Reality/Fiction, Remembering/Working Through Experience and Language in Films

My lecture takes its cue from the specific memory of an episode which dates back to when I was ten or eleven years old. It is probably a Deckerinnerung, a Freudian term which translates in French as souvenir-écran and in English as screen-memory. Both translations — referring as they do to the screen — are more easily associable to the cinema than the German term Deckerinnerung, or, for that matter, the Italian ricordo di copertura. However, it is not my intention to speak about what either my memory or the film screen hide, but rather, simply to evoke the memory of an event that really took place. The episode is connected for me as a child to the almost initiatory revelation that the cinema is not experiencing reality, but that it is fiction endowed with its own, highly specific language and is in the end a product deliberately made by certain individuals for the benefit of other human beings. Film creates its own perceptive reality, on a screen which superimposes itself on the natural reality of habitual experience, suspending it and even hiding it temporarily.

The episode from my childhood is the following. The father of a classmate of mine, an engineer, had brought the two of us to see a film at the local town cinema. I have no recollection of the film itself, but I do remember clearly what happened at the cinema. During the whole film it was clear that my friend's father could not follow the plot, as he kept asking his son, in a most insistent and irritating manner, for explanations of what had happened on the screen, where a story was being acted out, of which he was unable to grasp the meaning.

The discovery of this cinematographic illiteracy in an adult — which indicated a sort of agnosia related to works of fiction — came as a great surprise to me, and led me to reflect deeply on this matter. My own father — unlike my friend's — loved films and was a competent cinemagoer; as to myself, I had no trouble understanding the film at an elementary level. How could