Rice Cinema’s Dove to speak about film and memory

Rice Cinema’s Dove to speak about film and memory

BY PATRICK McLAUGHLIN
Rice News staff

Charles Dove, director of Rice Cinema, will present “Impossible Memory: Cinema, History, Information (on Chris Marker’s ‘San Soleil’)” at 4 p.m. April 22. The lecture is sponsored by Scientia and will be held in McMurtry Auditorium, Anne and Charles Duncan Hall.

CHARLES DOVE

A transitory experience held in darkness, cinema has always had a troubled relationship with memory. With the historic changes in technology and distribution beginning in the early 1980s, cinema altered its course and therefore its relationship with memory. A viewer’s memories of a film may once have been embellished with mistakes, imaginings or misrecognitions. Now the viewer can have the film itself at hand in tape, disk or electronic form to confirm or negate the memory.

Film essayist Chris Marker explores these early days of the emergence of this new media and its implications for human survival in his study of human survival, “Sans Soleil.” In the movie, a filmmaker writes a series of letters about his travels and his feelings toward the footage he has shot, received and carefully pieced together. Memory, in Marker’s film, is filtered through ceremony, photography and other media.

The lecture is free and open to the public. A reception will follow the colloquium.

Scientia is an institute of Rice University faculty founded in 1981 by the mathematician and historian of science Salomon Bochner. Scientia provides an opportunity for scholarly discussion across disciplinary boundaries. Its members and fellows come from a widerange of academic disciplines. To learn more about the lecture and Scientia, go to www.ruf.rice.edu/~scientia.