Clips from films will be
used as punctuation throughout Forget me Nots,
in order to highlight both the realities of amnesia,
and our cultural fascination with and representation
of it. The image of the amnesiac stumbling through thrillers,
mysteries, noir films, literature and comic books is
a familiar one. In Random Harvest (1942), Ronald
Coleman played a shell-shocked WW I vet whose amnesia
leaves him blissfully unencumbered by his past, until
he is bumped on the head one day and remembers who he
truly is…. In Hitchcock’s Spellbound
(1945), Gregory Peck plays a paranoid amnesiac that
is running from a shrouded past that may include murder.
An elaborate metaphor for the wonders of psychoanalysis,
Peck’s character is in the end successfully analyzed
by Ingrid Bergman, who unlocks the secrets of his past
and leaves them free to fall in love. More recently,
Memento rigorously portrayed anterograde amnesia
in the story of a man who tattoos his body in a constant
effort to shore up his memory. Lighter clips from cartoons
and television comedies also show the extent to which
memory and amnesia have seeped into our popular culture.
The author Jonathan Lethem, editor of The Vintage
Book of Amnesia and winner of the National Book
Critics Circle Award, comments on memory and amnesia
as a subject for art, from Wordsworth to Proust, and
later in 20th century popular culture.
|
|
|
