Cinema has long played a crucial role in the way that societies represent themselves. Hedges discusses the role of cinema in creating cultural memory within a global perspective that spans five continents. The book's innovative approach and approachable style should transform the way that we think of film and its social effects.

Taking Hollywood as its focus, this timely book provides a sustained, interdisciplinary perspective on memory and film from early cinema to the present. Considering the relationship between official and popular memory, the politics of memory, and the technological and representational shifts that have come to effect memory's contemporary mediation, the book contributes to the growing debate on the status and function of the past in cultural life and discourse. By gathering key critics from film studies, American studies and cultural studies, Memory and Popular Film establishes a framework for discussing issues of memory in film and of film as memory. Together with essays on the remembered past in early film marketing, within popular reminiscence, and at film festivals, the book considers memory films such as Forrest Gump, Lone Star, Pleasantville, Rosewood and Jackie Brown.

One of the leading voices in cultural studies today examines the habits of British cinema audiences in the 1930s to reveal the role that cinema played in shaping their lives.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Since its inception, cinema has evolved into not merely a ‘reflection’ but an indispensable index of human experience – especially our experience of time’s passage, of the present moment, and, most importantly perhaps, of the past, in both collective and individual terms. In this volume, Kilbourn provides a comparative theorization of the representation of memory in both mainstream Hollywood and international art cinema within an increasingly transnational context of production and reception. Focusing on European, North and South American, and Asian films, Kilbourn reads cinema as providing the viewer with not only the content and form of memory, but also with its own directions for use: the required codes and conventions for understanding and implementing this crucial prosthetic technology — an art of memory for the twentieth-century and beyond.

In the wake of World War II, the arts and culture of Europe became a site where the devastating events of the 20th century were remembered and understood. Exploring one of the most integral elements of the cinematic experience—music—the essays in this volume consider the numerous ways in which post-war European cinema dealt with memory, trauma and nostalgia, showing how the music of these films shaped the representation of the past. The contributors consider films from the United Kingdom, Poland, the Soviet Union, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Austria, and the Netherlands, providing a diverse and well-rounded understanding of film music in the context of historical memory. Memory is often underrepresented within scholarly musical studies, with most of these applications found in the disciplines of ethnomusicology, popular music studies, music cognition, and psychology and music therapy. Likewise, trauma has mainly been studied in relation to music in only a few historical contexts, while nostalgia has attracted even less academic attention. In three parts, this volume addresses each area of study as it relates to the music of European cinema from 1945 to 1989, applying an interdisciplinary approach to investigate how films use music to negotiate the precarious relationships we maintain with the past. Music, Collective Memory, Trauma, and Nostalgia in European Cinema after the Second World War offers compelling arguments as to what makes music such a powerful medium for memory, trauma and nostalgia.

Surviving Images explores the prominent role of cinema in the development of cultural memory around war and conflict in colonial and postcolonial contexts. It does so through a study of three historical eras: the colonial period, the national-independence struggle, and the postcolonial. Beginning with a study of British colonial cinema on the Sudan, then exploring anti-colonial cinema in Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia, followed by case studies of films emerging from postcolonial contexts in Palestine, Iran, Lebanon, and Israel, this work aims to fill a gap in the critical literature on both Middle Eastern cinemas, and to contribute more broadly to scholarship on social trauma and cultural memory in colonial and postcolonial contexts. This work treats the concept of trauma critically, however, and posits that social trauma must be understood as a framework for producing social and political meaning out of these historical events. Social trauma thus sets out a productive process of historical interpretation, and cultural texts such as cinematic works both illuminate and contribute to this process. Through these discussions, Surviving Images illustrates cinema's productive role in contributing to the changing dynamics of cultural memory of war and social conflict in the modern world.

Few historical events have resonated as much in modern British culture as the Second World War. It has left a rich legacy in a range of media that continue to attract a wide audience: film, TV and radio, photography and the visual arts, journalism and propaganda, architecture, museums, music and literature. The enduring presence of the war in the public world is echoed in its ongoing centrality in many personal and family memories, with stories of the Second World War being recounted through the generations. This collection brings together recent historical work on the cultural memory of the war, examining its presence in family stories, in popular and material culture and in acts of commemoration in Britain between 1945 and the present.

American Smart Cinema examines a contemporary type of US filmmaking that exists at the intersection of mainstream, art and independent cinema and often gives rise to absurd, darkly comic and nihilistic effects.

The “spatial”, the “bodily”, and the “memory turn” in the humanities and cultural studies are well-canonized developments. These features of our being in the world are fundamental in the medium of cinema, which is an art of spaces, bodies, and memories, increasingly so today when the analogue platform has been running parallel with the digitalized method of filmmaking. The three nodal concepts define the tripartite structure of this volume, composed of an overview study and twelve case-studies of post-1989 Eastern European film and cinema. The overarching questions of space representation and construction, bodies on screen, issues of national identification in a postcolonial framework, and cinema as a form of cultural memory are explored through the lens of specific national cinemas or contemporary Croatian, Hungarian, Polish, Serbian, Slovakian, Slovenian, and Romanian films. In addition to investigating the cohesive forces that mark the postcommunist Eastern European region as a coherent cultural entity in its cinematic representations, the volume also stands as a witness to the importance of transnational approaches.