Remembering is "re-remembering"

"Memory is endlessly creative, and at one level it functions just as imagination does... endlessly rewriting the self." (Fernyhough, 2012)

Memories are constructed when needed "according to the demands of the present" claims Fernyhough (2010). And as a result they are "soberingly fragile" (Fernyhough, 2010). He argues that memories are "nifty multimedia collages of how things were" which are mental reconstructions and are "shaped by how things are now" (Fernyhough, 2012). 

"If the experimental conditions are set up correctly, it turns out to be rather simple to give people memories for events that never actually happened. These recollections can often be very vivid... [Kim Wade at the University of Warwick] colluded with the parents of her student participants to get photos from the undergraduates' childhoods, and to ascertain whether certain events, such as a ride in a hot-air balloon, had ever happened. She then doctored some of the images to show the participant's childhood face in one of these never-experienced contexts, such as the basket of a hot-air balloon in flight. Two weeks after they were shown the pictures, about half of the participants 'remembered' the childhood balloon ride, producing some strikingly vivid descriptions, and many showed surprise when they heard that the event had never occurred. In the realms of memory, the fact that it is vivid doesn't guarantee that it really happened." (Fernyhough, 2012)

"Remembering is always re-remembering" (Fernyhough, 2012) and it's the the assembly of memory and the resulting editing process that may distort how things actually were. He also notes that "contamination by visual images, such as photographs and video" may alter our memories and "when we look back into the past, we are always doing so through a prism of intervening selves".

Memories are "curiously susceptible to distortion, and often not nearly as reliable as we would like", however, knowing uncertainties in remembering makes memory into a kind of storytelling which "contain a rather wonderful kind of truth" (Fernyhough, 2010).

Fernyhough, Charles (2012) The story of the self. [Online]
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/13/our-memories-tell-our-story [03/02/2012] 
Fernyhough, Charles (2010) Ideas for modern living: memory. [Online]
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/aug/22/charles-fernyhough-school-life-memory [03/02/2012]

Errol Morris on truth and reenactment

The documentary film director Errol Morris claims that he "can't know for sure" whether an interviewee is telling the truth or not, and further notes how a reenactment can create "a kind of strange abstract world around a photograph" for his documentary films.

Morris claims that there is a line between the "mistaken idea about reenactments in general that you're showing somebody what really happened" and "a little world where people can think about a problem or a set of questions". which gets "the audience to think about certain questions about who was where, when, and what did they see" and "forces you into a position where you are asked to think about something or to think about something the way I am thinking about it".

"If the idea is entering history through a photograph," he notes on his work Standard Operating Procedure, "if you're somehow going through the surface of that photograph and going beyond, the reenactments help you to do that". He slows everything down, "almost, but not quite, to that instant of photography and ask you to reflect, to listen to what people are saying about that moment when the photograph was taken and the circumstances under which it was taken."

He argues it's simply wrong "that you can only talk about the real world in one way, that journalism has to be conducted according to a certain set of styles"  and claims "the pursuit of truth, the underlying reality of what happened, and anything which is in service of that is fair game."

"The photographs that fascinate me the most are the photographs that were posed, where they created some odd tableau vivant for the camera. It's almost as if in some strange way the soldiers were reenacting the essence of the war on a very private level. I guess that's the sick reading of it."

In the following interview he argues against the notion of subjective and varying truths, that there is truth based "in the real world" different to that of a personal opinion.

"What is true? What is false? What really happened?"

Columbia Journalism Review (2008) Recovering Reality: A Conversation with Errol Morris. [Online]

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHNf4No5WtY [02/02/2012]

Spiegel Online (2008) Interview with Abu Ghraib Documentary Director Errol Morris: 'I'd Like to See a Lot of People in the Administration Indicted'. [Online]

 http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,535350-2,00.html [02/02/2012]

True memory gone, illusion remains

"This is a memory of my sophomore year of 1989, the year when I almost got killed. I don’t feel lucky for my survival, but a strong feeling of sadness for myself, because of my inability to do something in the face of death. Twenty years have passed. Mother’s hair has turned gray; beloved ones have dried up the tears. Glorious as forever on this first street of China, silence prevails. Silence, forgetting and deliberate covering, people’s memory turns into a vacuum. The bygones twisted into a blurred picture, true memory gone, illusion remains. That memory makes us more helpless as the time passes by. Remaining silent in the face of reality is a testimony of our hypocrisy and weakness. The living still live in the question of the dead. The sun always rises the next morning and the four seasons remain alternate. The innocent died on the side of the world, while the guilty are at large on the other side of the world. This is the reality that has not yet changed throughout the history." [Liu, 2012] 

Liu, Wei [2012] Unforgettable Memory. [Online]
 http://www.transmediale.de/unforgettable-memory [[01/02/2012]

The Utopian Spaceship

The social experiment "based on an initially utopian, then scientific, notion of the future: Communism" [Transmediale.de, 2012] is portrayed in the first GDR-Polish science fiction film, Der Schweigende Stern (First Spaceship on Venus) (1959) by Kurt Maetzig. Based on the early works of the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem the film projects "a vision of the future that would incorporate technological, social and psychological criteria" and "reveals how a global visual canon of utopian ideas was begun to be created in the 1950s".

Transmediale.de [2012] Matinee: Der Schweigende Stern. [Online]
 http://www.transmediale.de/matinee-der-schweigende-stern [01/02/2012]