Memory, Empathy, and the Politics of Identification |
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Authors: | Alison Landsberg |
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Institution: | (1) Department of History and Art History, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA |
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Abstract: | This essay explores the ethical and political dimensions of what I have elsewhere called “prosthetic memories” (Landsberg,
Prosthetic memory: The transformation of American remembrance in the age of mass culture, Harvard University Press, 2004), focusing on those that are produced and disseminated cinematically. I argue that cinematic technology, by which I mean
also to include the dominant cinematic conventions and practices used in the Hollywood style of filmmaking, is an effective
means for structuring vision. Through specific techniques of shooting and editing, films attempt to position the viewer in
highly specific ways in relation to the unfolding narrative. Sometimes, in such films, viewers are brought into intimate contact
with a set of experiences that fall well outside of their own lived experience and, as a result, are forced to look as if
through someone else’s eyes, and asked to remember those situations and events as both meaningful and potentially formative.
By engaging specific strategies intended to elicit identification, films can force viewers to engage both intellectually and
emotionally with another who is radically different from him or herself. This complicated form of identification across difference
might condition viewers to see and think in ways that could foster more radical forms of democracy aimed at advancing egalitarian
social goals.
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Keywords: | Prosthetic memory Film Identification Empathy The Pianist Cinematic technology |
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