Friday, October 5, 2012

Momento/Baudrillard


After watching Momento on Tuesday night I was exhausted. It was a great film in the sense that you couldn’t watch it lazily or you would get lost. It was very interesting and intense. I like how this movie relates to Simulacra, because in the movie Leonard Shelby has this unstable source of history that he operates on for memory. Because he remembers things be photograph he is literally remembering things from the perception of both who took the photo and who wrote the caption. This while notion of his unstable history related to “real” life because our history, especially with the development in media and communication is created or reported through essentially pictures with captions.  An example of this was the ”Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” photo. This picture was used to promote the United States in the army, because we bravely rose our flag during a Battle of Iwo Jima this picture went to win a Pulitzer prize and is imbedded in history as one the greatest war photos. This photo was actually staged a smaller flag was raised and a photographer wanted to retake the picture for Leather Neck magazine. This moment in history was created then captioned to symbolize the winning of the Battle for Iwo Jima (which went on for two months after the picture was taken) this is just an example of the unstable history told through perception. This image was simulated it feigns to have this reality of war, it mask and denatures reality.

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