23 June 2009
memory films
Someone sent me an urgent request to think of films about memory. If anyone can add to this list, please email me at infinitethought[at]hotmail.co.uk:
These are already on the list:
India Song,
Memento,
Professione: reporter,
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,
2046,
Ararat,
Calendar,
La Jetée.
Immemory, Grin without a Cat by Chris Marker
In Search of Lost Time - Ruiz
The Machinist
Citizen Kane
Godard's History of Cinema
UPDATE: Lots of additional suggestions here! Thanks to all.
Travis:
I'd add Last Year in Marienbad+Hiroshima mon amour+Nuit et Brouillard+any other Alain Resnais movie. His memory movies might be my favorite in the class. Another Chris Marker film that might be added is Remembrance of Things to Come, about documentary photographer Denise Bellon and the spectral calm of prewar, peacetime photography when viewed with our 'memory' (or 'post-memory') of what followed. Also, Vertigo??? A mon avis, these could even knock some of the hip indies like Memento and The Machinist off the list--wasn't the whole 'oh shiiiit, that's what was really happening'-ending memory movie already perfected by Hitchcock, sexy male protagonist and all?
Ryan: City of Lost Children
Dark City
Jacob's Ladder
Edwin:
A Time To Live and A Time To Die (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
In The Heat of The Sun (Jiang Wen)
Balzac and the Little Seamstress (Dai Sijie)
Titanic (James Cameron)
Herbert:
I'm tempted to say, obnoxiously, What film isn't about memory? But this is fun. Below are a few more titles that came to mind quickly
Blade Runner
Le Chagrin et la pitié
Blue [Jarman]
The Decay of Fiction
Eloge de l'amour
Marnie
Mulholland Drive
Paris, Texas
Velvet Goldmine
Waltz with Bashir
Jayne:
Another great film about memory is Hirokazu Kore-eda's 1998 film "After Life" (Wandafuru raifu).
Andrew:
Last Year at Marienbad
Hiroshima Mon Amour
Muriel
Karim:
Resnais, Last Year at Marienbad
Syberberg, Our Hitler
If you want to extend to television plays, there is also Beckett's 'Eh Joe'.
Kodwo:
Je t'aime Je t'aime
Last Year in Marienbad
Toute la memoire du monde
Solaris
Zorns Lemma
The Man who Lied
The Final Cut
Dark City
Old Boy
Vanilla Sky
Paycheck (you didn't say they had to be good films)
Michael:
Fight Club
Vanilla Sky (and the original Abre los Ojos)
Solaris
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
A Scanner Darkly
Paycheck
Mysterious Skin
Total Recall
Johnny Mnemonic
The Final Cut
Reign Over Me
Hook
Groundhog Day
50 First Dates
The Bourne Identity (and sequels)
The Butterfly Effect (and the even worse sequel)
Mark:
Blow Up
Dave:
I'm assuming you mean personal memory vs. historical memory or cultural memory. There are lots of films that are about memory without being explicitly about memory but I'm trying to stay stricter here. Off the top of my head, since its after 2AM here:
lots of Alain Resnais films, especially these 3:
LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD
Hiroshima Mon Amour
Je t'aime, je t'aime
much of Jonas Mekas's work is explicitly about memory, and the way we keep memories. There's too much to list.
Lynch woks this ground a lot, in his recent work especially:
Mulholland Drive
Inland Empire
Godard's Eloge de l'amour [In Praise of Love]
Marker's Sans Soleil
more amnesia films!
Random Harvest
50 First Dates
The Bourne films (The Bourne Identity most of all)
Abre los ojos [Open Your Eyes] (and the American remake Vanilla Sky)
some docs about personal memory
Of Time and the City
Porto da Minha Infancia [Porto of My Childhood]
John:
Last Year at Marieband, Resnais
Re-released this week for region 1 dvd (and bluray).
UPDATE TWO: Everyone suggests Tarkovsky!
Andrew (again):
Rebecca (Hitchcock, 1940) - woman haunted by others' memories of her husband's deceased wife
Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1950) - four recollections of the one sequence of events
Don't Look Now (Roeg, 1973) - man haunted by the memory of his daughter's drowning
Grey Gardens (Mayles & Mayles, 1975) - documentary on a mother and daughter that live almost entirely in the past
Hugo:
By now, you seem to have more than enough, but here are two that
nobody seems to remember: Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, and Tarkovsky’s
Nostalgia.
Nathaniel:
Mirror
Richard:
Couldn't resist adding a favourite...
Mirror (Tarkovsky, 1974) - you could include pretty much all of his films under this heading, but this one most of all!
Has anybody seen Chris Marker's CD-ROM, Immemory? (An updated but Mac-only version has just been released)
And to complete the La jetée/Vertigo link, there's Marker's text on the latter - - oh, and Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, of course!
Julian:
For the interweaving and coexistence, not to mention confusion, of present, past and history (amazing archive wartime footage in an otherwise personal film), I would, inevitably, point you to Tarkovsky's 'Mirror'. Also the only film in which the sexy heroism of proofreaders is properly explored.
Arlen:
Persona by Bergman !!!!!!
Nostalgia by Tarkovsky,
The mirror by Takovsky,
Memories of Undervelopment by Tomas Gutierrez Alea.
Wayne:
A History Of Violence
Spellbound
Point Blank
The Man Who Fell To Earth
Spider
Once Upon A Time In America
All That Jazz
Synecdoche New York
Primer
Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte
Event Horizon
Rashomon
Sixth Sense
Birth
Amarcord
The Offence
Little Big Man
The Conformist
Time Regained
Two For The Road (?)
Sleepers
Cinema Paradiso
Remember My Name
Laura
Citizen Kane
The Killers
The Life And Death Of Colenel Blimp
Groundhog Day (oblique, but highly influential in the past decade's vogue for rearranged time/memory erasure)
Ted:
Ok, not technically a "film" but both "The Singing Detective" and
"Karaoke," Dennis Potter's mini-series are great essays on memory and
how we reshape them to form narratives to justify our current behavior.
BTW, the Japan manga "20th Century Boys" is on a level with the
Dennis Potter work. The not-so-great film adaptations do not really
carry over this thread that makes the comic sooooo good.
Giovanni:
Strange Days
Until the End of the World
eXistenZ
Impostor (on the established basis that they don't have to be good)
Minority Report (ditto)
The Forgotten
Wintersleepers
The Lives of Others (I hated this, but hey)
The Conversation
...so long as Cinema Paradiso is there, I'd add Decasia, which is like the antidote.
Wayne:
Suture
Peggy Sue Got Married
Robocop
The Machinist
Total Recall
Seconds
Out Of The Past
Reds
Bad Timing
Anatomy Of A Murder
The English Patient
Land And Freedom
Hulk (Ang Lee version)
Batman Begins
Man Of The West
Crossfire
Detour
Shoot The Pianist
Pursued (Raoul Walsh)
Most Terrence Davies films
These are already on the list:
India Song,
Memento,
Professione: reporter,
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,
2046,
Ararat,
Calendar,
La Jetée.
Immemory, Grin without a Cat by Chris Marker
In Search of Lost Time - Ruiz
The Machinist
Citizen Kane
Godard's History of Cinema
UPDATE: Lots of additional suggestions here! Thanks to all.
Travis:
I'd add Last Year in Marienbad+Hiroshima mon amour+Nuit et Brouillard+any other Alain Resnais movie. His memory movies might be my favorite in the class. Another Chris Marker film that might be added is Remembrance of Things to Come, about documentary photographer Denise Bellon and the spectral calm of prewar, peacetime photography when viewed with our 'memory' (or 'post-memory') of what followed. Also, Vertigo??? A mon avis, these could even knock some of the hip indies like Memento and The Machinist off the list--wasn't the whole 'oh shiiiit, that's what was really happening'-ending memory movie already perfected by Hitchcock, sexy male protagonist and all?
Ryan: City of Lost Children
Dark City
Jacob's Ladder
Edwin:
A Time To Live and A Time To Die (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
In The Heat of The Sun (Jiang Wen)
Balzac and the Little Seamstress (Dai Sijie)
Titanic (James Cameron)
Herbert:
I'm tempted to say, obnoxiously, What film isn't about memory? But this is fun. Below are a few more titles that came to mind quickly
Blade Runner
Le Chagrin et la pitié
Blue [Jarman]
The Decay of Fiction
Eloge de l'amour
Marnie
Mulholland Drive
Paris, Texas
Velvet Goldmine
Waltz with Bashir
Jayne:
Another great film about memory is Hirokazu Kore-eda's 1998 film "After Life" (Wandafuru raifu).
Andrew:
Last Year at Marienbad
Hiroshima Mon Amour
Muriel
Karim:
Resnais, Last Year at Marienbad
Syberberg, Our Hitler
If you want to extend to television plays, there is also Beckett's 'Eh Joe'.
Kodwo:
Je t'aime Je t'aime
Last Year in Marienbad
Toute la memoire du monde
Solaris
Zorns Lemma
The Man who Lied
The Final Cut
Dark City
Old Boy
Vanilla Sky
Paycheck (you didn't say they had to be good films)
Michael:
Fight Club
Vanilla Sky (and the original Abre los Ojos)
Solaris
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
A Scanner Darkly
Paycheck
Mysterious Skin
Total Recall
Johnny Mnemonic
The Final Cut
Reign Over Me
Hook
Groundhog Day
50 First Dates
The Bourne Identity (and sequels)
The Butterfly Effect (and the even worse sequel)
Mark:
Blow Up
Dave:
I'm assuming you mean personal memory vs. historical memory or cultural memory. There are lots of films that are about memory without being explicitly about memory but I'm trying to stay stricter here. Off the top of my head, since its after 2AM here:
lots of Alain Resnais films, especially these 3:
LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD
Hiroshima Mon Amour
Je t'aime, je t'aime
much of Jonas Mekas's work is explicitly about memory, and the way we keep memories. There's too much to list.
Lynch woks this ground a lot, in his recent work especially:
Mulholland Drive
Inland Empire
Godard's Eloge de l'amour [In Praise of Love]
Marker's Sans Soleil
more amnesia films!
Random Harvest
50 First Dates
The Bourne films (The Bourne Identity most of all)
Abre los ojos [Open Your Eyes] (and the American remake Vanilla Sky)
some docs about personal memory
Of Time and the City
Porto da Minha Infancia [Porto of My Childhood]
John:
Last Year at Marieband, Resnais
Re-released this week for region 1 dvd (and bluray).
UPDATE TWO: Everyone suggests Tarkovsky!
Andrew (again):
Rebecca (Hitchcock, 1940) - woman haunted by others' memories of her husband's deceased wife
Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1950) - four recollections of the one sequence of events
Don't Look Now (Roeg, 1973) - man haunted by the memory of his daughter's drowning
Grey Gardens (Mayles & Mayles, 1975) - documentary on a mother and daughter that live almost entirely in the past
Hugo:
By now, you seem to have more than enough, but here are two that
nobody seems to remember: Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, and Tarkovsky’s
Nostalgia.
Nathaniel:
Mirror
Richard:
Couldn't resist adding a favourite...
Mirror (Tarkovsky, 1974) - you could include pretty much all of his films under this heading, but this one most of all!
Has anybody seen Chris Marker's CD-ROM, Immemory? (An updated but Mac-only version has just been released)
And to complete the La jetée/Vertigo link, there's Marker's text on the latter - - oh, and Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, of course!
Julian:
For the interweaving and coexistence, not to mention confusion, of present, past and history (amazing archive wartime footage in an otherwise personal film), I would, inevitably, point you to Tarkovsky's 'Mirror'. Also the only film in which the sexy heroism of proofreaders is properly explored.
Arlen:
Persona by Bergman !!!!!!
Nostalgia by Tarkovsky,
The mirror by Takovsky,
Memories of Undervelopment by Tomas Gutierrez Alea.
Wayne:
A History Of Violence
Spellbound
Point Blank
The Man Who Fell To Earth
Spider
Once Upon A Time In America
All That Jazz
Synecdoche New York
Primer
Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte
Event Horizon
Rashomon
Sixth Sense
Birth
Amarcord
The Offence
Little Big Man
The Conformist
Time Regained
Two For The Road (?)
Sleepers
Cinema Paradiso
Remember My Name
Laura
Citizen Kane
The Killers
The Life And Death Of Colenel Blimp
Groundhog Day (oblique, but highly influential in the past decade's vogue for rearranged time/memory erasure)
Ted:
Ok, not technically a "film" but both "The Singing Detective" and
"Karaoke," Dennis Potter's mini-series are great essays on memory and
how we reshape them to form narratives to justify our current behavior.
BTW, the Japan manga "20th Century Boys" is on a level with the
Dennis Potter work. The not-so-great film adaptations do not really
carry over this thread that makes the comic sooooo good.
Giovanni:
Strange Days
Until the End of the World
eXistenZ
Impostor (on the established basis that they don't have to be good)
Minority Report (ditto)
The Forgotten
Wintersleepers
The Lives of Others (I hated this, but hey)
The Conversation
...so long as Cinema Paradiso is there, I'd add Decasia, which is like the antidote.
Wayne:
Suture
Peggy Sue Got Married
Robocop
The Machinist
Total Recall
Seconds
Out Of The Past
Reds
Bad Timing
Anatomy Of A Murder
The English Patient
Land And Freedom
Hulk (Ang Lee version)
Batman Begins
Man Of The West
Crossfire
Detour
Shoot The Pianist
Pursued (Raoul Walsh)
Most Terrence Davies films
