Contexts

pp. 236-245

in: Stephen Heath, Questions of cinema, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1981

Abstract

In the 1970s in France "popular memory" became a key issue in cultural theory and practice. Michel Foucault, interviewed in Cahiers du cinéma stressed memory as "an important factor of struggle" and, consequently, as cinematically productive, since defining a task for film-makers, an area of intervention.¹ The movement of popular memory has been blocked, and by a whole series of apparatuses, cinema included: "People are shown not what they were, but what they must remember they were"; the point is to oppose that obliteration, the effects of those apparatuses, to return people their real memory, the terms of their struggle. "Popular memory exists but has no means of formulation." Thus the problem is one of a recovery and expression of history, with cinema seen as playing a potentially important part in its resolution, able to help towards that recovery and expression.