Images of memory
by Paolo Valassi
I tried to transpose Enrico Prada's interesting article on imaginary photographs into the world of cinema.
"Literary photographs, whose subjects are (physically) non-existent figures. Photos of subjects that photography has not taken from reality and in front of which looking is useless: they are photographs to be imagined", by definition would seem not to apply to a visual art such as cinema. But upon a more in-depth analysis, things are not like that.
In 1982 Ridley Scott shot what seemed to be the first of a series of masterpieces (and which instead will remain an orphan): Blade Runner.
Based on the novel by Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the film tells the story of the struggle for survival of a group of replicants (robots) who are outwardly identical to human beings but animated by feelings more human than those of real humans. Photography is used by humans to reconstruct the robots' memory. In other words, photographs are like the pieces of a puzzle of grafted memories, the tool with which the need for a past is expressed, necessary to accredit an authentic and non-artificial existence.
Grafts of visual memory to give a human profile to a new kind of humanity, the humanoid. Paradigmatic in this regard is the scene in which the beautiful replicant girl with whom the protagonist played by Harrison Ford will fall in love naively shows her collection of photos from when she was a child to demonstrate that she has a past, that she is not a robot built only a few months earlier. Here is how even in a film it is possible to show photographs of unreal subjects placed in a non-existent context.
But let's take a step further: if in Blade Runner photography contributes to building a memory, in Schindler's List (a 1993 film directed by Steven Spielberg) photography is shown as a dangerous ally of memory.
The "final solution to the Jewish question" envisaged not only extermination but also absolute oblivion.
One of the most effective scenes in the film is precisely the one in which the Nazis pile up boxes of looted objects in a large warehouse. Some will be reused (first of all the precious objects, obviously) but the things that are considered useless or, worse, dangerous will be destroyed.
Among these are also photographs, concrete proof (real, this time, not artificially constructed) of the existence of a people whose every trace of earthly passage should have been erased.
The power of photography, or the ability to create and destroy memory.
Shown at the cinema. Ironic.
