Résumé

Film is the ‘art of time’, and film and memory’s generative affiliation is founded in this relationship. This paper will examine how this mnemonic facility is invoked through practice and how this in turn creates memories.
The tension between narrative interests and memory’s imperatives can form an axis of experimentation and exploration. All films reference memory, one way or another, however not all are works of memory. Some films would evoke the idea of memory but do not risk structural and psychological instability whereas others consciously suggest memory’s presence through offering more than one temporal plain and other related signifiers.
The latter categorisation includes the films suchas Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Resnais, 1963), Tren de sombras (Guerín, 1997) and Appearances (Meter, 2000). In this work the correspondence of history and form, narrative and memory relates and develops subjective and cultural recollection.
These films relate a form of filmic hybridity that emphasizes conceptual potentiality and will be the focus of this study. This examination will consider how these films’ account of memory’s evolving resonances is an act of writing and re-writing, and how these works produce new ways of seeing and thinking.