This film was a comedy which was based around a form of amnesia called anterograde. The film was funny as with all Sandler films but I was trying hard to keep serious and look at the ways memory problems were shown. Unlike Eternal Sunshine there was no visual evidence of how her memory was being affected, instead it was all down to acting to show the removal of a memory.
The film used a video camera to show the main character every morning about her situation. This was the method used to document the past. Almost as if her memories were on a video tape although they were not her own memories. Constructed by her boyfriend and family the video tape was only a reminder to her of how her life was being lived, there were none of her own emotions accept what was being taped. When she kisses her boyfriend on the video tape, every day she had to construct new feelings towards him for a constructed scene.
There were references to the memory condition, but the film called it ‘goldfield’s syndrome’ which I have found out is not a condition at all. This must just have been to keep the movie from getting to serious; after all it is a comedy.
A few people I have spoken to about the movie told me they found her quite annoying forgetting all these amazing memories that she had previously have. This is something I could use in my work. Repetition is a large part of the condition she had. Every day she was living the day she lost her memory, everything repeated just as it was one year ago. This could be something I chose to look at, I immediately think of Warhol’s lino prints when I think of repetition in art. Also in one of my ideas before I started to concentrate on memory I looked at an artist’s piece which used repletion of the eye. In a documentary called ‘Takashi Murakami - Toying with Art’ it explains that Takashi is the next stage of pop art and it directly references his work back to Warhol’s and another artist called Jeff Koons.
Another thing I touch upon when writing my review for Eternal Dream was the dreaming in the film. When she sleeps her ability to organize her long term memory doesn’t work due to her disorder. She is a painter and she paints all these images of her boyfriend, she says they are from her dreams. This means that she doesn’t have a problem with encoding her memories more that she cannot retrieve them. There has been proof that dreaming helps memory which is something I would like to look into for my ideas. I think there is something about dreaming which is similar to a memory.
Memories are not accurate and each person will have a different memory of the same event due to individual senses of the body recording each owns environment. Like dream’s memories can warp and become something they once were not. They are both a non-reality, you can dream that a shirt is red when it is in fact blue, also you might not remember the colour of a shirt and you just add your own colour which could be yellow when in fact it was blue. I think this is also something I would need to do a little more research on but there is something which appeals to me to use in my work.
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