ABSTRACT

The theoretical and methodological tension around memory in film studies arises from cinepsychoanalysis' difficulty in addressing memory - a paradoxical difficulty, given the cinema's inextricable connections with memory. Memory's historical and contemporary association with the cinema must be set beside, however, cinepsychoanalysis' paradoxically difficult relation to memory — a difficulty that stems, in part, from a continuingly contentious theoretical move made early in the history of psychoanalysis concerning its understanding of the role of memory in the aetiology of (particularly hysterical) neuroses. Memory's non-linear temporality and its indivisibility from fantasy that emerge here, in Freud's revised understanding of traumatic memory, pose difficulties for cultural studies and history. Trauma theories appear to offer to disciplines operating a memory/ history opposition, a conceptual model of the relation between the inner world of memory and the external world of (historical) events.