Abstract

A film is a few moments worth of looking on and a lifetime of memory. Not just the memory we may retain of the film after the projection—which inevitably fades and soon enough either changes or is lost—but the memories we already have at the moment of watching: all those associations, souvenirs, and traces of encounters that give shape to the personal meaning a film may hold for us. Film memory, in this sense, evokes and plays within a heterogeneous and diffused space of film experiencing, which involves not only a general semiology of the image, but also the “idiom” of each and every spectator. Every time we watch a film, our whole history as spectators is called into being. Some parts of this history may rush to the foreground and play a greater role in determining what images mean for us, some may disappear in the background or go unobserved, but it is only as a history that the image comes to exist. This is the source of its evocative power. Arguing for an extension of the domain of the image beyond the disciplinary concerns of film theory, as well as beyond the modernist conception of the work of art as an object independent from its contingent situation and subjective perception, the article will discuss the status of the cinematic image as an evocative object within the frame of Jacques Rancière’s theory of aesthetics and address it, more specifically, as a tension between different conceptions of memory in the work of Victor Burgin and Laura Mulvey.