The ghost of the past and memory

Nothing is harder to tell than memory, because it does not come in order and because it lies. Proust built a cathedral on that, Faulkner has the same plantation story told by several voices that contradict each other, Rulfo sends a son into a village where everyone seems to speak from before. Cinema found the corresponding means: four versions of the same crime in a Japanese wood, a hotel where no one can say what happened last year, an old professor who sees his childhood house again.

works 12

• TaleTales of Moonlight and Rain雨月物語Ueda Akinari · 1776Nine fantastic tales of 1776, drawn in part from Chinese collections and transposed to Japan.Literature
• NovelWuthering HeightsEmily Brontë · 1847A servant tells a passing tenant the story of the house next door, and of those who have lived in it.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelThe Turn of the ScrewHenry James · 1898The narrator is the only one who says she sees the apparitions, and her manuscript passes through two hands before reaching the reader, so that nothing guarantees what she reports.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelIn Search of Lost TimeÀ la recherche du temps perduMarcel Proust · 1913Seven volumes that follow a narrator from childhood to the age of writing, in which memory, jealousy and society life are examined under the same magnifying glass.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelAbsalom, Absalom!William Faulkner · 1936The narrative is reconstructed by several narrators, some of whom know the facts only by hearsay.Literature
• NovelThe Makioka Sisters細雪Jun'ichirō Tanizaki · 1948A novel published from 1943 to 1948, following a family of sisters from Ōsaka during the six years before the war.Literature
• CinemaRashomon羅生門Akira Kurosawa · 1950A film from 1950 in which four witnesses tell the same crime in four ways that do not agree.Cinema
• CinemaUgetsu雨月物語Kenji Mizoguchi · 1953Film of 1953 in which two men leave their village in wartime, one to sell, the other to bear arms.Cinema
• NovelPedro PáramoJuan Rulfo · 1955A village peopled by voices, in the rural Mexico of the caciques, where a son goes in search of his father.Literature
• CinemaWild StrawberriesSmultronställetIngmar Bergman · 1957An old man drives towards the town where he is to be honoured, and on the way takes stock of what he has missed.Cinema
• CinemaLast Year at MarienbadL'Année dernière à MarienbadAlain Resnais · 1961A man tells a woman of a shared past of which she keeps no memory.Cinema
• CinemaMirrorЗеркалоAndrei Tarkovsky · 1975A 1975 film built like a memory, in which a man relives his childhood, his mother and his country across three periods.Cinema