Mémoire des apparences

Prologue: the film theatre lights dim. Out of the darkness a voice speaks: “In early April 1974 a literature teacher, Ignacio Vega, had to learn the names of 15,000 anti-junta resisters”. Using as a mnemonic a Calderón play which he knew by heart, this amazing feat took only a week, but shortly after he is caught and has to forget everything. With the loss of memory the screen goes black, a voice announces: “Ten years have passed. And our story begins.” Ruiz tells how he made this film after reading Francis Yates’ book The Art of Memory, which traces the work of ‘artificial memory’ from its use by orators of antiquity, through Gothic transformations in the Middle Ages, to its use in the 17th century by the scientific philosophers. Memory, for Ruiz, is located in the cinema, in the cinephiliac imagination. But this imaginary is not simply ‘in’ the cinema; rather, the cinema provides the pretext for its staging. There is a peculiar discrepancy between the two ‘lost objects’, the immense list of names and the Calderón play; and this discrepancy elaborates a highly complex and slippery relation between the real and the realm of dreams, between memory and experience. -Lesley Stern