Film Studies
Jacques Aumont

Is the cinema really just a mechanism for saving significant stories? For this is how it is perceived in the collective memory. Jacques Aumont, on the other hand, sees the cinema more as a mechanism for forgetting. Reality cannot be completely reproduced in films with the power of the images that emerge from them. “It is perhaps no coincidence that so many films use the amnesia scenario and variations of it”, wrote Aumont in an essay. “Because cinema is an instrument for forgetting, it can truly play its role in the end as a memory of past events and things of the world – quite simply, because the memory is not a treasure that is endlessly collected, rather it is an endless process.”