French Literature Reviews - 2026
V. Burgin, Le film qui me reste en mémoire
Art and Visual Culture
Le film qui me reste en mémoire
Victor BURGIN
Mimésis Editions, 2019
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150 pages
15 EUR
ISBN: 9788869761928
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DESCRIPTION:
In Le film qui me reste en mémoire, Victor Burgin explores the fragmentary memories of films that fleetingly cross our minds, subsequently blending with memories of other films or real-life events. Consisting primarily of perceptions and recollections, such "image-sequences" have largely been overlooked by film and photography theory. Taking us from the writings of Roland Barthes to Chris Marker's La Jetée, and drawing upon psychoanalytic insights, the author invites us to reflect on the implications and functions of our fragmentary cinematic memories.
Victor Burgin is an English artist and writer living in France. He is Emeritus Millard Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and Professor Emeritus of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His still and moving image works are held in major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
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The study of film reception has long focused on complete viewings, narrative structures, or direct spectatorial engagement rather than the persistent, lingering traces left behind in everyday cognition. Within the broader field of film and media theory, scholars occasionally address how cinema embeds itself in personal autobiography, yet ephemeral mental composites formed by overlapping recollections remain less thoroughly mapped. Victor Burgin explores the fragmentary memories of films that fleetingly cross our minds, subsequently blending with memories of other films or real-life events.
References to Roland Barthes and Chris Marker place this reflection within a well-established tradition of twentieth-century French cultural critique and avant-garde cinema, where memory, photography, and narrative montage intersect. By incorporating psychoanalytic perspectives, the text connects individual acts of remembering to broader questions about visual representation and subjectivity. Readers interested in the intersections of cinema, photography, and psychoanalytic approaches to memory may find this volume relevant to their inquiries.