Narrative of Memory in Lav Diaz Film Novel A Tale of Filipino Violence (2022) (original) (raw)
Related papers
This book investigates the multiple interconnections between film and different cultures of memory, presenting discussions of, amongst other things, the representation of memory, rememberance and oblivion in films, and the role of film in the construction of collective memory. It is the result of a close cooperation between Saarland University (Saarbrücken, Germany) and Petro Mohyla Black Sea State University in Mykolaiv (Ukraine) and unites contributions of German and Ukrainian scholars of various disciplines. Their papers invite the reader to discover different cultures of memory through case studies about Russia, Spain, USA, Cuba and Germany, and illustrate various approaches in analyzing the relationship of the medium film to (collective) memory and rememberance.
The Border Crossing: the Cinematic Representation of Memory in theAutobiographical Documentary
2012
In this paper I explore the cinematic representation of memory, trauma and identity in the autobiographical documentary, with reference to my film The Border Crossing. I utilise and locate my own experience inside questions about the use of cinematic language in the representation of memory, trauma, and identity. Alisa Lebow (2008) asks: “do we call up our cultural ghosts, or do they call on us? Is not the latter likely… where we are interpolated into the body of (cultural) knowledge we think of as our (contested) self?” The Border Crossing is set in the Basque country where a young woman reconstructs my self of 40 years ago. She wanders through streets on both sides of the Spanish/French border towards a violent fate, while an unnamed man drives in the rain at night. Interweaved are narratives of Aitziber, a Basque nationalist, tortured by the Spanish Guardia Civil, and Maria, a photographer, whose niece died in a car she was driving, and whose narratives of the present and past, i...
Hispanic Research Journal , 2016
This article investigates the national and transnational dimensions of the representation of memory in two contemporary Uruguayan films, Esteban Schroeder’s Matar a todos (Kill Them All, 2007) and Ana Diez’s Paisito (Small Country, 2008). These films revisit the traumas and after-effects of the Southern Cone dictatorships that came to power in the early and mid-1970s. As coproductions, Matar a todos and Paisito rely on the representation of prosthetic memories, but the artificial nature of these memories may be problematic for different audiences. Thus, this article not only considers these films’ depiction of a traumatic past, but also their circulation in and beyond Uruguay and the challenge of engaging transnational audiences.
From 'Erotics' to 'Poetics' of Documentary Remembering
After Haneke’s The White Ribbon, cinema has freshly opened up the question of generational logic to understand historical events that refuse containment within the praxis of history-writing. How the psychological landscape participating in the event is shaped, or how the event shapes the next generation, is what this paper is deeply interested in. I shall try to understand the relationship between photograph and memory, truth and documentary cinema, situating its affective and conceptual force within Chile. Attempting to make sense of the political, memorial, and historical transformations between the rise of Salvador Allende and his subsequent murder in the coup, to the next generation separated by around twenty years, this paper tries to understand the long and troublesome process of coming to terms with the unseen, as captured and argued by two important documentary films by Patricio Guzman – Battle of Chile, and Chile: An Obstinate Memory. I shall try to unpack Guzman’s journey to the point where he reintroduces a generation to its collective national past investigating the power of memory: the role consciousness plays in remembering, and whether human memory is truly obstinate in the act of remembering; or whether forgetting is always its preferred component, the ‘other’ we often overlook.
Violent Homes: The Nostalgia of Lav Diaz and Southeast Asian Cinema
2024
Violence is a motif in the filmography of independent Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz. Navigating the spaces where Lav interplays his trauma with that of his country, the paper examines the rural as a site of nostalgia. It provides a nuanced understanding of nostalgia as a time-space phenomenon by reading the depiction and spatialization of violence in Lav's films. The paper ultimately proposes this as a framework for identifying Southeast Asian films, highlighting the relational and archival role of cinema.
This paper was presented at FIAF simposium in 2005, and published in the proceedings (How do we Visualize Culture?) The complexity of meanings regarding the notion of memory has become more complicated and simpler at the same time, as when first photography and then film entered human history. Unlike written records or different works of art – including architecture – these “means” of representation simultaneously reduce and enlarge the impact of subjectivity on a product, which makes a representation possible. The mechanical aspect of producing a photograph, a film and other visual or audio-visual representations, contributes to the impression of a special “objectivity” of any “documented” look through the lens of a camera. This gives way to an implication of a simplicity of any (audio)visual narrative form. So, there is almost no doubt that such a record represents a powerful means of verification of memory in almost any respect: historically, collectively, and even individually or psychologically. However, through the accumulation of ways of audiovisual recordings, no matter what kind of objects we can think of, a memory, which is “stored” in various media (photographs, films, tapes, disks, etc.), becomes more complex as it is becoming increasingly inaccessible in its totality. It seems that especially film and other forms of audiovisual presentation, in a sense, “objectify” memory. However because they are multiplying levels of reality in a sense, memory therefore becomes open to manipulation. Nevertheless, due to all circumstances, memory as it is “materialised” in film, is unavoidably constructed. This makes the work of film archives especially demanding and ethically accountable. In the midst of a time-space continuum or construct, which is inhabited by memory, the notion of identity is formed. This notion brings us then closer to the realm of culture since identity acquires its relevance in relation to difference. Each film is in one way or the other related to these notions, which form its basic grammar.
Collective identity and traumatic memory in the cinematic expression
The present article is an analysing work to the role of the cinematic production in the expression of traumatic memory and cultural identity, in the postcolonial North African societies. Following the cultural production and postcolonial theoretical framework, I try to investigate the way films as a form of visual art production enables the reconstruction of the past and recalls historical narratives. Analysing meanwhile the interconnection of the concepts of identity and memory the article focuses on their expression of the cultural productions. In a second level I specify the conceptual study to the " traumatic memory " and " cultural identity " , and I tried to explain the cinematographic tools explored in the construction of the remembered collectivity. The Lion of the Desert: Omar Muhtar being one of the rare films testifying the north African colonial history that reached an international fame, was the cinematic example followed to understand the way the visualization of cultural elements assure effective recall to the past and presents an alternative form of building the meaning and rebuilding the symbolism of the Hero to revive the collective and cultural memory in an intergenerational frame. Sinematik anlatımda kolektif kimlik ve travmatik hafıza Özet Bu çalışma, sömürge sonrası dönem Kuzey Afrika toplumlarındaki sinema filmi üretiminin travmatik hafıza ve kültürel kimliklerin dışavurumundaki rolünü analiz etmek istemektedir. Birer görsel sanat ürünü olan sinema filmlerinin, geçmişin yeniden inşa edilmesinde ve tarihi anlatıların hatırlara getirilmesindeki işlevi üzerinde durulmaktadır. Bu maksatla, Kuzey Afrika'nın koloni dönemini yansıtan az sayıdaki sinema filminden biri olan Çöl Aslanı: Ömer Muhtar adlı filmden yola çıkılmaktadır. Film aracılığı ile kültürel unsurların görsel olarak geçmiş ve bugünü bütünleştirici rolüne vurgu yapılmaktadır. Ömer Muhtar karakterinin kahramanlaştırılarak anlamların yeniden üretimi sağlanırken, nesiller arası ilişki kurulduğu ve kültürel hafızanın güçlendiği iddia edilmektedir. Anahtar kelimeler: Kültürel kimlik, travmatik hafıza, sömürge sonrası dönem, film araştırmaları