L.F. Starodubtseva Cinematographic “post-memory”

Abstract: the article attempts to trace the ways of visualization of memory, performing a hermeneutical insight into the history of screen representations of “cinematographic memory”, “cinematic retentiveness” and “cinematographic postmemory ”. The goal of the article is to substantiate the concept of “cinematographic post-memory” on the basis of showing the correlations of the concepts of “memory”, “fire” and “sacrifice” in the cinematographic reminiscence of the 1812 fires in Moscow as a cultural trauma of sorts. The three ways of overcoming this “memory trauma” can be metaphorically called “the Letey waters” historical anesthesia (extrusion of traumatic experience), “the Wisdom of Mnemosine” (dealing with traumatic experience by rethinking it, “accepting” it as a given part of historical memory) and the “Paramnesia’s Smirk” (memory metamorphosis, reforming of memories via pseudoreminiscence, substitution of ersatz and fakes of the past. Cinematographic “post-memory” of the Moscow 1812 fires chose the third way, as illustrated by multiple screen versions of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”: K. Vidor and M. Soldati’s in 1956, S. Bondarchuk’s Oscar-winning movie in 1956, and R. Dornhelm’s 2007 screen version. In the rich variety of ways to create the visual images of fire in “memory films”, three main rapidly interchanging approaches of cinematic illusion based on pulsating magnification seem dominant: the “point-blank view”, the “chiasm view” and the “distant view”. They do not just mark the distance play, or the change of scenes by changing magnification. They are three masks which hide the ironic smirk of Paramnesia, three ways to set up distorting filters for ocular and mental perception – the prisms of “mental optics”, filters of sight and thought, conscious screening of the trauma without the ability to actually erase it.

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