2.18. Cinema, Art, and Political Memory: Narratives of Violence and Representation

My presentation deals with the 2025 film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s debut novel A Pale View of Hills (1984). It focuses in particular on the representations of the memory of the atomic bomb dropped in 1945 and on the ethical attitudes surrounding it. A notable feature of the film is its media translation, achieved through the sophisticated visualization of the narrative dynamism of the original novel. However, what is even more striking is the changed tone in the depiction of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki after Hiroshima. While the original novel, set in postwar Nagasaki, only makes indirect references to the bomb, its 2025 film version presents the theme more explicitly. Characters openly discuss the memory of the bombing, and the visual effects highlight its presence. These changes reflect the intentions of both the film director and Ishiguro himself, who was born in Nagasaki in 1954. He has recently emphasized that, eighty years after the event, the voices and memories of the hibakusha must be protected from fading. One major reason for this is that his mother was a hibakusha. Although Ishiguro himself was not a direct victim, he once said, “If I had been born ten years earlier, I would have been alive when the bomb was dropped.” Ishiguro now feels that the shared memory of the atomic bombing, once deeply rooted in the public consciousness, has been fading rapidly. The case of the Nagasaki bombing is even more serious, as it is less well known than Hiroshima’s and thus more likely to be forgotten from public memory. Through a comparison between the original novel and its film adaptation, my presentation examines the narrative strategies that serve to sustain the public memory of the atomic bomb in the face of changing social attitudes.

In the opening ceremony of the 78th Venice Film Festival in 2021, Pedro Almodóvar released the film Parallel Mothers. Almodóvar's decision to make a film about historical trauma in the post-pandemic era is reminiscent of his early experiences during the Franco regime. Parallel Mothers, which focuses on the disinterment of mass graves, is the first time Almodóvar directly comments on the Spanish Civil War, and also "the first time that [anyone in] Spain has made a movie about that (Francoism)" (Almodóvar, 2022). However, despite the director's assertion that he has never discussed the Franco regime before, there are still numerous allusions and metaphors in his work that reveal his concerns about Spanish history. The research questions include: How are illness narratives, patients, and surgery depicted in the films of Pedro Almodóvar? How do these depictions reflect and critique the societal and cultural backgrounds of Spain (the shadow of Francoism)? Methodology of this study includes semiotics and an archival study. In the end, this study argues that in Almodóvar's world (since 2000), the goal of the historical memory movement is not to reconstruct one authoritative narrative of history, but to examine how the dominant narrative is constructed by those in power. Confronting the past is a means of addressing the present and future. His cinema not only presents individual illnesses as reflective of collective suffering, but also shows how history can be used to reconstruct and rebuild the nation.

The civil war in Algeria (1992-2002), which pitted armed Islamists against the state, was overshadowed by binary framework (“terrorists” vs “patriots”) that allowed for all kinds of abuses, including silencing all opposition in the post-violence era. The Charter for Peace and Reconciliation (2006) forbids and penalizes mention of civil war. The expression “civil war” itself has vanished. This paper discusses this conjuncture by re-tracing the way in which art (cinema, music and installation art) has taken up the recent past to question and problematizes it, and by considering modes of visibility and audibility that create antagonistic pluralities and rearticulate multiple and differentiated spaces of memory and politics. How do these artistic works express the complexity of the civil war, its actors, and its memories in a hampered present? We pose that this visibility is a political act – not just an act of showing and seeing or saying –, it brings discussions that are located at the heart of justice and recognition into the public arena. They ask questions about “who count” , “who speaks”, “on what, and how”. In short, it is a work of aesthetic and political visibility and audibility that strives for equality, a work that is concerned by two forms of violence: the one it recounts (memories of war) and the one in which it is itself caught (non-democratic space). In this paper, we will bring together a few art work to make them speak as fragments of memory but also as interventions in an authoritarian public space. The work of artists Amina Menia (installation), Djamel Kerkar, Merzak Allouache, Karim Moussaoui (cinema), “MBC” and “Hamma’ (Rap music groups) will serve us as anchor point to discuss the past/present entanglements and the possibilities of defacing erasure.

Catharsis. Encountering a work of art that moves you, its theme promotes reflections, enabling, perhaps, dreams of other futures based on scenarios you have been shown. The probability of becoming inspired to take action, intellectual or protest, is significant. Moved by the narratives of the films On Borrowed Time (1968), Four Days in September (1997) and I'm Still Here (2024), we will reflect on how film production has created spaces for debate, strengthening the pillar of memory (Stutz de Almeida, 2021) and leading to discussions on public policies for memory and reparation. For such a purpose, the Brazilian Diário Oficial da União will be mobilised to compare how the two films released during the country's redemocratization period helped to transform catharsis into public policies; it opposes the first one, released during the Anos de Chumbo of Brazil's military dictatorship, which faced strong censorship, being characterised as subversive propaganda. For this end, a literature review will be the method used to understand the impacts of cinema on the rearrangement of public memory and for mobilising memory policies. In the context of Four Days in September, it had been only a year since the implementation of Brazil's National Human Rights Plan, and two years since the establishment of the Brazilian Commission on Political Deaths and Disappearances, creating a favourable scenario for the production of the film and reflections on Human Rights issues. Meanwhile, I'm Still Here initiated new measures of reparation related to the military dictatorship violations, generating changes regarding death certificates with the recognition of guilt by the Brazilian state. On the other hand, the 1968 film brought to the screen the dilemmas of Brazilian society then, presenting the population's disbelief towards the government – yet, their confidence in the ideals of social change would later be evoked by public memory.