Trapped in amber: the new materialities of memory

Abstract

Cinema defies time through its 'uncanny ontology': moving images always document what is not yet dead but also not quite alive, simulacra of life at its most vivid. This unresolvable tension between rewind and replay, between presence and absence, between life preserved and the kingdom of shadows, has profoundly altered our understanding of what history is, just as the same tension between original and copy, between reconstruction and replica, dominates our thinking today about the status of art and historical artifacts, in our post-auratic era that nonetheless craves authenticity and “keeping things real.”