Page - 10 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/01

10 | Freek L. Bakker and Lucien van Liere www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/1, 9–14 belong. The social context in which we remember determines which elements in our narrative of re-membrance provide us with that recognition.6 Social rec- ognition is an important element of remembrance. As Jan Assmann argues, the “wish to belong” is present in every memory.7 In this sense, to remember al- ways serves the present. How do these memories then determine what we per- ceive as important elements of the past and how are these memories related to the topics formative for the groups we belong to? Making a film about the past is always about the present. In 1978 Mark Snyder and Seymour W. Uranowitz published an article that ad- dressed the memory of past events from a cognitive perspective. They argued that a person’s current beliefs reconstruct that person’s memory. Information is never fixed in a person’s memory but instead is repeatedly and actively re- constructed. We do not remember events, they suggested, “by activating or ‘replaying’ some fixed memory trace. Rather, we construct a schematic rep- resentation of our past experience by piecing together remembered bits and pieces with new facts that we (knowingly or unknowingly) supply to flesh out or augment our emerging knowledge of the past.”8 Conducting research with this thesis in mind, the authors witnessed how stereotypes provided after an event could nudge people to recall information that was predominantly con- sistent with that stereotype. Despite some criticism, the research was repeated by many others, and the evidence grew that people who after an event were given information that contained a stereotype about the event adapted their memories to the subsequently provided stereotype.9 Memory, so it seems, is modified by “current” information. Ap Dijksterhuis showed that an a posteriori stereotype renders the memory of information about an event inaccessible if the information contradicts the stereotype, but information that suits the stere- otype is rendered accessible.10 Stereotypes have an impact on what we remem- ber in that they ensure we selectively recollect information about events. Film- making deals with present stereotypes as current frames for a past that might have been discarded. However, whereas “entertainment” provides the simple stereotype duality of perpetrator and victim, often evoking feelings that venge- ance is just, documentary movies like S21, The Act of Killing and Das Radikal Böse present a more complex characterization. Oppenheimer for example has explicitly argued in several interviews that for him The Act of Killing is about 6 As documented by the case of Binjamin Wilkomirski and his work Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood (1996; German ed., 1995). In his book Wilkomirski depicted cruel events he had witnessed as a child during the Holocaust. After publication of the award-winning book, Wilkomirski’s memories were identified as invented. See Wilkomirski/Mächler 2001. 7 Assmann 2006, 4. 8 Snyder and Uranowitz 1978, 942. 9 Dijksterhuis 1996, 4–5. 10 Dijksterhuis 1996, 12.