Memory and popular film

Front matter

Memory and popular film

Inside Popular Film

Fadler bry

Part II 5 Notes on contributors Acknowledgements

Introduction: memory and popular film Paul Grainge

A white man’s country: Yale’s Chronicles of America Roberta E. Pearson

Civic pageantry and public memory in the silent era commemorative film: The Pony Express at the Diamond Jubilee Heidi Kenaga

‘Look behind you!: memories of cinema-going in the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood Sarah Stubbings

Raiding the archive: film festivals and the revival of Classic Hollywood Julian Stringer

The articulation of memory and desire: from Vietnam to the war in the Persian Gulf

John Storey

The movie-made Movement: civil rites of passage Sharon Monteith

Prosthetic memory: the ethics and politics of memory in an age of mass culture

Alison Landsberg page vil

X vi

Contents

‘Forget the Alamo’: history, legend and memory in John Sayles’ Lone Star Neil Campbell

Part III Mediating memory

‘Mortgaged to music’: new retro movies in 1990s Hollywood cinema Philip Drake

Colouring the past: Pleasantville and the textuality of media memory Paul Grainge

Memory, history and digital imagery in contemporary film Robert Burgoyne

Postcinema/Postmemory Jeffrey Pence

220 237

Notes on contributors

Robert Burgoyne is Professor of Film and English at Wayne State University. His work centres on questions of history, memory, and film. He is the author of Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History (Minnesota University Press, 1997), Bertolucci’s 1900: A Narrative and Historical Analysis (Wayne State University Press, 1991) and is co-author of New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics (Routledge, 1992).

Neil Campbell is Head of American Studies at the University of Derby. His recent publications as author, editor and co-author are The Cultures of the American New West (Edinburgh University Press, 2000), The Radiant Hour: Youth and American Culture (Exeter University Press, 2000) and American Cultural Studies (Routledge, 1997). He is currently writing on American Western landscape photography.

Philip Drake is Lecturer in Media at the University of Paisley. He is currently researching questions of stardom, performance and industry in contemporary Hollywood cinema. He has published on performance in post-classical comedian comedy, and has forthcoming publications on stardom and cultural value.

Paul Grainge is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Nottingham. His work on cultural nostalgia and media memory has been published in journals including Cultural Studies, The Journal of American Studies, American Studies, The International Journal of Cultural Studies and The Journal of American and Comparative Cultures. He is the author of Monochrome Memories: Nostalgia and Style in Retro America (Praeger, 2002).

Heidi Kenaga is Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Memphis, where she teaches film, television and literature courses. Her article, ‘Edna Ferber’s Cimarron, Cultural Authority, and 1920s Western historical narratives’ will appear in the anthology Forgotten Feminisms: Popular Women Writers of the 1920s in 2003. She is currently at work on a book about the viii Notes on contributors

American film studios’ production of ‘commemorative’ films during the postwar era, entitled Marketing a Usable Past: Historical Commemoration and the Prestige Western, 1923-1931.

Alison Landsberg is Assistant Professor of American cultural history and film in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. Her work on memory has been published in journals including Body and Society and New German Critique and has most recently appeared in The Cybercultures Reader (Routledge, 2000). She is currently finishing a manuscript entitled Prosthetic Memory: The Logics and Politics of Memory in Modern American Culture.

Sharon Monteith is Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Nottingham. She is co-editor of Gender and the Civil Rights Movement (Garland, 1999) with Peter Ling and South to a New Place (Louisiana State University Press, forthcoming) with Suzanne W. Jones, and is the author of Advancing Sisterhood? Interracial Friendships in Contemporary Southern Fiction (University of Georgia Press, 2000). She is currently writing a book on popular cinema and the Civil Rights Movement.

Roberta E. Pearson is a Reader in Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. She is the author, co-author and co-editor of numerous books and articles. She has recently co-edited both the Critical Dictionary of Film and Television Theory (Routledge, 2001) and American Cultural Studies: a Reader (Oxford University Press, 2000). She is also co-editor of Worlds Apart: Essays on Cult Television, which will be published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2003.

Jeffrey Pence is Assistant Professor of English and Cinema Studies at Oberlin College. His essays have appeared in such journals as Public Culture, Poetics Today, MLO, Film and Philosophy and JNT. Currently, he is working on a manuscript dealing with cinema, technology and spirituality.

John Storey is Professor of Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sunderland. His recent publications include Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (University of Georgia Press, 1998), Cultural Consumption and Everyday Life (Edward Arnold, 1999), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction (University of Georgia Press, 2001) and Inventing Popular Culture (Blackwell, 2003).

Julian Stringer is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Nottingham, and editor of Movie Blockbusters (Routledge, 2003). He is currently completing a PhD on film festivals at Indiana University.

Notes on contributors ix

Sarah Stubbings is currently completing a PhD entitled ‘From Modernity to Memorial: Changing Meanings of the 1930s Cinema in Britain’ at the University of Nottingham. She is a contributory writer in Mark Jancovich and Lucy Faire, The Place of the Audience: Cultural Geographies of Film Consumption (BFI, forthcoming).

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Mark Jancovich for his encouragement and unfailing generosity, and to colleagues at the University of Derby and the University of Nottingham for sharing thoughts and memories throughout this project, specifically Neil Campbell, Dave Holloway, Alasdair Kean, Simon Philo, Sharon Monteith, Julian Stringer and Peter Ling. My thanks go to all the contributors, to everyone at Manchester University Press and, most of all, to Claire who with great patience let me tap away upstairs.

Finally, my thanks go to the editors of the online journal Markszine for permission to reprint a version of Robert Burgoyne’s essay, and to the San Francisco Chronicle for the image that appears on page 54.

Introduction: memory and popular film

Paul Grainge

As a technology able to picture and embody the temporality of the past, cinema has become central to the mediation of memory in modern cultural life. While, in representational terms, the past has been figured in variations of the history film, the costume drama and the heritage picture from early cinema to the present, rituals of remembrance have come to surround the culture of film. Whether in the form of commercial reruns, generic recycling, critical retrospectives or popular reminiscence, the memory of film scenes and movies screens, cinema and cinema-going, has become integral to the placement and location of film within the cultural imagination of this century and the last.

This volume uses memory as a specific framework for the study of popular film, intervening in growing debates about the status and function of memory in cultural life and discourse. Susannah Radstone has usefully mapped the boom in memory’s valuation in recent decades, a contemporary resurgence that has led to an explosion of academic interest in questions of memory and memory work.! This cross-disciplinary field of enquiry, which has become loosely known as ‘memory studies’, has addressed itself both to historical and methodological concerns: how to understand the rising stock of memory in particular periods of history, and how to evaluate particular sites and texts of memory as they invoke the past in specific ways and for specific ends. At the centre of analysis is a fundamental concern with what the CCCS Popular Memory Group has called the ‘past-present relation’? While akin to the province of history, with it disposition towards ‘knowing’ and interpreting the past, memory suggests a more dialogic relationship between the temporal constituencies of ‘now’ and ‘then’; it draws attention to the activations and eruptions of the past as they are experienced in and constituted by the present.

Despite the clear entanglements of history and memory, there remain important differences between them that prevent any simple conflation of terms. These differences have been mapped politically. Michel Foucault, for example, has discussed the tensions between official histories and their contestation in ‘popular’ or unofficial memory, analysing the bearing of historical and memorial knowledge on formations of identity and operations of power. In a discussion of ‘film and popular memory’ in French cinema of the 1970s (specifically, a number of films dealing with the French Resistance), Foucault suggests that memory is ‘a very important factor in struggle . . . if one controls people’s memory, one controls their dynamism’.? Memory, in this context, is seen as a political force, a form of subjugated knowledge that can function as a site of potential opposition and resistance, but that is also vulnerable to containment and ‘reprogramming’. In a more recent study, Marita Sturken draws upon Foucault but refines his conceptual position. Rather than categorise memory as inherently oppositional, Sturken develops a concept of ‘cultural memory’ that is more varied and ambiguous, that lays stress on memory’s production through images, sites, objects and representations, but that neither inherently celebrates nor castigates manifestations of memory in the cultural terrain. Adapting her argument to events in American history and culture, she writes that:

[The] process of cultural memory is bound up in complex political stakes and meanings. It both defines a culture and is the means by which its divisions and conflicting agendas are revealed. To define a memory as cultural is, in effect, to enter into a debate about what that memory means. This process does not efface the individual but rather involves the interaction of individuals in the creation of meaning. Cultural memory is a field of cultural negotiation through which different stories vie for a place in history.*

In this definition, memory is socially produced and is bound in the struggles and investments of cultural and national identity formation. It retains a notion of contestation but does not give memory a prescribed politics or cultural orientation. Unlike Foucault, who equates ‘popular memory’ with the force of resistance, Sturken provides a useful model for the negotiation of memory in popular film, especially as it is produced within the context of American culture. If, as Erica Carter and Ken Hirschkop suggest,’ memory depends less on a conscious decision to record than an inability to forget, the negotiation of memory describes the echo and pressure of the past as it is configured in present-based struggles over the meaning of lived experience.

While the study of memory and film extends itself to a number of national cinemas, with potentially different stakes in the form and nature of cinematic remembrance, this volume takes Hollywood, and the cultural history of the United States, as its principal focus of concern. Notwithstanding the dominance of Hollywood in world cinema, and its capacity to harness debates about the nature of popular film, America has become central to critical discussions about the status and bearing of memory in the cultural sphere. As I have written elsewhere, these discussions have focused on two principal questions or concerns.‘ Firstly, the question of what (or not) is remembered in cultural life and practice has been carried into a number of debates within the United States figured around the content and transmission of memory within educational curricula and public and popular representation. This has derived, not least, from a deepening sense of the plural and discontinuous histories that have challenged ideas about the singularity of American experience, and that have led to battles of value fought over the (re)conception of the cultural centre. The balance of memory and forgetting in American culture — what is remembered, by who and for who — has in recent years become entwined in hegemonic struggles fought and figured around the negotiation of America’s national past.

These struggles sharpened significantly in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a moment of reported ‘culture war’ where consensual narratives of American identity were (seen to be) challenged by an emergent politics of difference. According to Robert Burgoyne, Hollywood played its part in these struggles, in some cases reasserting traditional narratives of nation and, in others, addressing the ‘recovered memory’ of the American nation-state — taking on traumas such as slavery, genocide, political assassination and the war in Vietnam — to express a reconfigured sense of American identity.” The 1990s, in particular, were a time when the metanarratives of American memory began to strain for legitimacy against the multiple pasts of the marginalised. This must be set within a broad climate where national identity itself was, and continues to be, called into question by transnational political and economic restructuring. If memory discourses have accelerated in response to crucial changes in the ideological structure of US society — symptomatic, according to Andreas Huyssen, of a more general challenge to progressive Western paradigms of history, modernity, and nation’ — Hollywood has functioned strategically in the articulation and codification of the cultural past. Although varied in its discursive contribution to the ‘field of national imaginings’ that Burgoyne describes, Hollywood has shown a concerted fascination with cinematic renderings of American history and memory, levied in films such as Glory (1989), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Dances with Wolves (1990), JFK (1991), Malcolm X (1992), Forrest Gump (1994), Nixon (1995), Lone Star (1996), Amistad (1997), Titanic (1997), Pleasantville (1998) and Saving Private Ryan (1998), to name just a few. Whether or not these films represent an anxious response to the ‘end of history’, a revisionist programme of alternative remembrance, or something more benign, memory has garnered a powerful currency in the discursive operations of contemporary American film.

Of course, Hollywood’s bearing on constructions of memory and identity are not constrained to the domestic sphere alone. Hollywood film has been taken up in discussions about the degree to which its products advance, adumbrate or even ‘Americanise’ the memory of events and peoples that belong, figuratively, to other cultures and contexts. Steven Spielberg’s treatment of the Holocaust in Schindler’s List (1993) is a marked example, generating discussion about the capacity of American/popular film to address the gravity of a subject that has become an encompassing trope of twentieth-century trauma. On the one hand, Schindler’s List was accused of representing events within conventional narrative frames, for concentrating on survivors rather than victims, and for presenting, within its documentary mode, the ‘voluptuous anguish and ravishing images’ that Saul Friedlander has linked with the re-evocation of Nazism in the West.’ On the other hand, Spielberg’s film was praised for problematising Nazi clichés, for its mood of visual gravity and seriousness, and for the way that Schindler’s List dealt with the Holocaust in affective terms. The debates that unfurled posed a series of questions not simply about the capacity of Hollywood to understand and respect the Holocaust, but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, about the nature of popular film and its function as an approbate or ‘authentic’ memory text.

The question of authenticity is a complex one that has frequently come to manifest itself in debates about the fidelity of popular film to historically remembered events. The brouhaha over Oliver Stone’s depiction of events surrounding the assassination of

President Kennedy in JFK was an especially publicised example of this, figured around questions of historical accuracy and the perception of Stone’s obfuscating conspiratorial obsessions. For its part, Schindler’s List generated fears that ‘authentic cultural memory’ was being compromised by the film’s particular blending of fictive and factual elements. These debates were embroiled in larger questions about the limits of representing the Holocaust. However, the distinction between real and imagined pasts became a central focus of complaint for critics like Claude Lanzmann who objected to the film’s very pretensions of being able to approximate, in representational terms, the Nazi genocide.

The concept of ‘authentic memory’ is, of course, highly problematic. The desire for memory as stable, reassuring, and constant has always been plagued by the fear of its instability and unreliability, and its disposition towards fantasy and forgetting. The impact of digital mediation further compounds and complicates the question of authenticity, as Robert Burgoyne outlines in his essay for this volume. In certain kinds of critique, however, a notion of memorial authenticity has endured, linked negatively to presumptions about the deracinating effects on memory produced by and within particular forms of technological media. In his sweeping theory of modern memory, Pierre Nora suggests that the ‘real’ or ‘unbidden’ experience of memory has been replaced by its trace and secretion in particular sites, or lieux de memoire. This is a type of memory ‘deformed and transformed’ by its essential materialisation within mass culture. The attendant ‘collapse of memory’ that Nora posits is based on a premise that memory is a matter of retrieving and reliving experience rather than something that is bound in, and structured through, representation and narrative. While not all would agree with Nora’s romanticised notion of spontaneous memory, there is enough critical scepticism felt towards the forms and narratives of popular culture (not least, by documentary filmmakers like Lanzmann) to make certain of Nora’s observations resonate in theories that suggest an essentially fallacious or inauthentic rendering of memory in mainstream commercial film.

The narrative imperatives of popular cinema in both classical and post-classical forms — largely character-driven, marked by continuous editing, demanding resolute closure — have led historians and cultural critics alike to form of ring of suspicion around Hollywood’s treatment of the historically remembered past. More recently, however, theories about the narrative character of history itself, powerfully addressed by Hayden White, have inspired a re-appraisal of the workings of history and memory in film." Addressing the shibboleths of objective modernist history and the tendency on the part of many historians to dismiss film as distorting, subjective and trivial, Robert A. Rosenstone points out that such a view does not give due attention either to the narrative dimensions of history-writing or to the specificity of film as an influential mode of engaging with the past.” If Schindler’s List is able to demonstrate anything about the status of memory in popular film, it is perhaps that memory is never straightforwardly authentic or inauthentic. Spielberg’s film was mortgaged to a notion of authenticity that relied as much upon mediated memories — notably, the ranging registers of black and white photography and the various scenes and images that evoked previous films about the Holocaust — as it did upon the use of genuine Polish film locations or the presence of living Holocaust survivors. While the film played upon the experiential chords of personal and collective memory, it also ‘remembered’ a line of narrative and visual representations of the Holocaust. Simply put, Schindler’s List drew out the multiple facets of cultural memory as lived in history and experienced through the auspices of twentieth-century media.

In both national and international terms, Hollywood has become powerfully associated with the cultural politics of contemporary memory and its associated questions of taste, representation, ideology and identity. However, products of the American film industry have also become endemic to the second major focus of critical discussion associated with cultural memory: the issue of how (or not) cultures remember in a climate of accelerated technological media. If, as Andreas Huyssen suggests, ‘the very structure of memory (and not just its contents) is strongly contingent upon the social formation that produces iť, memory has been theorised in terms of a formation where new technologies and multinational organisations of capital have engendered a culture of hyperreality and capitalist hyperdevelopment, where changing relations of space and time have produced a culture ‘haunted by the explosion of temporality in the expanding synchronicity of our media world’. This conditional diagnosis has been largely hatched within the critical discourses of postmodernism and has been consistently mapped onto the US as the most discreet and supposedly complete locus of late capitalist and/or postmodern energy. Specifically, the issue of amnesia has gathered conceptual momentum in significant strands of postmodern literature, refiguring the clichés of American forgetting and ahistoricism (symptomatic of a culture that has long been seen to invest, ideologically, in trajectories of the future) at a more fundamental level. The perils of postmodernism, especially as they have become associated with the US, are bound in a culture of increasing speed, space and simulacra unable to retain or engage with a meaningful sense of its own past.

For critics like Fredric Jameson, postmodernism represents a situation where ‘our entire social situation has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve’. Less concerned with the content of memory, the debates that figure around how (or not) the past is remembered address the prospective dissolution or potential refiguration of memory in a culture of electronic mediation and semiotic excess. If Jameson’s theory of a depthless and historically impoverished culture represents the former position, a number of historians and cultural critics have challenged assumptions of postmodern amnesia, leading to discussion about the form and experience of what Andrew Hoskins has come to call ‘new memory’.

Defining memory in terms of a new phase or epoch brings with it the usual problems, and potential crudities, of historical periodisation. If there is something new or particular about the way the past is experienced in cultural life, however, this arguably turns on a heavily mediated contemporary landscape able to transmit, store, retrieve, refigure and circulate memories in very specific ways.” This is linked inimitably to the electronic and digital technologies that are influencing the form and development of national and transnational modes of cultural remembrance. In different ways, the notion of authentic and territorialised memory, tied to personal and collective experience, has been challenged in a media world where the past may no longer be felt or understood in any culturally specific or referential sense. It is the perceived artificiality of memory, associated with the (global) media sphere, which has led to various assumptions and theories of amnesia. However, notions of historical and memorial blockage present a limited view of modern memory practice. Crucially, they fail to address the means and possibilities for articulating the past through established and developing forms of technological mediation. While this will be addressed specifically in part three of Memory and popular film, emphasis lies throughout the volume with the presence and persistence of (American) cultural memory, rather than with the sense of loss and absence inscribed within much postmodern theory.

The concentration on contemporary culture outlined thus far should not be taken to suggest that mediated memory does not have relevance for earlier periods of history. While the relationship between memory and technological media became a central theme for critics of modernity like Walter Benjamin and Henri Bergson, memory itself has a modern history that can be examined and discursively traced. Susannah Radstone suggests that memory has developed visibility at specific historical junctures, principally as a means of expressing, and holding in balance, particular ambivalences and equivocations about identity and cultural value. While, from the nineteenth century, she suggests that these equivocations were turned towards the status of history, community, and tradition, in the late twentieth century, they focused more on fantasy, subjectivity, and fabrication." These ideas are brought into focus through particular, and historically rooted, notions of memory crisis. For example, while the memory crisis of the American 1920s — which saw fears about the dilution of national purity and tradition by ‘alien’ elements and ideologies — was addressed in the public history films and commemoration pictures examined by Roberta E. Pearson and Heidi Kenaga in this book, Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (1990) and Memento (2000) demonstrate a more contemporary concern with the unsettled boundaries between reality and simulation in the constitution of remembered identity and experience. If concerns with history, community and tradition govern the former, a preoccupation with fantasy, subjectivity and fabrication inform the latter. Of course, the distinction between history/fantasy, community/subjectivity, tradition/fabrication, can hardly be contained within set historical periods, but there is perhaps a question of emphasis here that underscores the historicity of the relationship between memory and film.

From its first beginnings, the temporal realities of early cinema - what Leo Charney equates with the shock and embodiment of modern space and time — has posed significant questions for the formation of modern memory.” In discursive terms, however, the contemporary period remains the key focus of concern. If a particular moment can be identified where the connections between memory and film become more tangible and self-conscious, it arguably begins in the 1970s. Discussing broad transformations in the history of American film, Robert Sklar suggests that, since the 1970s, historical memory has become the touchstone of a movie’s cultural power, replacing a ‘traditional rhetoric of myths and dreams’.” For Sklar, the identification of a shift from ‘myth to memory’ in the rhetorical power of mainstream American film relates to a particular dissolution of the consensus that, until the 1970s, had underpinned American liberal ideologies in the postwar period. While speculative in nature, ideological schemas of this sort do have a certain use in identifying broad historical trends and patterns in the discursive propensities of popular cinema. Sklar is one of many critics who identify the 1970s as the origin of the contemporary ‘memory boom’ in American life and society. In a time when it is claimed that metanarratives of history and progress have been severely undermined, and when the past has become increasingly subject to cultural mediation, textual reconfiguration, and ideological contestation in the present, memory has developed a new discursive significance. In cinema, as in other modes of cultural practice, memory has become a powerful locus for the articulation of identity in the sphere of cultural imaginings. This has been levied in rhetorical terms — Sklar’s transition from the ‘myths and dreams’ of classical film to the ‘historical memory’ of more recent work — but it has also become figured in particular generic transformations and bound in regimes of industrial and institutional commercialism, such that movie memory itself has experienced a heightened cultural significance.

Hollywood has long had an obsessive fascination with the memory of its own past. From the affectionate parody of the sound era in Singin’ in the Rain (1952) to the nostalgic atmosphere of the Last Picture Show (1971) and the retro sensibility of Pulp Fiction (1993), memory has played an instrumental part in Hollywood’s strategies of production and self-promotion. In representational terms, this has been marked in recent decades by the use and reformulation of genre memory in works such as American Graffiti (1973), Chinatown (1974), Star Wars (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Back to the Future II (1989) and Moulin Rouge (2001). Genre memory depends less on the explicit remembering of events, characters and experiences, than on the use and appropriation of previous cinematic modes and conventions. This can involve the recreation and re-situation of motifs, music, atmosphere and feel in cinematic forms that draw from a repertoire of past styles and generic traits. In critical terms, this tendency has been levied in discussions around pastiche. Critics such as Jameson and Richard Dyer have each examined pastiche as a mode of (postmodern) cultural production, relating it in different ways to questions of historicity, authorship and cultural memory. While Jameson finds the ‘nostalgia film’ — his chosen label for the embodiment of postmodern pastiche — a form of evisceration or ‘blank parody’, Dyer holds a more positive view, suggesting a more complex cultural mode that has the potential to be critical and transgressive, but that can also suggest an awareness about the constructed nature of feelings and emotions while allowing them to be experienced and enjoyed.” While arriving at different conclusions about the historical antecedents and cultural value of pastiche, each critic maintains and develops the supposition that film itself has become central to the landscape and production of contemporary cultural memory.

Movie memory may be a question of representation and generic style. However, this should not prohibit or relegate the significant industrial factors that contribute to Hollywood’s relationship with, and conspicuous fostering of, cultural remembering. Indeed, the development of memory since the 1970s has been linked to various aspects that are not strictly ideological or textual in nature. These include diversifying markets for memory, the growth of the heritage industry, and the proliferation of technologies of time-shifting like VCR and DVD. In various ways, these have shaped a burgeoning market for cinematic remembrance, and led to new media channels for consuming Hollywood history.

Together with the revolution in video during the 1980s, one of the most significant contemporary developments for the circulation and exhibition of Hollywood film has been the evolution of cable. The deregulation of the cable industry’s pricing structure in the 1980s led to an explosion of cable channels pursuing strategies of market segmentation and niche programming. Together with the likes of MTV and CNN, some of the most successful channels to emerge have been those with rerun formats such as American Movie Classics, TV Land, and Turner Classic Movies. As Jan-Christopher Horak writes, ‘the proliferation of cable networks and other new media, and the concomitant development of ever more specialized and fragmented audiences, forced distributors to turn to the collective movie past’.” With new outlets for movie memory, typified by cable’s ability to generate audiences through the (inexpensive) replaying and recontextualising of old films and television products, a renewed interest in Hollywood heritage began to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s. While the studios’ desire to collect and archive history was, according to Horak, ‘driven by marketing and branding considerations, rather than any altruistic urge to preserve history’,” investments in film memory certainly became more acute. This has, of course, developed in conjunction with the technological revolutions associated with video and DVD which have not only given film and television industries a means of repackaging their products in new commercial lines (‘vintage classics’, ‘Hollywood legends’ etc.), but that have also given the consumer more control over the way that film and television can be watched, consumed and collected. Marketing the past has, in various ways, become a lucrative by-product of the new relationship being forged in the age of video and DVD between institutions, texts and audiences.