2013 研討會

Cinema archives memories and conserves histories. Those which can never be seen, presented and witnessed are traced and well-­‐kept in imaging. Cinema operates as the collective memory machine that voices the past, bemoans the lost and twists the authoritative, and therefore the forgotten and the repressed can surface. Playing between remembering and forgetting, cinema utilizes memory shared, recovered, sustained and consumed.  In contemporary Sinophone cinemas across the Strait many images are invested with the politics of memory to remember the forgotten in asserting the consciousness of the self, the neighborhood, and the nationhood along the continuity of history.

Different strategies are deployed to realize memory projects: in the historical and costume-­‐drama films the past is fictionalized to meet the real, in the Wuxia films the fantasy is staged to reenact the collective desire, and in documentary films the hidden is arrested in situ to show the un-­‐presentable. Sinophone cinemas, caught by traditions in tension, have been contributing to the formation of subjectivity. The interest in historical investigations in cinema is on climax and has provided the narrative for state authorities to construct the consensus of the nation’s identity, its past and present. With popular TV dramas on the events from the Battle of Nanjing, the Founding of a Republic, or romantic tales such as Cape No.7, there has been a tendency to fictionalize the past into a collective fantasy. If it comes to national pride related to crucial events, history can be iteratively retold, twisted or reversed.

Film witnesses the disappearance of the old self, resulting from modernity where irreversible destructions of urban spaces and traditions have made it difficult for the individual and communities to grasp identity. "How can we face the disappearance and the loss?," asks Tsai Ming-­‐Liang concerning Taipei’s rapid massive transformations; it is also the answer in his films scanning through the fabrics of the changing urbanscape. The absent is the reminder of the loss, and represented in cinematic images. Thus contemporary cinemas function much as an archive, which are promoting altering histories full of visceral touches and bodily experiences. The self or the hometown becomes the site of memory though imaging, and individual interviews or personal letters and memoirs serve as documents in resisting the authoritative inscription of the official. From Taiwan New Cinema and Documentary Film to Chinese Independent Film there is a desire for archiving and reconfiguring the past that, in turn, serves for a different perception of the now and a possible future.

Cinematic images can be the archive for memory, interplayed by remembrance, foreclosure and forgetting. What is worth being memorized, and what should be forgotten? Which are histories to be told, to believe and to educate? What has to be done with the represented and the disappearance?  Most importantly, who are the holders of archive and the executors of censorship? In other words, who controls the implemented production of filmic images, which altogether bespeak the aesthetics of contemporary cinema as the symptomatical encryption of the memory machine, envisioning past and present, always politicized along the way.