Collective Memory, Collective Trauma

Excavating Cultural Memory

Marks hypothesizes that what she calls intercultural cinema—Canadian, U.S., and British films and videos made by people who find themselves caught between their own minority culture and dominant Western culture—probes for new forms of visual expression and “encode[s] the sense memories that do not find their way into verbal discourse” (259). By eschewing Western ocular centrism, intercultural cinema embraces the proximal senses—smell, taste, touch—as a means of embodying knowledge and cultivating “recollection images” which unsettle exclusionary national narratives (Ibid. 251). Marks argues that intercultural films attempt to counter Western hegemonic modes of filmmaking that inscribe a certain form of epistemology and mode of Cartesian, audiovisual discourse as the “universal” one, circumscribing “what can be said” about the past (Ibid. 246). Films that counter the hegemonic memory bank employ what she calls “an archaeological quality that allows it to pose different regimes of truth against each other” (Ibid. 245). This includes anything that confounds or deconstructs “official history,” which extends to any diasporic works that hybridize autobiography with a mixture of documentary, fiction, and experimental textual strategies.

In order to make her argument, Marks relies on an old standby of Althusserian apparatus theory, showing how dominant narrative forms align with “official history” and how memories not encoded through auditory or visual means can slip away from dominant discourse. But how does cinema appeal to senses it can not technically represent, such as smell and touch? Are there strategies to visually represent “recollection images” while still resisting dominant regimes of knowledge production? If cinematic archaeology is a matter of destroying unitary myths from the inside, then can digital animation play a role in deterritorializing the image? 

The first seedlings of these questions had sprouted half-formed over the summer of 2016, when I entered production of This Is Civilization, a 9-minute documentary thematizing similar problematics of counter-hegemonic memory and cultural displacement. Originally, the film was supposed to highlight the contents of an archive of more than 20,000 Kodachrome slides donated to the Middle East Institute, a D.C. think tank, by a former U.S. diplomat. As one of only five U.S. Regional Geographic Attaches posted around the world, Colbert Held was responsible for documents and reporting on topography, cultures, languages, and political developments across the entire Middle East from 1957 to 1975. Yet as the interns digitizing the archive—many of them identifying as diasporic—began recounting anecdotes and fragmentary memories elicited by its images, the project transformed. 

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