Resnais had begun with a collective memory, that of the Nazi concentration camps, that of Guernica, that of the Bibliothéque Nationale. But he discovers the paradox of a memory for two people, or a memory for several: the different levels of past no longer relate to a single character a single family, or a single group, but to quite different characters as to
unconnected places which make up a world-memory. He attains a generalised relativity, and takes to its conclusion what was only a direction in Welles: constructing undecidable alternatives between sheets of past. 56
Whilst Cinema 2 resonates with images of a shattered and desolate physical landscape Deleuze sets the scene for another nightmare scenario. This is found in the passages Deleuze devotes to the problem of reconciling individual memories of the past with a collective remembering of the same events. What makes the selected passage above particularly striking in the light of this problematic is the manner in which Deleuze describes the existence of many memories of the same past which do not belong to a single group; and therefore cannot be shared collectively. Also the unity between places and memory is seen to break down as these become
‘unconnected’. This description exemplifies the extent to which Deleuze’s examination of time and memory reveals how they are intrinsically connected to real and imaginary, inside and outside spaces. As I examined in the Introduction, the disjunction between a collective experience and subjective memory which cultivates a private time, detracts from attempts to forge national identity.
As Deleuze argues, the complex post-war world is replicated in post-war European Cinema, where he discusses the disconnection between personal
recollection and collective remembering. As the films of French filmmaker Resnais depict, when we enter the realm of a ‘world-memory’ there is a ‘generalised
relativity’ where a collective history is displaced into the internal time zone of subjective memory.57 Deleuze’s essential Bergsonian approach validates the authenticity of personal memory which constructs an interior sense of time. This exists in marked contradistinction to social remembering which is located in external and public spaces. As Deleuze expands upon the complications associated with shared memory he explains how in the film Hiroshima mon amour ‘[t]here are two characters, but each has his or her own memory which is foreign to the other’.
Ultimately the tensions between ‘sheets of past’ where personal memory is located and the social spaces of collective remember collide, because the cultivation of
126 interior time brings a ‘memory world, for several people, and at several levels, who contradict, accuse and grab each other’.58
Engaging with Deleuze’s analysis of Resnais Hiroshima mon amour suggests there is a profound and unbridgeable gap between a shared understanding of the past, what he defines as a shared memory with the ‘same givens’, and
subjective personal memory. As he puts it: ‘It is like two incommensurable regions of pst, Hiroshima and Nevers’. 59Within its context specificity, Akamas provides an example from an emerging new cinema to explore the extent to which a nation-building project is readily jeopardised by its director who refuses to enter the public space of shared or collective memory. The counter-narrative at the centre of this film precipitates the accusations and contradictions which Deleuze discusses.
Conclusion
Akamas is a litmus test in the brief history of Greek-Cypriot Cinema. In 2014, it continues to be banned from exhibition in the Greek-Cypriot community. Akamas excavates its own time and spaces, both real and imaginary to re-write the past and influence the shape of the island’s entrenched politics in the future. What is at stake is the invisible yet privileged space where history is situated, making the film in the eyes of a key opponent, a ‘very serious issue’. As it attempts to find a space within the Greek-Cypriot community, the opposition it faces suggests how a consensus version the history of E.O.K.A., the colonial struggle and its heroes and patriots appropriate the narrative space. Whilst Akamas is in many definitions of Deleuze’s terms representative of minor cinema, it is the political and public spaces where the collective struggle is played out which manifest the problem of collective memory.
As a small nation, the Greek-Cypriot community did not have a small memory. In the next chapter, the tensions between collective and subjective memory are examined more closely through individual films and their intimate connections to the post-war landscape.
Notes
1 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans.by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, London:
Continuum, 2008, p.92.
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2 Akamas was co-produced by Chrysanthou and Turkish-Cypriot director Dervis Zaim.Chrysanthou and Zaim have collaborated as filmmakers in the past, making the documentary film Parallel Trips (Turkey, 2004. For further details regarding the film’s production, political background and media coverage see its official website http://www.akamas-film.com/index.shtml (visited 17 January 2010).
3 David Archibald and Mitchell Miller ‘Introduction’ in Screen , Vol. 52, No. 2 (2011), p.250.
4 Deleuze, Cinema 2, pp.209-210.
5 Deleuze, Cinema 2, pp.209-210.
6 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 263.
7 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p.209-210 and p.213.
8 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p.245.
9 Deleuze, Cinema 2, pp.209-210, citing Franz Kafka’s article in Journal 25 December 1911(and letter to Brod, June 1921).
10 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans.by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2004.
11 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London: Zone Books, 1991.
12
For further details on the geography of the Akamas Peninsula see the “Conservation Management Plan for the Akamas Peninsula’” Mediterranean Environmental Technical Assistance Programme World Bank, September 1995.
13 Chrysanthou in the newspaper Alithia (Truth), 29 May2005.This interview is found on the film’s website www.akamas-film.com/en_fromthe press. shtml (visited 17 January 2010).
14 ‘Movie Stirs Cyprus Passions’ in News.com.au Correspondents in Nicosia, 8 September 2006. See
‘From the Press’ at https://www.akamas-film.com/en (visited 17 January 2010).
15 ‘Movie stirs Cyprus passions’ in News.com.au Correspondents in Nicosia 8th September 2006. See
‘From the Press’ at www.akamas-film.com/en (visited 17 January 2010).
16 ‘Panicos Chrysanthou and Dervis Zaim ‘Call for Support Against Censorship’ in ‘Our News’, 22 November 2006, http://www.akamas-film.com/en (visited 17 January 2014).
17 Chrysanthou and Zaim ‘Call for Support Against Censorship’ (visited 17 January 2010).
18 Stavros Panteli, The Making of Modern Cyprus: From Obscurity to Statehood, London:
Interworld Publications, 1990, p.190.
19 Chrysanthou, in ‘Movie Stirs Cyprus Passions’ (visited 18 January 2010).
20 Constantine Markides, ‘I will go to Venice’ Cyprus Mail, 8August 2006, included in ‘From the Press’ on the film’s website www.akamas-film.com/en.fromthepress (visited 18 January 2010).
21 Markides, ‘I will go to Venice’, Cyprus Mail (visited 18 January 2010).
22 Chrysanthou and Zaim, ‘Call for Support Against Censorship’ (visited 17 January 2010).
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23 Chrysanthou in an interview with Turkish-Cypriot journalist Sevgul Uludag published in the newspaper Alithia (Truth) on the 29 May 2005. This article is also on the film’s website:
www.akamas-film.com/en_fromthepress (Visited 18 January 2010). Sotiris Sampson MP is a Greek-Cypriot member of Parliament for DYSY, a right of centre party. Sampson who is the son of Nicos Sampson, who stepped in to act as President of the Republic of Cyprus in 1974 when the legitimate President, Archbishop Makarios was forced out. This was in July 1974 when right-wing members of EOKA invited help from the military JUNTA in Greece to force an Enosis solution on the island. Sotiris Sampson is also the proprietor of a newspaper called Mahi (Battle).
24 Markides, ‘I will go to Venice’ Cyprus Mail (visited 18 January 2014).
25 News.com.au Correspondents in Nicosia 8th September 2006. Source found on the Akamas official website www.akamas-film.com/en_fromthepress_20060905.shtml (visited 18 January 2010).
26 ‘I will go to Venice’, in ‘From the Press’.www.akamas-film.com/en_from the press (Visited 18 January 2010).
27 Sotiris Sampson’s statement is reported in the Cyprus Mail by John Leonidou on 24 May 2005.
See ‘From the Press’ on the film’s official website: www.akamas-film.com/ (visited 18 January 2010).
28 Crash (David Cronenburg, USA, 1996). Although the BBFC gave it an 18 certificate, the Royal Borough of Westminster banned it from all cinemas in this London borough. For further information on the debates surrounding this film see Martin Barker, Jane Arthurs and Ramaswami Harindrana (eds) The Crash Controversy, London: Wallflower Press, 2001. Subsequent to the Daily Mail’s reporting of the film this has been referred to as the ‘Crash controversy’. Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, USA, 1992) and Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, USA, 1994). Further insights surrounding the debates over Stone’s film are discussed in Empire magazine. See
http://www.empireonline.com/features/history-of-bbfc-in-18-movies/p15 (visited 20 January 2010).
29 Chrysanthou and Zaim, ‘Call for Support Against Censorship’ (visited 17 January 2010).
30 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p.95.
31 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge: London, 1994, p.212.
32 Susan Hayward, ‘Framing National Cinema’, in Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (eds), Cinema and Nation, London: Routledge, 2005, pp.88-103.
33 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p.212.
34 David Martin-Jones, Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity: Narrative Time in National Contexts, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006, p.5.
35 Martin-Jones, Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity, p.3. Here he refers to ‘aberrant time schemes’.
36 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p.221. The reference to ‘sociological organism’ is from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined CommunitiesReflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1991, p.26.
37 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p.203.
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38 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p.95.
39 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p.95.
40 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p.95.
41 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 72.
42 Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp.89-90.
43 Bergson, Matter and Memory, p.102.
44 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p.213. This is a citation by Deleuze from Franz Kafka which he locates in Journal, 25 December 1911 (and letter to Brod, June 1921).
45 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p.1.
46 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p.201.
47Anderson, Imagined Communities, p.193 and p.23.
48 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p.204.
49 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 230.
50 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p.201. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 230.
51 Connerton, How Societies Remember, p.1.
52 Connerton, How Societies Remember, p.1.
53 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p.213.
54 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p.213.Also citing Kafka in Journal 25 December 1911 and June 1921.
55 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p.113.
56 Deleuze, Cinema 2, pp.112-113.
57 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p.113.
58 Deleuze, Cinema 2, pp.113- 114.
59 Deleuze, Cinema 2, pp. 113-114.
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