Short Film Studies - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2020

Remembrance demonstrates how Alfred, and indeed everyone, must edit memory and sensory information to act with purpose. To accomplish this, the film portrays a character's struggles with an extreme form of photographic memory, synaesthesia, and newfound convictions through its expressive editing.

This article argues that the film’s contrasting lighting techniques and its accompanying bold colour scheme are effectively used not only to set the narrative tone but also to capture and visualize Alfred’s synaesthetic sensory experiences.

Remembrance's cinematic events generate an urge for the two characters to throw themselves into the world anew. Alfred feels an impulse to embrace fully his agency and the wondrous vivacity of his sensorial world, while Aurora yearns to discover the mysterious nature of her own being through Alfred's senses.

Remembrance presents the themes of memory and emotion in the context of espionage activities during Second World War. Combining familiar elements of the war film, the spy film and the melodrama, Remembrance effectively evokes these cinematic traditions while presenting the cinema itself as a technological form of memory.

In Remembrance's distinctively Canadian transposition of Chris Marker's La Jetée, mnemonist Alfred Graves escapes a comparable recursivity by following the woman who triggered the flashback in the first place. In the end he escapes the bounds of the short film genre as the protagonist of the TV series X Company.

This article analyses the film Remembrance from a narratological perspective, paying particular attention to the description of memory both as a gift and as a curse, and on the narrative developments that these conceptions of memory imply.

This analysis of Remembrance (2001) shows how this short film displays five distinct features of Canadian national cinema – Canadian setting, the failed male, lack of narrative closure, auteurism and anti-romance. By displaying these characteristics found in Canadian feature-length films Remembrance rises above the short film genre.

Remembrance highlights the possibilities of a modest commercial cinema that prioritizes craftsmanship and focus. This has special importance in Canadian and Quebec cinema, and Remembrance's afterlife as the three-season Canadian TV show X-Company raises important questions about the flourishing of small national cinemas in a globalized age.

Remembrance is analysed in relation to memory as data, as nostalgia and as cinema. It is argued that the film presents a view of memory that is personal, embodied and resistant to co-option, exemplified in Alfred's demonstration of the difference between memory and remembrance.

This analysis focuses on Blow-Up's play with synchronous and asynchronous sound; the use of breath and frame size to join the visual and sonic dimensions of the concept of blowing up; and its commitment to the embodiment of both viewer and the material of cinema.