History  and the Production of Memory

JOHN  O'KANE
The volume "History/Production/Memory",  the outcome of a conference  related
to the annual Edinburgh Film Festival, discusses  issues of some  importance
for our concern with history and national  identity mediated  through the New
German Cinema, and which pertain to questions of a 'counter-cinema' gener-
ally.  Whit motivated  these essays was the appearance in France around  the
mid 70s of films that proposed to rewrite contemporary  history  (specifically
questions surrounding  the experience of World War  II):  Liliana  Caviani's
Uight PotfeA;  Louis Malle's Lacombe. LucUw,  Marcel  Ophul 's The SOIAOW  and
tht Pity, etc.  The attempt in these films (as perceived by French critics,
especially those attached to the journal  CahieM  du Cinema),was to depict
France in a somewhat less heroic light than done prior to the late sixties,
as being predominently  sympathetic with Fascism.  Rather than simply  accept
these "rewritings of history" as truth, these critics, with the help of
Foucault's  ideas regarding  the archeology of knowledge through  the reasser-
tion of repressed discourses.and  those of Benjamin with respect to the dif-
ferent ways of acknowledging  constellations of present and past, point to
the 'neo-conservative' motivation of the present political  situation in
France as conditioning  reconsiderations of the past.

With this as justification, these essays proceed to consider the theoretical
problems generally of rewriting and re-presenting  history through film as
such.  They focus on the unique capacity  for popular media to obstruct the
flow of 'popular memory1  (defined as the traditions of struggle by margin-
alised groups for legitimacy through oral, written, or musical  expression)
through  its  'reprogramming':  the tendency to depict  for these groups
(workers, women, etc) not the  'way things were' but a particular  construct
or image of them, what they "must remember having been", that is greatly
shaped by present political  issues (Intvivliaii with  Foucault),  The popular
media, generally  synonymous with narrative traditions  in film, corresponds
for'these writers to the notion of history in Christian Hetz's sense of the
term as a self-validating  expression  that effaces all  'marks of enuncia-
tion' and disguises  itself as a story.  It is a history, as is usually  the
case, of already  'completed' events.  In the same way, the transparent  film,
that which has a narrative  that proposes to tell  everything, rests upon a
denial  that anything 1s absent or that anything  has to be searched for. As
Metz himself asserts, with this model  "we see only the reverse  (and always
more or less regressive) face of those factors, the one which is completed
and satisfied, the formulated accomplishment of an unformulated wish (''His-
tory/Discourse:  Notes on Two Voyeurisms").  'Discourse' is then what cor-
rects this self-validation, what fosters this bringing to the fore of the
multiple voices actually sedimented  into this effective absence.

Consistent with Foucault, and extending this distinction elaborated by Metz,
these essays point to the theoretical  problems with narrative films propo-
sing to reorganize or restructure memory and history, and accordingly  offer
some ideas regarding  how this can be overcome.  Believing  generally  that
'history' denotes a non-discursive past and a discursive present  (John Ellis,
"The Institution of Cinema"), it becomes more specifically  defined, in Fou-
cault's terms, as being not "the past as such, nor yet a discourse in which

AJpurnalf or MediaStudies

the  past  is  revealed,  but  rather  a  set  of  discourses  in  which  the  past  is
constructed,  and  constructed  not  simply  from  'the  past1  i t s e lf  but  from  the
various  discourses  that  the  past  has  thrown  up  and  that  have  been  accumula-
ted  in  various  forms  of  'archive'"  (The  Aiicheology  o& Knouiledge., 1972).
Since  'history'  never  comes  to  us  as  anything  less  than  a  text  or  construct
of  some kind  ("raw  data"  or  facts  already  worked  by  "ideology"),  in  order
to  be more  'objective'  about  the  past  we  have  t o,  with  Brecht,  distance  our-
selves  prior  to  a  clearer  apprehension.  Objectivity  consists  in  the  exposure
of  subjective  voices  and models,  the  purging  of  argument  and  bias,  that
might  approximate  a  structurally  induced 
the  feeling  of
being  able  to  see  the  past  for  the  f i r st  time  that  emerges  from  the  demysti-
fication  of  previously  functional  myths  that  are  tainted  with  ideology  or  a
false  vision. 
In  this  regard  the  Cahlvu*'  c r i t i c s,  when  interviewing  Fou-
cault,  assert  that  it  is  a ll 
establishing  the  truth,  to  saying,  about  the  Resistance,  for  example,  "No,
I  was there  and  it  wasn't  like  that!". 
If  you're  going  to  wage  any  effect-
ive  ideological  struggle  on  the  kind  of  ground  dictated  by  these  f i l m s,  we
believe  you have  to  have  a much broader,  more  extensive  and  positive  frame
of  reference".

important  "that  we  don't  l i m it  ourselves  to  re-

iiande.  mJUt  : 

' t r u t h1,  they  simultaneously  pro-

In  this  move away  from  posing  some final 
vide  a critique  of  'historicist'  views  of  history.  According  to  Geoffrey
Nowell-Smith  ("On. the  Writing  of  the  History  of  the  Cinema:  Some  Problems"),
the  difficulty  has  been  that  historical  investigation  aims  to  produce  histor-
ical  explanations  of  past  and  present  events  in  terms  of  a  process  known as
History  (not  just  an  explanation  of  a  past  event  in  i ts  own  terms).  Vet
historical  explanation  in  this  sense,  he  contends,  is  not  v a l i d,  because
'History'  as a  causative  force  does  not  exist.  All  inquiries  into  the  past
tend  to  lapse  at  some  point  into  this  attribution  of  causative  power  to  this
non-existent  entity,  that  1s  into  historicism. 
If  past  events,  he  continues,
are  to  be examined  at  a l l,  they  should  be  seen  structurally,  in  terms  of
successive  synchronies  or  as  elements  of  "synchronous  formations'  ,  rather
than  in  the  "misleading  term",  to  which  a ll 
inevit-
ably  lead,  of  the  causal  development  of  one  thing  out  of  another.

invocations  of'History' 

Such a  'radical'  rethinking  of  the  writing  of  history  is  actually  heavily  i n-
debted  to  ( if  only indirectly) the  Blochian  notion  of 
where  it  is  believed  that  histories  are  not  continuous  and  do  not  simply  ac-
cumulate,  but  provide  a  "terrain  of  possibilities  which  materialize  erratic-
ally  according  to  determinations  which  have  no  comfortable  l i n e a r i ty  about
them".  And it  is  dependent  upon  two  notions  coming  out  of  the  f i e ld  of  Lin-
guistics  in  the  early  part  of  this  century,  which  became  the  cornerstone  of
Russian Formalism: 
sought  in  a past  state  of  the  same  thing  ("diachrony  does  not  explain  synch-
rony");  and the  outside  cannot  explain  the  inside.

that  the  explanation  of  a  present  state  is  not  to  be

ungltichz&i£<gkeiX

There  is  l i t t le  in  these  essays  which  actually  extends  these  implications
further  to  advocate  a  particular  type  of  'alternative  practice"  that  escapes
from  the  difficulties  outlined.  This  is  so,  it  seems,  because  the  c r i t i cs
are more  interested  in  presenting  the  symptoms  (the  negative  features)  of
the classic,  narrative  model  as  it  relates  to  the  repression  of  memory  («s
opposed  to  the  construction  of  a  liberated  memory  within  an  avant-garde
practice).

They accordingly  put  forth  two  provocative  hypotheses: 
self  not  directly  realizable  on  f i l m;  and,  related  to  t h i s,  that  the  prob-
lems  of  'Popular  Memory'  in  the  cinema  run  into  a  conjunction  of  'humanism'
(in  the  philosophical  as  opposed  to  the  socio-political  sense  of  the  term)

that  'memory'  is 

i t-

Anti  Vol  3  Wo  3  19(5 

54

and  'hi-.toru ivv  in the attempt  to render memory  representable  filmically.
Reqardinq  the latter, Colin MacCabe ("Memory, Phantasy, Identity:  'Days of
Hope' and  the Politics of the Past') views  "the cinema"  (actually  the narra-
tive model) as  Inherently  Inscribing  the significance of a past  in the
heroes  that  it constructs.  In film,  the attempt  to realise a history  rapid-
ly regresses  into a  'humanism' as  Us  support  in which  the person  is the
bearer of the history, the visible agent of historicity  in whose actions are
inscribed  the  'truth' of a past.  That is, the coming  together of  'histori-
cism' and  'humanism'  in dominant cinema  produces  two main negative effects:
the construction of narrative  in such a way  that  the historicity  of events
closely rests on the faithful  representation of  the agents of this history
(and whose viewpoint, consistent with  'classic' cinema, we are destined  to
assume)-  and  the self-evident  (consistent with  historicism) primacy of vis-
ual  Imagery  that blocks efforts to achieve a complexity  of historical  know-
ledge.  As MacCabe points out regarding  "Days of Hope", because the "image
looks right" the truth of the argument  (pertaining  to the reconstruction  of
"20s labour history  in Britain) becomes conditional  not upon the actual  via-
bility of the politics that set this history to work but on an apparent
truth of this history as an autonomous object.  The  'verity' of the image of
the past prevents the working  through of a historical  discourse with  its
own principles of truth!

Given  their too little emphasis, then, on possible modes of memory recons-
truction  (in favour of its repression), the assertion that  "memory  is not
directly realizable on film" is an  inevitable one,  A type of cinema  that
can interrelate  'history' and  'discourse' (in Hetz's sense of the terms) in
new ways  is a test case that could prove such a statement to be an ahistori-
cal one.  The New German Cinema  is such an example  (these writers as a general
rule provide few specific examples) where conscious attempts are made to use
narrative within discursive arrangements that address the socio-historical
context  in greater depth.  The greatest deficiency of these essays, then, is
the theoretical  proximity to Metz's distinction between history and discourse.
Kluge's  Ideas, for example, about the capacity of the film medium to present
history  1n a form encouraging viewers to remember, are exactly what these
essays lack.

That 1s, Kluge appears to offer the possibility of a larger  socio-historical
context within which personal  dramas  (the raw material  of narrative, popular
cinema) sre positioned  (perhaps a new amplification  of the  'family  romance1,
the form of novelistic cinema  par excellence, where the private melodrama  of
everyday enters into a different constellation with  the documented).  To use
narratives and fantasy  in an enlightening  relation  to documentary, his avow-
ed aim, can provide one means of positively re-programming  popular memory.
Where  'classic cinema' appears to incorporate a process of forgetting  (little
1s carried away from such films, even when political  and historical  issues
are treated, for reasons (partially) pertaining  to the suturing  process),
and the  'political avantgarde' concentrates predominantly upon  the generally
Immediate historical  conjuncture to the de-emphasis  on tradition  (Syberberg's
critique being quite apt  in this  regard), Kluge  implicitly  argues for a use
of the film medium  that exploits cinema's  unique "mode of presencing"  (Metz's
notion of film language as perceptual  presentness, a kind  of  j&tztzeJX).
This quality, the power of evoking  immediacy, would  seem to qualify  cinema
as being  Ideal  for re-presenting  history.  Yet, as Kluge argues, this  power
of evocation  (as mainly typified  in the medium of TV and the press) privil-
eges the actual, immediate  to the detriment of the future and  the past.  He
asserts that "experience is always a question of a specific  situation.  In
this concrete situation, there  is always a future, past, and actual  present:
it's always the same".  Stated differently, you can never make the false
separation between past and future while concentrating  on the present:  the

A/itb Vol 3 No 3  1985 

55

three parts  are  always  present  in  our  mind.  Drawing  upon  Freud's  notion  of
free  association  as  being  the  elementary  unit  of  thinking  and  feeling,  Kluge
places  cinema within  a  similar  disposition: 
"This  sort  of  mass  medium  ( i ln
has its  basis  in  people's  minds  and  experience  over  several  thousand  years",
("Film and the  Public  Sphere",  New  Gojman  Otctcoue,  24-25).

The problem then  becomes  the  effective  reconstruction  of  such  an  experience'
that  presences  this  constellation  of  past  and  future,  one  that  works  against
this  tendency  to  forget.  Though  these  essays  provide  the  beginning  frame-
work for  such a project,  they  f a il  to  take  the  mandatory  next  step.

FOOTNOTE

1.  For an elaboration  of  these  issues  see  Keith  Tribe: 

"History  and  the

production  of  Memories",  Sateen,  Vol  18  No  4,  especially  pp.  21-22

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