Screen Memory - Department of English

private; it is “constructed along the lines of old chains of
associations laid down in the mind: schemata, models, paradigms”
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(Cole 25). Bartlett called these frameworks schemata, and for
Halbwachs they were “social contexts and relationships at a given
moment in time when a memory is made, which colour and inflect
the memory itself” (Russell 13).
We acquire group memories by hearing people talk about them,
by participating in commemorations and rituals or by reading
about them or viewing their representations. Collective memory is
an anthology of different kinds of mental and communication
events, “multimedia collages” consisting in part of “a mixture of
pictorial images and scenes, slogans, quips, and snatches of
verse, abstractions, plot types and stretches of discourse, and
even false etymologies” (Kansteiner 190 and Fentriss 47). These
memories are brought to us by what Confino calls “memory
carriers,” semiotic systems like commemorations, popular movies,
or scholarly works of history, and the two primary routes are art
and politics: on the one hand, artists “from whose imagination
new representations of collective experience enter into public
currency via cultural gatekeepers such as the publishing and
movie industries,” and, on the other, “institutionalized forces
such as governments, political parties and pressure groups”
(Confino 1997a:1395 and Boutine 6).
As a consequence of all this, we “own” memories of events
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