Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
In Sites of Memory (1984-1992), French historian Pierre Nora argues that a nation's identity is rediscovered as a result of reconfiguring the rationality that makes up its 'memory realms'. Nora's work was shaped by the idea that memory today no longer functions as it once did. In premodern times, memory was spontaneously hailed, with ancestors remembered in 'the warmth of tradition, in the silence of custom' (1989: 7). Today, however, a historical sensibility has replaced such a rapport. History reconstructs from the remnants of material and symbolic culture what is no longer closely remembered. Memory sites emerge because memory realms are no longer directly, personally, and intimately experienced by people living in a condition of modernity, in societies subject to constant change and accelerating history. The 'acceleration of history' reveals the distance that separates real memory - an inviolate social memory that so-called primitive and archaic societies embodied - from history, which is how modern societies organise a past that constant change condemns them to forget (1996: 2). With modernity's insistent futurist drive, a counter thrust returns to ancient ways, as Mathew Arnold recounts in 'Empedocles on Etna' (1852),
"[…] we are strangers here; the world is from of old […] And we shall fly for refuge in past times,
Their soul of unworn youth, their breath of greatness […]"
Repository Citation
Sigley, Simon. "Programming (Bi)Cultural Memory: Remembrance, Reinvention, and Commemorative Vigilance at the Film Archive, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 16, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1–23. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol16/iss1/20