In discussing individual versus collective memory, Jose van Dijck draws attention to Halbwachs' notion of the overlapping spheres of "individual and larger communities, such as family, community and nation" (266). I have taken this as my starting point for exploring what sort of memory trail emerged when I recalled helping my son with his recent school project. Van Dijck discusses Halbwachs' concept of connectivity: that we "experience events in relation to others, whether or not these communal events affect us personally" (267). My son's history project around the Easter Rising 1916 in Ireland set off a cascade of memories for me, not necessarily my own, and I set out to construct a piece of work that could illuminate these memories.
The decision to write a short drama was dictated by the struggle to find a medium which enabled the memories of several different people to be represented. The only memory that is my own personal experience is that of helping my son with his school project. The other memories are family memories (scene 2 which actually happened to my elder sister and a neighboring boy from down the road); community memories (scene 3 contains a common Catholic ritual from earlier times - praying the rosary at home - which my family never did); and a form of national memory (the massacre at Croke Park in 1920).
Halbwachs draws attention to "auditory expressions ... which often form a basis of recall" (van Dijck, 267). As I thought about my son's school project, the folksong Come Out Ye Black and Tans came back into my head very clearly. I first heard this song in London as an adult, but it became a vector to enter the melange of thoughts I had around the Easter Rising and focus them for this exercise. The Black and Tans are lodged deep in the memory of many Irish and their descendants in the colonies, recalled with hatred, and it seemed to me that this strength of emotion presented a strong enough focus to tie all the memories together in terms of using film as a medium, where a strong emotional motivation for the story and visuals is imperative.
The visualization process (and the process of considering the colour/texture palette) for the film influenced many decisions in shaping the recall of the memories, for example in effecting a late change in scene 3 to what the little girl is staring at. She was looking at a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This has become a picture of the crown of thorns with stigmata. Equally the discipline of conveying pictures in words and shaping dialogue exerted a strong influence, especially in the choice of characters. The aim, as with most film, was to keep the dialogue to a minimum and this resulted in, for instance, the decision to create the Irish grandfather as someone who was actually at the massacre (in order to convey the emotion without having to talk about it).
My decision to focus on the massacre resulted in a complete change in scene 1 to what is on the front page of my son's school project. His project covers the surrender of the rebels in 1916. Once I made the decision to go with the Black and Tans, I had to fictionalize the project so that it bore some relation to what came in scene 4, in order to bring a sense of coherence to the narrative. The representation of the massacre itself is based on the representation of this event in the film Michael Collins. My memory of this film gave me the images of the football game, the crowd and the tanks breaking through the gates. Into this I was able to weave the character of the small boy in order to make this national memory personal.
There is for me, absurdly, a feeling of the personal in my recall of the massacre at Croke Park. As Kuhn notes "remembering appears to demand no necessary witness" (128). I am struck by the intensity of my shared disdain for the Black and Tans, which has no basis in reality but is an emotion carried almost at one remove, as my family did not discuss these things, though I was vaguely aware that my mother hated a man who lived down the road because he had been in the Black and Tans.
The use of elements of representation from the film Michael Collins is interesting also. Both my son and I watched this film recently for the first time as part of his school studies. I can say that the representations in that film have "become part of (our) personal archive of experience", acknowledging the validity of Alison Landsberg's definition of prosthetic memory.
This exercise has enabled me to explore individual and collective memories, and more specifically, various types of collective memories: family, communal and national. It has required the fictionalization of much detail and the creation of fictional characters, but these have been metaphors which have enabled my interpretation of the essence of the actual memories to be conveyed.
Kuhn, Annette. "Phantasmagoria of Memory." Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. 2nd ed. London: Verso, 2002. 125-46.
Landsberg, Alison. "Prosthetic Memory." Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 25-48.
van Dijck, Jose. "Mediated Memories: Personal Cultural Memory as Object of Cultural Analysis." Continuum, 18.2 (2004): 261-77.
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