Book reviews

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the factors that influence eyewitness identification accuracy, this turn towards a more philosophi-
cal discussion is unexpected. Indeed, there is little that links this discussion of memory and knowl-
edge to the opening chapters in which more mainstream theories of memory were described. These
links might have helped the reader to feel that he or she had completed a journey through the world
of eyewitness identification accuracy – come full circle, if you will – rather than ending up on a
more philosophical branch.

Conclusion
This book would be extremely useful for specialized postgraduate classes in eyewitness identifica-
tion, such as those provided at certain universities, as these students should have the background
knowledge in cognitive psychology to help them to understand and apply the theories underlying
eyewitness identification. It may also be useful for professionals who are involved in identification
procedures; however, they may not have the desirable background knowledge. Finally, the book
might prove a useful resource for defence lawyers who can use the information to argue that their
clients may not have been accurately identified for a number of reasons. It may also be helpful in
informing lawyers – if they do not know already – about the factors that increase eyewitnesses’
appearance of accuracy, that is, being very confident in their identification of the perpetrator and
reporting their memories of the event in great detail.
The authors have made an excellent attempt at drawing together theory and experimental find-
ings from related, yet often distinct, areas of psychology to give a comprehensive account of eye-
witness identification accuracy and the factors than can increase and decrease this accuracy. It is
designed to go beyond basic textbook entries about eyewitness identification accuracy and exam-
ine the issues in more specific detail. For example, instead of informing the reader that eyewitness
identification accuracy will be poorer when the eyewitness encountered the perpetrator in a situa-
tion with low light (e.g. a poorly lit car park), the book describes the effects of light in substantially
more detail, including the impact on the rods and cones at the back of the eye. For readers wanting
the substance behind the show, this book delivers nicely.

References
Atkinson RC and Shiffrin RM (1968) Human memory: a proposed system and its control processes. In:
Spence KW and Spence JT (eds) The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Volume 2. New York:
Academic Press, pp. 89–195.
Baddeley AD (2000) The episodic buffer: a new component of working memory? Trends in Cognitive
Sciences 4: 417–423.
Wells GL, Small M, Penrod SJ, et al. (1998) Eyewitness identification procedures: recommendations for
lineups and photospreads. Law and Human Behavior 22: 603–647.

Russel JA Kilbourn
Cinema, Memory, Modernity:The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema.
New York: Routledge, 2012. 276 pp. £28.00. ISBN 9780415520300

Reviewed by: Adrián Pérez Melgosa, SUNY Stony Brook

Cinema, Memory, Modernity examines how cinema can illuminate recent theorizations of memory
as an always already mediated process. The book pays special attention to the ethical implications
of this shift from understanding memory as a ‘natural’ process to conceptualizing it as a ‘mediated’
one. Kilbourn aligns his argument along the lines of José van Dijick’s (2007) notion of ‘mediated

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memory’, which emphasizes the inherent prosthetic nature of memory, a fact which is now ren-
dered conspicuous due the growing ubiquity of digital reproduction and archival technologies. But
if van Dijick builds her argument through the analysis of a variety of ‘prosthetic’ memory tech-
nologies (e.g. personal diaries, musical hit lists, computer technology, radio and television pro-
gramming), Cinema, Memory, Modernity radicalizes this insight, arguing that cinema (its narrative,
language and formal conventions) has become the chief prosthetic technology of mediated mem-
ory at least since the end of the Second World War. Cinema, contends Kilbourn, provides its view-
ers with a self-sufficient ‘art of memory’, one that represents the past, models the act of recollection
and teaches its viewers how to use the images it conveys.
Taking a diachronic approach, the book moves from post-war art cinema to contemporary trans-
national films in an effort to show that a key transformation has taken place in the way these films
represent memory. The overarching argument defends that the once transgressive, alternative, and
revolutionary codes of post-war art cinema have now become the raw rhetorical materials employed
by current transnational films. In the process, the book argues, the resistant aesthetics and politics
of post-war art cinema have become incorporated, naturalized and commodified in an ongoing
process that nurtures the construction of a globally shared visual culture. The adherence throughout
the book to this stark binary opposition, between a glorified art cinema from the 1960s and 1970s
and an aesthetically and ideologically devalued transnational cinema of today, becomes at times
too narrow a classification for the rich and cogently deployed theories and the captivating readings
of a variety of films the book provides. Similarly, cinema certainly has occupied a central role both
in disseminating models of memory and in attempting to provide socially unified mnemonic con-
tent, but it is not difficult to demonstrate that it shares these roles with a variety of other technolo-
gies, pedagogies and traditions. These two approaches to the relation of cinema and memory may
represent a special case of what, in a different context, Michael Rothberg (2009: 1–19) has termed
‘competitive memory’, the belief that memory is a limited personal and social resource. If Rothberg
builds his argument over the struggles of several groups to gain public recognition for their histo-
ries of discrimination, Kilbourn puts cinema in competition with other technologies of memory, on
one hand, and on the other hand, he puts art cinema in competition first with commercial and then
with transnational cinema. By contrast, Rothberg proposes that memory is always multidirectional,
a productive process subject to ‘ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing’ (p. 3). A
multidirectional approach to the study of memory in both cinema, and the art-film would reconfig-
ure many of the arguments that Kilbourn opens up in this book, away from a binary framework, to
show how both cinema’s and the art-film’s conceptualizations of memory build their conceptions
of memory through referencing, borrowing and negotiating those of other technologies.
To set up the book’s argument, chapter 1 studies how memory figures in a group of post–Second
World War European art-films from the perspective of two generative observations: the conceptual
connection that film has established between urban-escapes and memory-escapes and the frequent
depiction in classic art-films of psycho-katabases, narratives of agonizing journeys of self-
discovery through the protagonist’s past life. These tropes guide the readings of a surprisingly
diverse group of films including, Orpheus (Jean Cocteau, 1950), Last Year at Marineland (Alain
Resnais, 1961), Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957),
Mirror (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975) and Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987). Kilbourn sees these
films as different modes of narrating memory as a desire to escape time. Thus, in the films from
Cocteau, Hitchcock, Resnais and Bergman, the protagonists use memory as a tool to defeat death.
By contrast, the films of Tarkovsky and Wenders become examples of a post-modern ironic turn to
this struggle with time. For their protagonists, the processes of remembering and the memories
they recall activate a desire for death.

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This shift, characterized as a symptom of a ‘crisis of memory’ becomes the central concern of
chapter 2. The evidence for this crisis comes from the recurrent cinematic representation of the
displacement of memory away from the subject. Given the close connection between memory and
identity, the crisis of memory would be at the root of the current impossibility to articulate coherent
personal and collective identities. To explore this, the book analyses a variety of films, including
blockbusters like the Bourne trilogy and the auteur films Europa (Lars Von Triers, 1991), The
Double Life of Veronique (Krzyzstof Kieślowski, 1991), Exotica (Atom Egoyan, 1994) and Caché
(Michael Haneke, 2005). The threads that connect these films together are their open self-
reflexivity about film technology, and their meta-cinematic allusions to history and memory. Again
the contrast appears between the Bourne trilogy (and by extension Hollywood) and the post-art
cinema films. The former would provide a specific and punctual cause for the crisis of memory, an
original moment of violence that may be resolved once remembered. By contrast, the latter are
more concerned with representing the silences, gaps and illusions created by a culture where mem-
ory is always mediated. The distinction between these two views extends into a critique of current
theorizations of mass culture as a collective prosthetic memory and, therefore, the symptom of a
shared pre-existing social trauma (Landsberg, 2004: 149). While Kilbourn finds useful the connec-
tion between memory and trauma in these theories, he objects to their ‘overtly utopian privileging
of capitalist-consumerist pop culture’ (p. 141). More detailed development of this objection would
help the readers understand how cinema figures within the pop-culture matrix. At times (as in
chapter 1), it seems cinema is a pre-eminent example of the currents that move this fluctuating
realm of pop culture. Other times, some cinema (specifically art cinema) seems to fall out of the
frame of the popular, even when it has gained wide exposure.
Chapter 3 explores how cinema has come to be understood as a universal visual lingua franca,
and the raw material for the emergence of a global memory. The concept of cineliteracy becomes
central to this discussion. Proposed by Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden (2006), it is a means to
refer to the phenomenon by which the expansion of capitalism correlates to an expansion of spe-
cific and standardized image-reading practices. Cineliteracy, argues Kilbourn, implies memory.
While commercial film provides the signs and conventions of this global memory, the current
‘memory art-film’ provides its viewers with an experience of profound defamiliarization with
established and standardized global mnemonic practices. The main case studies for this proposition
are Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002). While incorporating
the stylistically transgressive radical formal and narrative practices of art-films from the 1960s,
these films, argues Kilbourn, neutralize their political content.
Chapter 4 focuses on three films, Lost Highway (David Lynch, 2000), Caché and After Life
(Hirokazy Kore-eda, 1998) as examples of three different responses to the current and ongoing
crisis of memory that Kilbourn identified in chapter 2. The chapter proposes to read these films as
attempts to represent memory as one of three alternatives: hell, purgatory or heaven. Thus, Lynch’s
movie becomes emblematic of a notion of memory as a hermetic, labyrinthine and repetitive space
that generates tortured and self-absorbed subjects. By contrast, Kilbourn reads Caché’s formal
structure as enacting a notion of memory as a space of possible redemption if the subject manages
to correctly navigate the treacherous waters of self-reflexivity. Finally, After Life would present
memory as a subjective choice rooted in complex psychic mechanisms but which ultimately con-
nects each individual to a personalized eternity. These three approaches to memory, concludes
Kilbourn, become evidence that a ‘prosthetic’ transnational memory built upon a globally shared
visual language ‘may or may not enable the individual to confront an ethical responsibility toward
the other’. This is a tentative conclusion which the book promises to resolve in the last chapter
through a reading of City of God as post-memory film.

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Chapter 5 is devoted to an in depth analysis of City of God (Fernando Meirelles and Kathia
Lund, 2002) as an example of the dual modes of reading that critics should use when treating
transnational memory film, a category defined by its use of ‘amped up’ forms of traditional con-
tinuity codes, what Bordwell (2002) has termed an ‘intensified continuity’ (p. 16). Focusing on a
specific example of a film that has circulated widely among a variety of localities and very diverse
audiences allows Kilbourn to reflect on the mystifying effect of a global post-art cinema style that
has become apparently transparent and immediately readable to global audiences. This mirage
flattens up the film’s ability to signify by stripping it of the specificity of its context of production.
The analysis shows how City of God contains a variety of instantiations of memory in its style,
in its narrative and in diegetic objects such as Rocket’s camera. All of these remit the viewer to
a global cinematic language articulated in the wake of and, one could say, upon the ruins of post-
art cinema. This global language, however, contains highly localized references to specific expe-
riences of time, violence and memory that may become illegible as the movie traverses the
international circuit.
City of God becomes emblematic of the current impossibility to differentiate between art and
commercial cinema. The films blurring of the limit between these categories becomes here a symp-
tom of a change in the distribution and distinction of personal and collective memories. ‘In the
twenty-first century all memory is collective memory’ (p. 228), writes Kilbourn, a statement that
carries with it both a nostalgic desire for a time when personal memory was alive, and a hope for
the emergence of alternative spaces of memory within current and future cinematic practices.
Cinema, Memory, Modernity alternates between mourning the passing of the ‘modern’ moment of
art cinema and a feisty denunciation of a global post-modern malaise in which subjective meanings
have become disguised as collectively globalized through an ever-present visuality. While the
implications of this affective framework remain largely outside of the critical scope of the book,
the text’s lament and yearning take the shape of a plethora of original theoretical observations and
provocative analyses of specific films that make the book a very important addition to the study of
memory at the intersection of film and modernity.

References
Bordwell D (2002) Intensified continuity: visual style in contemporary American film. Film Quarterly 55(3):
16–28.
Ezra E and Rowden T (2006) General introduction: what is transnational cinema? In: Ezra E and Rowden T
(eds) Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–11.
Landsberg A (2004) Prosthetic Memories: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass
Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rothberg M (2009) Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Van Dijick J (2007) Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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