Screen Cultures: On Archiving, Collective Memory, and the Mainstream Cinematic Culture

This paper explores the relationship between film and the creation of historical memory. By looking at examples from films that talk about World War II, and later exemplified by Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar, I try to exemplify the complex role mass distributed films have in creating opinions about historic events and their collective understanding. Once this role is recognized, this paper develops as an approach to further understand what is necessary to create a new paradigm of what it means to be literate in a world where screens are quickly becoming the main platform for communication. As we move forward into the Information Age, the shift from traditional media to digital ones has brought many changes to the way society recognizes and creates itself. Nowadays, true literacy has shifted from the understanding of written language to the understanding of messages –mostly made up of images– that find their medium in screens. This proliferation of monitors has translated what used to be written communication into sound and image based events. Thus, videogames, television, film, and online videos have become the primary vernacular through which people communicate and share narratives. These sensorial messages have also empowered storytelling in a way that has never been seen before. This lays out the foundations for talking about narratives. Tales that are important because they constitute the basis of what human society is: we have created nations, cultures, wars, and peace through stories; and even as technology shifts it is impossible to imagine anything being more important for understanding the human race.2 The screen brings an increased potential to the way stories –in the broadest sense of the word– are told. Therefore, the massive communication that was once only possible through the printing press now has the ability to incorporate scenes, paintings, music, and dialogue to sustain its message and make it more real. Moreover, audiences are being constantly manipulated –not necessarily in a bad manner– through film and most of the time consumers are not aware of these processes. More importantly, the communication through screens that facilitates the sharing of images also helps contextualize messages in a way that proves more effective for their understanding. Therefore, film and television have become the most popular platform of communication with the masses, and it is through these platforms that we –as societies– now understand the world around us. To help exemplify the way that social memory has been affected by new media this paper will analyze the way that film has been used to create memories in social and historical settings using World War II as an example and further explaining the process through Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar. 1 Pratt Institute, USA. 2 Apkon, Stephen. The Age of the Image. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013) 12 Review of Arts and Humanities, Vol. 4(2), December 2015 Societies recognize themselves as groups at the moment that they share a common identity. But what we call identity is really a complex system of signs that can only live within the society that recognizes them and gives them meaning. In other words what we recognize as part of our social identity is really a series of images that have been contextualized since before we were born. The afore mentioned images are in turn limited by geographic and ideological notions that result in common identities intertwined with socio-political grounds. In other words, societies are created not only by acquiring the ability to decode the set of signs that surround a human being, but also with the geographical idiosyncrasies individuals consume on a daily basis. These identities form a specific approach to History that was explored by Michel Foucault in The Archeology of Knowledge in which he explained that statements –what we would call speech acts– are in reality actions that are linked to our material existence.3This type of knowledge, or episteme, is at the same time abstract and tangible. Foucault makes this distinction by saying that the episteme is divided into four categories that work at the intellectual level as a set of historical rules, and concretely as experiences. Once these experiences find a place in the community a specific group of people functions within these epistemological boundaries to create a shared understanding of the past. Social memory –or collective memory– is based on reconstruction rather than on recollection, making our experience of the present largely dependable upon our knowledge of the past. Therefore, the construction of History becomes a palimpsest that doesn’t separate the present from the past, but is rather, the weaving of a system of expectations that contextualizes and experiences the present to configure memory. 4 For example, someone’s childhood memories have nothing to do with the actual recollection of events, but rather from the construction of their identity based on the stories people tell them about their childhood. Therefore, what really matters is not the realness of the events, but rather the belief that the stories your relatives or friends tell are true. The same can be said about cultural identity. What a specific group of people remembers is intimately linked to what and how they remember. Recollection, after all, is a cultural tradition that manages to unify different classes, beliefs, and ages under the same discourse. As Connerton explains, memory allows generations that are not physically together to remain indirectly in contact. One of the most useful tools by which collective memory is created is mass media communications. Once a single message was able to circulate around thousands of households –let’s not forget Orson Well’s infamous “War of the Worlds” broadcast in 1938– there came an opportunity for feeding political discourses through these channels. First was radio, but during the 1930’s, with the creation of the major film studios, it became possible to impregnate society’s brains with specific images. Images –that as proverbs suggest– are worth more than a thousand words. In summary, mass media opens up the boundaries of space for the creation of social memory. During the late 1920’s when talking movies became a popular form of entertainment, commercial culture started to be infiltrated by political discourses and manufactured stories. The later, in addition to the transatlantic reach of certain films, created a fertile environment to constructpolitical speecheswithin the movies. Mass media communications allow a shared understanding of a specific event –history, if one may– whilst allowing the constant archiving of the images they present. Therefore, as stated by George Lipsitz “time, history and memory become qualitatively different concepts in a world where electronic communication is present.”5 On the one hand, there is no longer a temporality to which events are linked to, you can access through moving image and documented literature events that were not considered “relevant” at the moment. And, on the other, events that are considered important at a given timereceive important coverage and, are therefore circulated at an international level. With the mass distribution of film certain movies became part of popular culture, and their subjects too became popular understanding. From this perspective, watching a film becomes relevant in terms of what it portrays rather than how it is portrayed. At this moment it is important to make a distinction between independent –less popular movies– and blockbusters. 3Foucault, Michel. The Archeology of knowledge; and, The Discourse on Language. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.) 4Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 6. 5Lipsitz, George. Time Passages. (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 17. Carmen M. Irabien Chedraui 13 Even though the dichotomy between “high culture” and popular culture is only possible when you encapsulate each term in a predetermined description, the real concern with popular films comes from consumption rather than creation.6 Filmmakers immersed in consumer-based productions do not see themselves as creating lowerend products, but rather a film that will be available to a larger audience than an independent or experimental film. Nonetheless, since both audiences and studios know what popular culture is not –high art and folklore– they are willing to open the possibility for the content to move around the boundaries of commercialized leisure.Nowadays, at any given time, 70% of the screens available at multiplex cinemasproject films produced by the major studios in the United States.7 This means that only 30% of the market is populated by independent –artsy– American film and local productions. Therefore, American film’s role in popular culture is becoming increasingly important for the creation of a global social memory where electronic communication and History cross paths. Thus the importance of popular film goes beyond financial success. When film is added to the mix, collective memory takes on a new possibility. Cineplex theatres are able to create non-traditional gatherings that attract audiences with no shared set of values. In other words, the limits of the reach of a specific set of recollections no longer matters since they can reach new audiences without the need fora justification. Films are not viewed as independent, foreign entities with a hidden agenda, that’s why it is easier for extremely traditional societies to accept film screenings in their communities, as opposed to other types of cultural documents. History –as a narrative– is treated differently when it is brought up in film. First, it is important to mention that movies, even the ones that are “based on real events”, are fiction and should be studied as fiction. Nonetheless, movies –much like collective memory– depend on the social environm