Mediated memory - remembering 9/11

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 generated an excess of mediated depictions of the events and their aftermath: from live coverage across global news networks, to dramatisations such as United 93 (Paul Greengrass, 2006) and World Trade Center (Oliver Stone, 2006), to the official September 11 Museum and online memory-sites such as 9/11 Memorial, which archives images and stories from members of the public.

The following clip shows a virtual flyover of the planned 9/11 memorial site. In a sense, it is an image of the projected future that points back towards a memorialised past...

Blade Runner - the original ending

This clip contains the final scene from the original 1982 release of Blade Runner (the version you should have seen this week is the 'Director's Cut', which was released in 1992). See if you can recognise the landscape shots, which consist of unused footage from another famous film of the early 1980s...

 

Nostalgia and irony

Although we've been focusing on nostalgia in cinema, advertising is another key media format that makes use of nostalgic depictions of the past. It's also one place where we often see nostalgia tempered by a sense of irony, as discussed by Paul Grainge (2003). This ad for L & P is a fine example of ironic nostalgia...

Where were you in '62?

Here are the trailers for two prominent examples of what Fredric Jameson calls the 'nostalgia film' (1984, 66): American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973)...



... and Rumble Fish (Francis Ford Coppola, 1983)...

Analogue nostalgia

Media themselves often serve as objects of memory, as exemplified by http://tapedeck.org/, a website which archives images of vintage audio cassette tapes.

The memory of noir

Return of the repressed: the noir parody Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (Carl Reiner, 1982) gains comic mileage from the hero's traumatic memory disorder...



Death Be Not Deadly: appearing on Saturday Night Live in 1987, Robert Mitchum makes fun of his background as a noir hero (recalling in particular his role in Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past 40 years earlier)...

The memory of film

Here, Bill Morrison's 2002 experimental film Decasia 'remembers' excerpts of damaged and degraded found footage:

 

...and this character from Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988) 'remembers' a generation's worth of excised romantic scenes...

Welcome to FTVMS 219/326

I'll be using this blog to share interesting images, links and video clips relating to the content of the course.