Cinema, senses, ethics: an analysis of forgetting in Remember (2015)

Bayman, Louis, Yildiz, Pinar and Erkonan, Sahika (2025) Cinema, senses, ethics: an analysis of forgetting in Remember (2015). In, Radical Embodiment on Film: Time and the Cinematic Object. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Abstract

This chapter addresses memory, and more specifically forgetting, as a way of incorporating the individual into broader collective frames of reference offered by history and politics. It will use sensuous scholarship to understand the aesthetics of time and the body in relation to recent developments in memory studies. Sensuous scholarship interprets the body as a carrier of the past, a past which can be performed through our actions and evoked in the senses. It will do this in relation to the film Remember (Atom Egoyan 2015), the physical decline of whose protagonist is used to embody the uneasy relationship of the historical conflicts of the 20th century to the present. This embodiment provides first of all an artistic strategy giving material presence to the immaterial properties of memory, selfhood, values and justice. Yet in their narratives of dementia, this physical, and individual, incarnation of time itself serves to problematise ethical positions of victor and vanquished, perpetrator and victim. Analysing the artistic and dramatic function of forgetting thus leads us to think about our position towards the past from an artistic, a subjective and a collective standpoint. The chapter will ultimately allow us to reflect on cinema as a tool of memory that defines how we remember the past politically and ethically.

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Contributors

Author: Louis Bayman

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