience is a discourse regarding memory and forgetting. This discourse has its roots in the persistent anxiety (from ancient times to the present day) that technology erodes the capacity for recollection. Indeed, the connection between memory and narrative extends as far back as the origins of storytelling itself. Prior to the written word, cultures depended upon the memory of their storytellers for the retention and transmission of both fictional and historical narratives. For the Ancient Greeks, memory techniques were an essential aspect of rhetoric, and the preservation of memory a significant concern. With the emergence of new forms of mediation throughout the modern and postmodern eras, anxieties regarding both the erasure and reification of memory have been substantially renewed. The struggle to remember is a central concern of a great many recent films, a trend which shows no signs of abating.¹ Modular narratives are particularly marked examples of this trend, as the temporal shifts within the narrative are often linked directly to the action of mnemonic recall. Modular narratives are part of a literary-filmic tradition concerned with the representation of memory, and also participate in a fraught discourse questioning representation’s threat to memory.