Possessed memory
In the cinema, whose raw material is photographic, the image does not, however, have this completeness (which is fortunate for the cinema). Why? Because the photograph, taken in flux, is impelled, ceaselessly drawn toward other views; in the cinema, no doubt, there is always a photographic referent, but this referent shifts, it does not make a claim in favor of its reality, it does not protest its former existence; it does not cling to me: it is not a specter (Barthes, 1982).
Photograph and Cinema are sharing one common indexical sense by chemical production. While the photograph is through extract a moment from the flux of time, a slice of a time-space continuum, Cinema unfolding of time through the addition of movement, thus giving the illusion of the same duration as our experience. Photograph’s mummified moment, as well as Cinema’s, unfolded represented moment both claim temporal lexis of time, the link of each image with its reference.
Photograph hunt ( framing, shoot, and take ), the present into the past, as a ghost, it remained and preserved as if it is imprisoned forever. Without death, it cannot be the past. Presence of the photograph image continually reminds you that it is already dead inside of your present and digested into your imagination, hallucination. On the other hand, Cinema brings back the death into alive. Forcibly returned past once again becoming the present presence.
In American Gods by Neil Gaiman depicted this contradictory relationship between the present and past present. Main character Shadow Moon represent ‘present’, and his wife Laura Moon is the past which is haunting forever. Gaiman elegantly portraits the mass memory and personal memory. Both are dependent on our memories. Cultural and mass memory — Gods, and Laura’s Zombie body are not like Mummy which embalmed and preserved for eternal dimension, it decays and changes. I believe that mass and cultural memory is a mixture of photographic cinema images. Photograph primarily used as a souvenir which replaces the position from the Portrait painting. The photograph is a souvenir, is a desire of conquest, you take it and you own it. The film, on the other hand, acts like a showcase or imaginary referent, which gains its movement — the life of the content by its narrative, the flow of the surroundings — sound, actors, and place, reproduced the vitality of the present.
In 1977 sociologists at the University of Procene began a ten-year oral history project. More than four hundred recorded interviews with residents of the Marseille/Aix-en-Provence area the memories of the years 1930 to 1945. Almost universal tendency fore personal history to be mixed with recollections of scenes from films and other media productions. ‘I saw at — ’ would become simply ‘I saw’. This “‘screen memory’ is one which comes to mind in the place of, and in order to conceal, and associated but repressed memory (Green, D. & Lowry, J., 2006)”.
On the computer, images from the other’s mummies consist of Mass memory, which will never be Mine but the others. The gap between this My memory and mass memories are making a new paradigm of the vision. Many researchers claim that Television familiarised distance image into personal territory, it has made an ambiguous distance between there and here. Is it happening there? or here? The illusion of the time-space structure framed ‘witness culture’ from the cinema and has continued to the Computer screen. While photograph reminds forever the death — no more by presenting the ‘there and then’, Television reminds confusion of the space of ‘here and now’ by alienate happening of the personal and public — mine and montage of people. Memories shifts between the first and the third person in such a way that it is unclear whom we are speaking of. The computer is a mixture of photographic and cinematic image, unlike photography and cinema, it is not your souvenir it is not your mummy, you are not framing and own it, it is not the revival of death but mummies of the present into future —collected memories of someone, somewhere, and something. The combination of photographic this was and perhaps still is with the cinematic this is or will be.
Block of the time is shifting from the past to present, then to future.
Television has affected mass memory into “My memory”.
Barthes, R., 1982. Camera Lucida, Hill & Wang.
Green, D. & Lowry, J., 2006. Stillness and Time, Photoworks.
