Irish Film Institute -MEMORY ON FILM

MEMORY ON FILM

A multipass with 5 films for €45 is available at Box Office.

The ways in which cinema evokes memory are manifold. Films are time capsules of the eras in which they were made. They act as sensory triggers for the viewer, inviting us to ponder where we might have been in life when a beloved film was first viewed. As a visual artform, cinema is adept at giving life to the memories and inner worlds of fictional characters.

This Memory on Film season hopes to explore the variety of innovative ways this has been achieved, from the central character of Ingmar Bergman’s elegiac Wild Strawberries observing the memories of his youth as though a spectator at a play, to the fallibility and unreliability of memory as expounded in Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, where a trio of characters attempt to tease out conflicting versions of a terrible event.

Amnesia, the absence of memory, forms the basis of Christopher Nolan’s deliciously knotty Memento. How a society comes to memorialise and ultimately celebrate a shared traumatic event in its history is explored in Radu Jude’s excoriating ‘I Do Not Care If We Go Down In History As Barbarians’, which depicts a community at odds over how to mark the anniversary of a controversial event, a theme with particular resonance for Irish viewers.

Introduction and notes on individual films by David O’Mahony

Programme

IFI CINEMAS TODAY


The IFI is supported
by The Arts Council

Arts Council of Ireland