Experience and Memory in the Films of Wim Wenders

The Mobile Threshold of Memory

Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2000) dramatically demonstrates the impossibility of replacing memory or of reproducing the network that is constitutive of all mnemonic activity. The protagonist has lost his short-term memory after a traumatic experience, and tries to replace it with a veritable cartography of relations and actions—Polaroid photographs (annotated, so he can recognize the people, places, or things in the image), tattoos, written notes he pins up anywhere he can. All this remains inert and ineffectual—an impossible attempt to replicate a network that can never remain fixed, since memory is of the order of the event, and of becoming—a sort of vital sap. By representing the failure of this repeated and desperate attempt to recreate mnemonic processes and associations, substituting them with a network of things, Memento effectively showsthe incessant work of memory, and indirectly reveals its affinity to the film medium. Several—if not all—of German filmmaker Wim Wenders’s films evoke or present a mise-en-scène of this invisible and living dimension of memory, exalting the film’s shared lineage with the process of remembering.