Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 7 No. 42, November 2003
Kristi McKim
Remembrance of Cinema Past:
Reading Nostalgia and Writing Possibility in Annette Kuhn's _Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_
Annette Kuhn _Dreaming of Fred and
Ginger: Cinema and Cultural Memory_ New York: New
York University Press,
2002 ISBN
0-8147-4772-8 xii + 273 pp. In the Reagan
administration's playing of 'Edelweiss' to honor the
Austrian Ambassador's arrival at the White House, we witness
cinematic memory's extreme overtaking of cultural memory.
Intended as a fitting tribute and touching homage to
Austrian folk culture, the rousing musical rendition was
hardly received as such. Written for and popularized by _The
Sound of Music_ (Robert Wise, 1965), 'Edelweiss' offered
more nostalgic warmth for musical fans than for Austrians,
who held no cultural referent for the song beyond its
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein origins. Clearly the
Reagan administration confused the intensity of the diegetic
nostalgia surrounding the song, for a memory that resonated
beyond the film's parameters. This incident embodies the
confusion between cinematic memory and cultural memory, in
its positing cinematic historicity as the actual. We cannot
overestimate the degree to which cinema has affected our
negotiation of time. While this claim might seem broad
reaching, within the context of Annette Kuhn's project, its
truth finds generous illustration. _Dreaming of Fred and
Ginger: Cinema and Cultural Memory_, [1] Annette
Kuhn's new cinematic ethnohistory, resides within this
intersection of cinema memory and cultural memory. Informed
by numerous surveys, questionnaires, and letters, Kuhn's
project assembles a portrait of 1930s British cinema culture
that ultimately resonates, she claims, beyond both British
cinema culture and past film audiences to 'ways of thinking
about films, cinemas, and cinema cultures of all kinds, past
and present' (3). Respondents whose memories comprise this
book's material were all born prior to 1925; they were
sought within specific areas (Glasgow, Greater Manchester,
East Anglia, and Harrow) and contacted through media appeal,
day centres, residential homes, and local organizations.
Given the parameters of and venue for this review, I am less
inclined to evaluate the method of Kuhn's inquiry than I am
to contemplate its conceptual tenets. How does Kuhn mobilize
memory as a term? How does the book conceive of memory
relative to cinematic aesthetics and ontology? In her work prior to this,
_Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination_, Kuhn asks
how film theory can, 'address itself to the
emotions films evoke, to the ways in which these emotions
enter into people's fictions of the past . . . Any feeling
response to a film -- and indeed recollections of such a
response even more so -- threatens our attempts to explain
or intellectualise . . . because each category
(memory/feeling as against explanation/analysis) seems to
inhabit an altogether distinct register'.
[2] She explains that, in
cultural and film theory, experience often becomes 'the
trump card of authenticity, the last word of personal truth,
forestalling all further discussion, let alone analysis'.
[3] _Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_ takes up
materially this problem that she poses abstractly at the
outset of _Family Secrets_. While _Family Secrets_ looks
inward at her personal history as a kind of memory work,
_Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_ casts such temporal reflection
outward upon a historical, spatial, and cultural moment.
Instead of attempting to account impossibly for the
dialectic between art and its community, Kuhn pares her
inquiry to a manageable time period, locale, and subject
that allows her to appreciate the intricacies of that
dynamic more fully. _Dreaming of Fred and
Ginger_ remains unique for its focus on cinema as an object
and site of memory work. Discussions of cultural memory have
previously included consideration of ritual and art objects.
Most notably, Walter Benjamin's 'Artwork' essay famously
explores the potential of such artefacts and practices to
behold authentic or sacred value. The mechanically
reproduced status of cinema, in addition to its early
locales, at first undermined its worth as a legitimate focus
of cultural inquiry. While social histories of film have
since been written, Kuhn's project is the first to
explicitly undertake a discussion of memory work within the
cinema. In doing so, she elevates the cinema to a realm
shared with other arts that have more endurably been
regarded with a historical and cultural legitimacy (e.g.
paintings, monuments, sites, etc.). _Dreaming of Fred and
Ginger_ posits the cinematic space and experience as
equivalent to other, more unquestionably valid, historical
sites, events, and rituals. Within film studies,
_Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_ fits into the tradition of
reception studies most notably begun with Janet Staiger's
1992 _Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical
Reception of American Cinema_. While Kuhn underscores her
focus on the social audience as differentiating her work
from other texts in this tradition, I would additionally
highlight the term 'memory' as the most distinguishing
attribute of _Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_. Other important
texts -- such as Jackie Stacey's _Star Gazing: Hollywood
Cinema and Female Spectatorship_ and Barbara Klinger's
_Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of
Douglas Sirk_ -- consider elements of social audience within
their respective projects of female spectatorship/stardom
and Sirk's melodramas; but they do not isolate memory as a
primary term of their study. _Dreaming of Fred and
Ginger_ acknowledges the temporal dimension of reception
studies, as it introduces the term memory to underscore how
any study of audience (whether of 1930s or contemporary
cinema) will be one of memory, since perception and
reflection are never simultaneous. Any recollection of
reception necessarily privileges memory as its most
apparent, if latent, term. Kuhn's attention to memory, what
ostensibly figures as the vital gap between the moment of
perception and of articulating that perception, enriches the
questions that can be asked and conclusions that can be
reached in researching film's social audiences. What this
study misses, however, is a consideration of how her
findings reciprocally enrich and complicate memory. For all
her carefully documented original research, she earns the
authority to contribute more conceptually to ideas about
cultural memory in general. She more apparently and rather
insightfully situates her text within frameworks of
reception studies; her casting such a contextual eye toward
memory work would have been helpful. Though her study
straddles the fields of cultural memory and film reception,
her leanings seem more toward the cinematic than the
cultural, especially in her overt discussion of the film
traditions within which she writes. Thus this project exists
more as a presentation of original research than it does as
a theoretical exploration of the intersection of memory and
cinema. The particularities of my
criticism follow, though I want first to establish that I
champion this study for its impeccable fulfilment of its
objectives. Kuhn's lucidity and persistence of research and
its presentation are rather stellar. The audience's
seemingly uninhibited evocation of passion for the medium
bespeaks a vibrant cinephilia that even seduces the reader
to reflect upon and appreciate the innumerable ways cinema
has enriched and continues to enrich our world. The energy
and spirit is contagious; to Kuhn's credit, she allows that
love to propel the reader through the book without weighing
the prose unmercilessly with heavy theory. The book reads
quickly and with great fun. Yet to approach this book with
the desire for a substantial consideration of film and
culture's reciprocity, the satisfaction level might be
somewhat decreased. My criticism should be contextualized,
in that I was most optimistically seeking a rigorous and
provocative synthesis of what I wish I could read, if not
write. Implicit in my review (and in any review) is a
delineation of what I value in current academic
scholarship. At exactly the point that
her reading or framing of responses begins to take on a
theoretical bent, she seems to divert and undermine her own
project by turning to a respondent's quote in the expense of
saying something worthwhile of her own. Instead of
concluding her chapter on memory and place with Walter
Benjamin's 'A Berlin Chronicle', for instance, she might
have taken some of his suppositions as starting points
rather than briefly mentioned ends. Granted, her method
allows the respondents to speak for themselves instead of
situating their comments within a pre-existing framework;
she admirably looks for the surprises and trends among
responses instead of squeezing them into an overarching
argument she hoped to make. Her words neither dominate nor
override the respondents' words. On the other hand, it still
would have done no injustice to infer, from these surprises
and trends of the responses, a conclusion of her own. The
book feels all too governed by the spectators' memories, and
it would have done well either to acknowledge such
predominance or to balance it with context and readings of
readings. The final page of
_Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_ consists almost entirely of an
assemblage of respondent quotations instead of a conclusion
by Kuhn. Here and elsewhere, she favors the spectators'
words to a fault, such that her own argument seems merely
supplementary and diluted relative to the respondents'
ideas. While we could read this as an ultimate scholarly
benevolence, resisting the commonplace tendency to exert
erudite authority over the subjects of her study, I think
Kuhn would do them more justice were she to develop the
ideas they introduce. It should be possible to draw from
their memories without hierarchically downplaying their
significance; such extrapolation wouldn't be speaking for or
summarizing, rather it would be the performance of a
scholarly respect for their contributions. While the words of the
audience members seem to constitute their own individual
conclusions to their cinematic experiences, Kuhn's
reluctance to privilege her own insights detracts from the
project's ostensible merits. As she indicates through
name-dropping or brief footnotes, she knows where and how
particular theories would have strengthened her analysis,
but she seems instead to presume the connection and to
devote her textual time toward the quantitative inclusion of
more voices, more comments, and less of her own analysis.
She positions herself more as a collector and organizer of
these responses than a scholar who cites them within her own
analysis. Nowhere does her
aspiration to offer salient conclusions yet inability to
articulate such arguments seem more apparent than in the
text's 'Epilogue', a glossary-like attempt to summarize her
project's contributions to broader fields. In these three
epilogue pages, Kuhn acknowledges that her book 'has covered
a great deal of ground on its journey around and through
cinema and cultural memory, and in the course of the journey
some new directions have been explored and some lessons
about the conduct of inquiries into popular culture learned'
(237). Kuhn lists nine headings (film studies, spectatorship
in cinema, the cinema audience, canonicity, cultural memory,
memory work, childhood, ageing, and elders' stories), each
of which are followed by a short paragraph that explains the
relative contributions of her project. Unfortunately, what
could be a succinct and persuasive reiterance of her
argument instead exists as an empty, self-evident, deferral
of a conclusion. Far too many sentences
hint at a 'deeper understanding' of these categories, the
'interesting', 'informative', 'revealing', 'instructive',
'entertaining', 'surprising', and 'thought-provoking'
memory-stories of her book (239). Such a string of
adjectives importantly does nothing to indicate why these
stories and her project actually merit such esteem. She
addresses the 'value of memory work in itself' (238), yet
resists articulating this value in this space where it would
be convenient and compelling to do so. She claims that
'examining the detail and the discursive registers of memory
stories of the 1930s cinemagoers throws into relief the
distinctive qualities of cinema memory' (238), yet refrains
from overtly committing to just what these 'distinctive
qualities' are within the cultural studies context she
conjures. Kuhn too frequently refers to the way her study
'enhances, deepens, and modifies understandings', 'offers a
productive way', 'permits a deeper understanding', and can
'throw light on the cultural as well as the psychical
processes involved in ageing' (238-9), all without
clarifying just what these deeper understandings and
insights are. Throughout the preceding
text, she similarly hints at such evasion; in the chapter
'All My Life, and Beyond', she writes the following sentence
that seems either to entrust us with more wholly
understanding her argument or to avoid delineating her
argument altogether. She writes: 'These observations are
telling not only because they shed light on the workings of
cinema memory but also because they flesh out discussions in
previous chapters' (206). The phrases 'shed light' and
'flesh out' are neither 'telling' nor enlightening in the
furthered ideas they sufficiently cloak. To its credit, _Dreaming
of Fred and Ginger_ shines as a successful and clear
presentation of original research into 1930s cinema-going,
as remembered decades later. Kuhn illustriously organizes
her findings and perceptively notes trends, surprises, and
exceptions; this book would be one well-suited for the
philosopher or theorist (or Kuhn, in a later work; as I've
indicated in this review, she seems well poised to offer
such extension of her findings, but just turns from it) to
take up in a more advanced situation of spectatorship,
memory, time, and aesthetics. Such development might
consider the following: what connections might be made
between the duration and time she addresses and the temporal
discrepancy implicit in the respondents' memories, the
disparate times of watching and recalling that become
narratively elided in the telling? How does cinematic time
relate to memories of cinema? How do Pierre Nora's famous
lieux du memoire relate to the movie theater or the films
themselves? What do Benedict Anderson's imagined communities
mean for the cinema audience, or Maurice Halbwach's
collective memory? How does Alasdair MacIntyre's concept of
narrative selfhood relate to these particular cinematic
recollections? The cinema, and the research Kuhn
impressively presents, becomes a terrifically suited site
for this unique elision of time, place, and subjectivity;
moreover, the cinema becomes an aesthetic form catalyzed by
modern technological developments. How does this art form
and its reception work within and create our modern notions
of fantasy, memory, hope, and community? More concretely,
how does cinema affect our experience of time, both the
reconciliation and opposition of the moment and its
duration? Granted, Kuhn is by no means responsible for these
questions; most definitely, she is not responsible for their
answers. But in reading her text, I couldn't help but
acknowledge my own scholarly fantasy that she undertake the
pressing questions that lurk behind and within her own
readings of spectators' cinematic memories. An example of how she
nearly arrives at such considerations occurs at the end of
the 'All My Life, and Beyond' chapter, wherein she explores
the case of _Maytime_ (Robert Z. Leonard, 1937) and
concludes that its reception maps the 'death of the star . .
. onto the deaths of the film's central characters' and
produces 'love . . . as triumphing over death' (212). She
nicely compares the 'enduring fan's devotion to a reluctance
to grow old and a nostalgia to remain young. Implicit in
these sentences is an attachment to the materiality of the
film for its recurrent, repetitive (and many would claim,
hysterical and traumatic) cycling of its narrative; the
characters and story remain unchanged and unaged, while the
film stock bears the time that otherwise would be made
visible through the body. Kuhn might have written several
more paragraphs (or chapters) extending the idea upon which
she momentarily touches here. The cinephilia that pervades
her respondents' memories seems inextricably caught up in a
cinematic consolation of temporal and romantic anxieties
beyond the diegesis, and the degree to which such
reflections complicate and lend clarity to such intersection
would be worth considering. Another example of her
proximity yet resistance to contextualizing theoretically
her original research involves the consideration of time and
magic in the cinema. In her final chapter, 'Oh! Dreamland!',
Kuhn writes that: 'In the magical ambience
of the cinema auditorium, time as well as space take on new
dimensions, and time spent in the pictures is remembered as
qualitatively different from ordinary time. It is more
elastic, more flexible, more giving. While time-memories are
rarely explicitly articulated in these terms, repeated
allusions in informants' accounts to a particular way of
organizing cinema time are revealing in this respect' (224).
Kuhn's distinction between
'ordinary time' and 'cinema time' introduces the
simultaneous temporal dimensions at stake in her project, to
which I would further add the specificity of the moment of
watching, the duration between the watching and the
recollection, and the moment of recollection (which
necessarily involves an ordering of the multiple times that
have preceded that moment of remembrance). Kuhn addresses the
continuous programming that lent itself 'to begin watching a
feature film part way through the story' (226). Such
programming resulted in a modification of 'narrative time,
narrative trajectory, and narrative closure' and a
misalignment of 'narrative time and viewing time' (226).
However, the stakes of this modification and asynchronicity
are never elaborated; moreover, Kuhn neglects to acknowledge
that story and film duration are hardly ever aligned
(Classical Hollywood cinema particularly strove to collapse
time within its narratives, with 'real time' characterizing
the art cinema). Kuhn considers that the continuous
programming 'lends remembered cinema time a quality of
expansiveness and circularity' (226), though immediately
upon introducing this fine direction her study might take,
she turns to the words of her respondents and hereby dodges
yet another chance to explore worthwhile and expansive
dimensions of the complicated temporality implicit in her
study. A respondent exclaims that
the cinema 'was all new and wonderful, just as the internet
and computing are today' (221). Kuhn frames this comment
with the following: 'Letter-writer Sheila Black explains
what it was that made cinema so exciting for her, offering a
telling comparison with present-day attractions' (221). At a
point when she might draw important conclusions between the
cinema and modern technology (or at least be invited -- by
the respondent's own words -- to consider the contemporary
implications and value of her study), she turns from
explicit mention of such technological developments and
dilutes them in the phrase 'present-day attractions'. In
moments such as this, she misses her chance to develop her
project into a contemplation of the new and magical relative
to emerging technology; she neglects the opportunity to
explore the ways this study resonates beyond 1930s cinema.
Of course, it is not for me to declare the directions she
ought to have taken her study, and then to critique her work
on the basis of such exclusion. I want to reiterate that
this book works extraordinarily well on its own terms; it
successfully fulfils the objectives it sets for itself. But
given my own objective of assessing the book's value to film
and philosophy, I need remark upon the theoretical gaps that
remain open and unfilled in its pages. Her framing of audience
response seems to beg theoretical development without, as I
have indicated, following through upon such concepts.
Another example includes her claim that 'imitation memories
are centrally about explorations of masculinity, femininity,
or sexuality' (181). Here might be another place for her to
substantiate if not sophisticate her argument by
incorporating Judith Butler's notion of gender as
performance, which undeniably beholds vital implications for
the idea of imitation. Even Homi Bhaba's mimicry would be
helpful to include. One page later, it is clear that she's
essentially describing the myth of entertainment so
eloquently elaborated by Jane Feuer; she could have saved
numerous paragraphs if only she could have cited Feuer and
moved forward from her ideas. The spontaneity, integration,
and audience Kuhn describes in 'An Invitation to Dance'
reflect almost identically the myths Feuer made apparent
years ago. Vital research on the musical (Richard Dyer, Jane
Feuer), memory, cinema, and community would have together
enriched Kuhn's reading of these respondents' comments. The
absence of her own close readings becomes most apparent when
she quotes at length Rick Altman's analysis of _Top Hat_
(Mark Sandrich, 1935); as this example demonstrates, her
most substantial analysis consists of quotes from other
theorists. I wish that that she had applied her critical and
reflective voice from _Family Secrets_ more substantially in
this book; even addressing the stakes of privileging
nostalgia as a focus of cultural inquiry could have
strengthened this project. 'Oh! Dreamland!'
constitutes the chapter that best approximates such
reflection; though it includes weak places as noted above,
this chapter also gets closest to approximating the level of
analysis I would have liked to read throughout the text. In
her consideration of American sociologist E. Wight Bakke's
1930s study of London unemployed men's relation to cinema,
Kuhn explains that his responses 'are uncoloured by
hindsight or popular memory as replies to questions about
cinemagoing in the 1930s might be today' (216). Clearly,
this 'hindsight' and 'popular memory' of 'today' constitutes
the subject of _Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_, and she values
the nearly seventy-year temporal disparity between moments
of viewing and recollecting for what it offers cultural
memory. It is in this chapter that Kuhn most explicitly
speaks the importance of her study: 'the power and value of
these memories as evidence lies less in what they reveal
about the individuals articulating them -- it is neither
helpful nor proper in an inquiry of this kind to attempt to
psychoanalyze informants -- than in the insights they yield
about the collective imagination of a generation' (219).
It is also in this chapter
that she more astutely and critically reads her respondents'
words: 'At one extreme, some
accounts deal with matters which may seem relatively
superficial and which informants rarely seem to have
difficulty putting into words. At the other extreme, some
testimonies betray an intensity of engagement which touches
on the transcendent; and where words fail here, the feeling
may find expression in circumlocutions as well as in
hesitations, silences and other nonverbal modes of
expression' (220). Within additional passages
that, for sake of space, I will refrain from quoting, this
chapter concludes the book with the very substance I wish
had been present from the outset. As my criticisms have
indicated, the book succeeds at what it aspires to do; but I
simply would have preferred those aspirations to bespeak a
greater awareness of their existence within critical and
cultural theory. Epilogue Since my greatest
appreciation of Kuhn's project lies beyond realms
philosophical, I include this epilogue so as more fairly to
indicate the parameters of my esteem. In evaluating Kuhn's
book critically, what I cannot account for is the sheer
pleasure of reading the respondents' stories. Gaining
momentum in the fifth chapter, the book celebrates cinema's
contributions to these people's lives more than it perhaps
wants to wax philosophical or even poetic in analyzing them.
When you finish the book, you might feel as if you've just
enjoyed a reunion of your most articulate and enthusiastic
elderly relatives (if you should be so lucky; and, if not,
then imagine a group of eager eighty year olds clamoring for
interviewer attention and smilingly swooning over the
cinema), most of whom have stories you want to hear. I'm
left with some kind of reverence for the cinema that these
stories behold. At once a respect for the respondents'
memories, this reverence also feels like a renewed belief in
cinema magic, for what happens in the theater as much as
what the films themselves constitute. The respondents'
fervor for their memories almost makes it seem that human
happiness was veritably unshareable before the cinema. The
fact that these stories would, for even a moment, convey
such an idea bespeaks the heightened suspension of criticism
necessary to appreciating this book in its
fullest. _Dreaming of Fred and
Ginger_ validates and celebrates cinephilia by emphasizing
how we remember through an art (and how art constructs those
memories both through reflection and through intensifying
our temporal experience). Kuhn's project nobly illustrates
how the cinema imbricates its mechanical self inextricably
in the most personal and effusive of human sentiment. The
innumerable and superlative idealizations of cinema, stars,
and movie houses can be met with both exhaustion and
appreciation: exhaustion, or a kind of depleted suspension
of disbelief (if everything inspires awe, then the threshold
to read it is proportionally altered); and amused
appreciation, a fondness that the reflector might be any
loved one, that we are enamoured -- not patronizingly, but
admiringly -- to read the optimism with which cinema is
beheld. More than that, we might
even feel our own kind of gratification, the heightened
faith in what cinema can mean and the ways in which it
explicitly contributes to people's, to our, lives. Depending
on what we need and want this work to be, we can either feel
a charmed affection or a critical disappointment. In truth,
my first time reading, I felt short-changed; but upon my
second reading, once I knew what the project did and didn't
include, I was much more readily seduced by the heartfelt
nostalgia intrinsic to the respondents' memories. Once I
established for myself that this text simply didn't aspire
toward theorizing cinema and time and sentiment, I felt in a
better position to appreciate the bemused affections these
people felt not only toward their (often shared) pasts but
also for the cinema's place in that past. In writing this review, I
realize my own optimism in wanting this book to chronicle
hope and faith as rendered cinematically, mediated
mechanically, and expressed nostalgically. More
specifically, I'd like to read any book about which I could
make such claims for its temporal and aesthetic
consideration of faith and hope. To claim that _Dreaming of
Fred and Ginger _falls short for its neglecting such
aspiration would hardly be a fair criticism. What this book
implicitly emphasizes through privileging memory, however,
is the mutual consideration of nostalgia and temporality
relative to the moment of sensation and of recalling the
sensation. Kuhn's project presents
the construction of a prior notion of hope and possibility
in proportion to a present loss or dissatisfaction; largely,
these respondents bespeak a desire to believe in some kind
of former happiness. Regardless of present satisfaction,
they relish the opportunity to wax nostalgic for what their
lives once seemed to promise; the memory of this promise
relates inextricably to the present need to remember this
promise. Whatever motivates such rosy coloration of the past
varies for each person; and even at the level of the
personal, we could not imagine that we might know,
individually, such motivation. What this project valuably
affirms is the tenuous and contingent negotiation of
selfhood and relationships, within time, relative to the
cinema. By writing their pasts as
they do, these respondents retrospectively build possibility
as they correlate their temporally bound lives with the
repetitious, cyclical nature of cinematic art. This project
writes the cinema, a temporally contingent aesthetic, within
the span of an individual life (and, ostensibly, within
collective memory). That cinema becomes inscribed within the
time of a life (and that the time of a life can be written
relative to cinema) bespeaks a particular contingency that
stands as an exemplar for how our lived experience might be
expressed, heightened, and knowable within modernity.
_Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_ postulates cinephilia in time,
a delineation of audience memory as nostalgically existing
in time and for the sake of sentimental
intensity. I suppose that we should
not be surprised that her project ultimately becomes so very
seductive. In reading Kuhn's organization of such
impassioned testimony, we can be moved firstly for the
appreciation of their appreciation; and secondly for the
reflection that it ultimately catalyzes in our own
relationship to cinema and time. Doesn't it make us want to
tell our memories that coalesce in the cinema? Even here,
how tempted I could be to share my own earliest memory,
which happens to include my family and cinema. That Kuhn
makes such a telling appealing perhaps highlights the
achievement of her study. In _Family Secrets_, Kuhn explains
that memory work engages both the psychic and the social,
and 'bridges the divide between inner and outer world'; she
hopes that the case studies therein can be read, 'for the stories they tell
about a particular life, stories which will perhaps speak
with a peculiar urgency to readers in whom they elicit
recognition of a shared history; as a contribution towards
understanding how memory works culturally; for what they
offer more generally to theories of culture and methods of
cultural analysis; and perhaps most important of all, as a
recipe, a toolkit, even an inspiration, for the reader's own
memory work' (10). While I wish that, in
_Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_, she had explored at greater
length the ways in which her research contributed to a
cultural understanding of memory, the very fact of her
project's catalyzing memory work -- of the respondents, and
potentially my, our, own -- speaks to the legitimacy (or
indulgence) she offers such endeavors. The fairest assessment I
can make of _Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_ is that I was
invested and intrigued enough to want to experience her
learned and wise synthesis of what she, in fact, concludes
about cinema memory, cultural memory, and social audiences.
This scholarly desire exists as testament to Kuhn's
enriching material and its lucid organization. Perhaps my
greatest compliment and criticism is to wish that I could
have read more. Atlanta, Georgia,
USA Notes 1. Originally published in
the United Kingdom as _An Everyday Magic: Cinema and
Cultural Memory_. 2. Kuhn, _Family Secrets_,
p. 33. 3. Ibid. Bibliography Klinger, Barbara,
_Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of
Douglas Sirk_ (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1994) Kuhn, Annette, _An
Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory_ (London: I. B.
Tauris, 2002). --- _Family Secrets: Acts
of Memory and Imagination_ (London: Verso, 2002).
Stacey, Jackie, _Star
Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship_ (London
and New York: Routledge, 1994). Staiger, Janet,
_Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of
American Cinema_ (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1992). Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2003 Kristi McKim, 'Remembrance
of Cinema Past: Reading Nostalgia and Writing Possibility in
Annette Kuhn's _Dreaming of Fred and Ginger_',
_Film-Philosophy_, vol. 7 no. 42, November 2003
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n42mckim>. Join the _Film-Philosophy_
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