MEMORY, LIES & VIDEOTAPE

by Mark Poole

This article was first published on Screenhub, the online journal.

Is an interviewee’s testimony real? What if they are recalling events that happened years ago? And if a slice of their recollection turns out to be false, does this discredit the rest of it?

Professor Janet Walker’s presentation at the Film & History conference entitled “Testimony In The Umbra of Trauma: Film and Video Portraits of Survival” covered this territory. Walker, professor in the Department of Film Studies at the University of California specializes in researching memory, and in particular the effect of trauma on memory.

Professor Walker began her presentation by informing us that, with the possible exception of autistic savant Stephen Wiltshire, known for his phenomenally accurate drawings of buildings and cityscapes created from memory, “hindsight is a frayed and baggy proposition.”

Apparently, forgetting is a necessary component in the construction of memory, as Marita Sturken put it. And where the experience of traumatic events is part of the picture, complications arise. While research has shown that memory for traumatic events can be extremely truthful, it is also clear that the components of traumatic memory exist in an altered and exaggerated state. The problem is, Walker told us, there appears to be no way to distinguish between real and pseudo memory in the ‘mise en scene of the mind.’ Further, traumatic events  can and do catalyse the very amnesias and mistakes in memory that are then perceived as undermining the legitimacy of a victim’s accounts. Walker terms this the ‘traumatic paradox.’

It seems that for people who have suffered some traumatic event such as the Holocaust, or child sexual abuse, their mind is likely to twist, blend and defocus aspects of their memory of that event in an attempt to come to terms with it.

This obviously poses problems for the judicial system, which recognizes lapses and gaps in memory as everyday events. Indeed, there are passages in the California Jury Instructions that state: “Failure of recollection is common. Innocent misrecollection is not uncommon.” Yet this doesn’t prevent the recent spectacle of the Michael Jackson trial, where the counsel for the defence discredited the testimony of one of the witnesses by putting holes in various remembered instances. Yet the academic research tells us that a child witness who has suffered sexual assault is highly likely to distort his memory of that event, and this tends to prove that sexual assault took place, rather than prove that it didn’t.

So while experts in memory function are building a complex model of how our brains function, the general public still seems more inclined to dismiss the entire testimony of a person whose recollection of some details can be demonstrated to be false.

And what of the avalanche of video testimony that is being accumulated worldwide? Should we regard video testimony as the whole truth, the truth in part, or a breeding ground for distortions and misrememberances?

Currently, Professor Walker reminded us, there is a vast interest in the video testimonial. The Shoah Foundation Institute at the University of Southern California has taped 52,000 interviews with Holocaust survivors and refugees, to create an “historically valuable archive.” It would take someone viewing the archive 13 years to view it all, even if they watched it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And documentary filmmakers have rediscovered the talking head, realizing the probative powers of testimony in the direct address documentary.

But how do audiences perceive such testimonials? They are presented as if every word contained in them is true, yet since they are people who have experienced extreme trauma, this is unlikely to be the case. Not that this matters, perhaps. So what if someone remembers four chimneys at Auchwitz when there was only one? Or even if someone else recalls a conveyor belt which took people to the ovens, when it actually didn’t exist. This is the mind of the trauma victim reconstructing horrific events in order to overcome them.

Walker showed us a number of clips that ably demonstrated her points. One of the most interesting was of a woman who recalled how she had responded to her mother by shunning her, citing a film about Anne Frank as an illustration. The Anne Frank film hadn’t been made until 20 years after the event she was  talking about had taken place, yet the woman’s testimony clearly merged her memory of the ‘real’ event with the filmic reference.

To conclude, Walker reiterated her view that more research into what audiences take away with them when they view testimony in a documentary, to what extent they accept that an occasional memory lapse does not disqualify the veracity of the remainder of the material, and whether they realize that errors of memory in a trauma victim may well prove that they did in fact experience that trauma, rather than the reverse.

A fascinating trip down memory lane.