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Still Image from Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008)

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Sound editing in film is another way of distorting memory. This picture is from Waltz With Bashir by Ari Folman that shows the beginning of the film, when a man who lost his memory was chased by dogs. This links with Elisabeth Weis’ article involving sound editing and voiceover. In the article, Weis discusses how post-production editing sounds could have a direct impact on the tone of the film, and how it makes the film “fuller”. This is seen in this scene, when the man’s voiceover recalls him remembering clearly about the dog bark at the village, but not about the screams of women who was involved in the massacre. The usage of the dog barks serves the purpose to show how Folman is able to remember one scene but not the other. It ties to the end of the film with the scene of the massacre. The two different sounds indicate Folman from losing his memory to regaining it in the end.

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Still Image from La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962)

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This black-and-white still photograph captures the climactic moment on the Orly Airport observation deck: a man is shot and collapses, witnessed by a woman and a nearby child. The image comes from Chris Marker’s La Jetée, a half-hour post‑apocalyptic time-travel film composed almost entirely of still photographs with voiceover narration (“On La Jetée” 2010). The protagonist is chosen for a time-travel experiment due to a powerful childhood memory of this very image, which proves to be the scene of his own demise in a tragic loop (“On La Jetée” 2010).

Film theorist André Bazin argued that photography “embalms time,” preserving fleeting moments (Mah, n.d.). Cinema, in his view, extends this preservation by mechanically reproducing not just images but duration itself: “the image of things is also the image of their duration, like a mummification of change” (Bazin, 9). La Jetée epitomizes this idea of cinematic memory: its still images become a haunting preservation of human experience across time, an “ideal world” mirroring reality’s flow (Bazin, 4).

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The most common use of photographs is for the preservation of memories. Film can similarly preserve memories, but it can also manipulate them, reconstruct them, and interact with them in narratives. It is this idea of memory fragments in cinema that inspired many filmmakers to play with memories in their films, such as Ari Folman in Waltz with Bashir (2008), or Chris Marker in La Jetée (1962). The audience then relates to these ideas through their own desire to preserve memories, the desire they fulfill daily through capturing their personal photographs.

Christian Metz, in his essay On the Impression of Reality in the Cinema, suggests that impressions of reality, while convincing, do not necessarily require complete factual accuracy. Film, like memory, does not just record, but simulates perspective, point of view, and a realistic presence. In this way, film is uniquely able to capture memory through realistic cinematography and sounds juxtaposed with situations that may have not actually happened in the way they are shown. For example, Waltz with Bashir already makes a step toward how situations are remembered by cutting out real life entirely—the film is almost entirely animated, disrupting the viewer’s ability to tell reality apart from falsity. Throughout the film, this causes a dislocation between what has truly happened and what can merely be remembered, sowing doubt on the real story. Waltz with Bashir expertly demonstrates how film can perfectly represent the experience of recalling memories, especially aged ones that have molded into a husk of what they were originally.

Bazin suggests that at the origin of visual arts – for instance, the “mummy complex” lay in that of painting and sculpture – reflects the ancient impulse to preserve human appearance and memory beyond death (Bazin, 1). In his essay The Ontology of the Photographic Image, he argues that photography finally satisfied this primal urge by mechanically capturing moments in time, essentially embalming time and placing it “beyond the reach of its own decay”(Bazin, 6). Unlike a painting’s subjective interpretation, a photograph offers an objective imprint of the world. With this inherent value of directly representing the truth, digital creators grasp this advantage and use it to display memories. Moving images and cinema further extend this preservation by adding motion, creating what Bazin calls “an ideal universe in the image of reality”(Bazin, 4). Thus, for Bazin, photography and film fulfill the human desire to preserve the present from time’s decay through their intrinsic ability to automatically reproduce reality, turning fleeting moments into enduring memories.

In Sync Tanks, Weis writes about the often overlooked concept of postproduction in filmaking. She discusses how aspects such as sound effects, dialogue and Foley plays an important role in realizing sounds heard in films. Through postediting, ordinary sounds could be transformed into ones that fits into the picture of the film scene being displayed. These elements then could also be transformed to critical pieces of evidence that hint towards the theme of memory. This is especially in the case of films that focus their center on memory. When a picture has failed to be realized by a characters, postproduction sounds come in. With forms such as music, dialogs, or ambience sounds, memory can be recreated in another aspect that pictures cannot represent.

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Bazin, André. "The Ontology of the Photographic Image." What Is Cinema?, translated by Hugh Gray, vol. 1, University of California Press, 1967, pp. 3-10.

Coppola, Francis Ford. Apocalypse Now. United Artists, 1979.

Fincher, David. Fight Club. Twentieth Century Fox, 1999.

Mah, Campbell. “Mah — an Examination of Time, Medium, and the Moving Image in La Jetée | Aspect: Journal of Film and Screen Media.” aspectfilmjournal.web.unc.edu, n.d. https://aspectfilmjournal.web.unc.edu/2023/09/mah-an-examination-of-time-medium-and-the-moving-image-in-la-jetee/.

Metz, Christian. "On the Impression of Reality in the Cinema." Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, translated by Michael Taylor, Oxford University Press, 1974, pp. 3–15.

Resnais, Alain. Hiroshima Mon Amour. Zenith International Films, 1959.

Ruins of the 20th Century. “On La Jetée,” September 19, 2010. https://briangdillon.wordpress.com/2010/09/19/on-la-jetee/.

Totaro, Donato. “Hiroshima Mon Amour (DVD Review).” offscreen.com, August 2003. https://offscreen.com/view/hiroshima.

Waltz With Bashir. Folman, Ari., et al. Widescreen ed. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2009.

Weis, Elisabeth. "The Sync Tank." Film Sound: Theory and Practice, edited by Elisabeth Weis and John Belton, Columbia University Press, 1985, pp. 56-61.

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Still Image from Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999)

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This still image depicts Tyler Durden and members of fight club, where men volunteer to fight each other for the sake of entertainment and fulfillment. Tyler Durden, the founder of fight club, is the alter ego of the unnamed protagonist, and by the end of the movie he is discovered to be imaginary and only a delusion of the protagonist. Tyler’s existence in the film is portrayed as almost completely legitimate with some hints planted throughout that his existence may not be so simple—for example, in the scene shown, only Tyler is shown interacting with characters while the protagonist is still, which brings to question why they are never interacting with other people at the same time. Fight Club plays with ideas of memory and memory distortion through the protagonist’s delusions regarding Tyler, how he slowly comes to piece together that Tyler is only a figment of his imagination and in fact, everything Tyler has done has been himself. This meets the gap between “realistic” and “nonrealistic” which Metz discusses—it is equally plausible as it is seemingly implausible, depicting a mentally ill and confused man whose memories are distorted and removed from reality. Retrospectively speaking, the factual accuracy of the film is debatable, but at the end of the film the viewer is indeed convinced on the truth that the protagonist has experienced, even if it is a ridiculous and far-away from reality one.

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Still Image from Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)

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This image shows the helicopter attack scene in Apocalypse Now, when Colonel Kilgore played Ride of the Valkyries through amplifying speakers installed on the helicopter to frighten villagers and raise the morallity of soldiers. Later after the attack, when Captain Willard tries to recall the scene, he doesn't see the interior of the helicopter he was in, neither does he see frightend villagers running aimlessly on the ground, or soldiers fighting back. He only hears the Ride of the Valkyries played by Colonel Kilgore. It shows a great example of how sounds could be more iconic then images in the memory. The music becomes the symbol of chaos and violence that happened during the battle as it remains blurry between past and present in Willard's mind.

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Still Image from Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)

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A groundbreaking French film that intertwines an intimate love story with the lingering memory of World War II’s horrors. The female protagonist’s personal recollections of her past trauma (a lost lover in wartime France) collide with the historical memory of Hiroshima’s devastation, as the film freely intercuts present moments with flashbacks and even documentary footage of the atomic bomb’s aftermath (Totaro, 2003). This blend of personal and collective memory speaks to Bazin’s idea of cinema as “embalmed time,” mechanically preserving real events (here the newsreel-like scenes of Hiroshima) from the decay of time (Bazin, 8). Resnais’s realistic on-location shooting and use of archival images create an indexical record of reality (burned buildings, scarred bodies) that echoes Bazin’s emphasis on photographic realism. By memorializing both individual and historical trauma on film, Hiroshima Mon Amour powerfully complements the ability of cinema to explore time and memory, adding a tragic, real-world dimension to the exhibit’s theme of cinema rescuing the present and past from oblivion.

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Still Image from Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008)

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This is an excellent example of how Waltz with Bashir expertly uses color and expression to display the emotions of the animated characters, such as the defeated face of the man in the front, Carmi.  The protagonist, Ari, is seen in the middle of the two men, trudges in the sea slowly behind them. The image depicts a memory Ari has from the Israeli-Lebanese conflict, although a memory that he cannot exactly place. In the present time, he tries to talk to Carmi about what is the truth surrounding it, and Carmi suggests that it never happened. This memory is not reflected or drawn in a way that makes it significantly different, as to make it appear false or untrue—in fact, it is animated in a similar way, with similar yellow tones to many of the other images in the film. Waltz with Bashir does this many times throughout the film, representing memories of questionable truth in the same style as any other part, blending reality and falsity together. This is another example of factual confusion in film of which Metz discusses; there is no current reality which the viewer experiences, only an image of a possible reality, something conceivable that may have never happened at all.