Screen Memory - Department of English

family portrait galleries” and “attics into archives” .
. . . the early nineteenth-century [also] witnessed an
explosion of autobiographical writing, diary keeping,
scrapbook pasting, and portrait taking. Families took
more care to commemorate personal occasions such as
birthdays, holidays and Christmas (Fritzsche 111).
Territories that have suffered great historical upheaval are also
likely to retreat into memory; for example, the American South,
at least in the popular imagination, which, like Tennyson’s
lotos-eaters, chose “To muse and brood and live again in memory”
(79).
Forced forgetting, however, is at least as old as history.
As a weapon against imperial tyranny, the Roman Senate instituted
the damnatio memoriae, removing the name of a defiant emperor
from archival documents and monumental inscriptions (Le Goff 67-
68). After the hated Domitian was assassinated, the Roman Senate
immediately had images of him torn down and mentions of his name
chipped out of inscriptions in order to remove all memory of him
from the world (Weinrich 33). Monuments have been razed long
before the fall of the Soviet Empire or the invasion of Iraq: a
famous instance was the fall from favor of Tiberius’s aide,
Sejanus (as described by Juvenal), and the melting down of his
equestrian statue: “Then from that face which was second in the
entire world are made pitchers and basins, frying pans and
bedpans” (Hedrick 99).
24