Nietzsche, blessed are those who forget. Aphorisms, quotes, statements of great people on the topic of error. Any discussion about love destroys love
Beauty is harmony; it is the key to peace...
Any discussion about love destroys love...
They were students. They loved each other...
They were students.
They loved each other.
A room of eight meters - why not a family home?!
Sometimes preparing for tests,
Above a book or notepad
Often the two of them sat until late at night.
She got tired easily
And if I suddenly fell asleep,
He washed dishes under the tap and swept the room.
Then, trying not to make noise
And shy glances,
Secretly behind a closed door, I washed my clothes at night.
But who will deceive the neighbors -
He will probably become a magician.
Their friendly swarm of wasps buzzed above the steam of the pan.
They called her "lazy"
His - sarcastically - "mistress",
They sighed that the guy was a doormat and that his wife was under his thumb.
They became engineers.
Years passed without quarrels and sadness.
But happiness is a capricious thing, sometimes as unstable as smoke.
After the meeting, on Saturday,
Returning home from work,
He once found his wife kissing someone else.
There is no sharper pain in the world.
It would be better to die, or something!
He stood in the doorway for a minute, staring into space.
Didn't listen to explanations
Didn't bother to sort things out
He didn’t take a ruble or a shirt, but silently stepped back...
For a week the kitchen was humming:
"Tell me which Othello!
Well, I kissed, I made a mistake... The blood jumped a little!..
But he didn’t forgive - did you hear?”
Philistines! They didn't even know
That maybe this is what true love is like!
If you peer into an abyss for a long time, the abyss begins to peer into you.
Blessed are those who forget, for they do not remember their own mistakes. - “Beyond Good and Evil”
In the end, no one can learn more from things, including books, than he already knows. - “Ecce Homo. How they become themselves" (1886)
In essence, between religion and real science there is neither affinity, nor friendship, nor enmity: they are at different poles.
Great is the one who gave the direction.
“Love your neighbor” means first of all: “Leave your neighbor alone!” “And it is precisely this detail of virtue that is associated with the greatest difficulties.
Where the crowd drinks, all the springs are poisoned. - “Thus spoke Zarathustra”
Our duty is a right that others have over us.
Heroism is the good will to absolute self-destruction.
The dominance of virtue can be achieved only with the help of the same means by which dominance is generally achieved, and, in any case, not through virtue. - “The will to power”
Giving everyone his own would mean: wanting justice and achieving chaos.
Being immortal pays off dearly: for this you die alive more than once.
There is a degree of inveterate deceit that is called “clear conscience.”
Life is a source of joy; but in whom the spoiled stomach, the father of sorrow, speaks, for him all the springs are poisoned.
The earth, he said, has a shell; and this shell is affected by diseases. One of these diseases is called, for example: “man”.
My method of retribution is to send something smart after stupidity as soon as possible: in this way, perhaps, I can still catch up with it.
Our suicides discredit suicide - not the other way around.
It is not your sin - your self-righteousness cries to heaven; the insignificance of your sins cries to heaven!
The same thing happens to a person as to a tree. The more he strives upward, towards the light, the deeper his roots go into the ground, downwards, into darkness and depth - towards evil.
Those who fight monsters should take care not to become a monster themselves.
“We have found happiness,” the last people say, and blink.
Man is a dirty stream. - "Thus spoke Zarathustra"
Man is something that must be surpassed. - “Thus spoke Zarathustra”
Humanity is not developing in the direction of better, higher, stronger - in the sense that they think today. Progress is simply a modern, that is, false, idea. The European of our days is incomparably lower in value than the European of the Renaissance...
I don't trust taxonomists and avoid them. The will to the system is a lack of honesty.
The most erroneous conclusions people make are the following: a thing exists, therefore it has a right to it. - “Human, all too human”
There are two ways to free you from suffering: quick death and lasting love.
He who knows himself is his own executioner.
Death is close enough that there is no need to fear life.
Long and great suffering brings up a tyrant in a person.
I hate people who don't know how to forgive.
The danger of the wise is that he is most susceptible to the temptation of falling in love with the foolish.
The desire for greatness is clear: whoever has greatness strives for kindness.
Whoever wants to become a leader of people must, for a good period of time, be known among them as their most dangerous enemy.
When skepticism and longing combine, mysticism arises.
What a believer most hates most is not a free mind, but a new mind with a new faith.
The cruelty of an insensitive person is the antithesis of compassion; the cruelty of the sensitive is a higher potency of compassion.
A person forgets his guilt when he confesses it to another, but the latter usually does not forget it.
The whole world believes in it; but what the whole world doesn’t believe!
A free mind requires foundations, while others require only faith.
Anyone who has a Why to live will be able to withstand almost any How.
Life would be a mistake without music.
One must still carry chaos within oneself in order to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
*
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
(Material from Wikiquote)
Other articles in the literary diary:
- 08/28/2010. From Molpoix
- 08/23/2010. Two poems
- 08/16/2010. Ridiculous, funny, reckless, crazy - magical!..
- 08/14/2010. A spoken thought is a lie
- 08/11/2010. Emptiness of space is filled with love...
- 07.08.2010. And the wise man says...
- 08/03/2010. Farewell song
- 08/02/2010. Vain words
- 08/01/2010. I miss you...
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There is nothing completely wrong in the world - even a broken clock shows the exact time twice a day.
Paulo Coelho
The mirror reflects correctly; it does not make mistakes, because it does not think. To think is almost always to be wrong.
Paulo Coelho
An adversary who reveals your mistakes is much more useful than a friend who hides them.
Leonardo da Vinci
Never be afraid to make mistakes - you don’t have to be afraid of hobbies or disappointments. Disappointment is a payment for something previously received, sometimes it may be disproportionate, but be generous. Just be careful not to generalize your disappointment and don’t color everything else with it. Then you will gain the strength to resist the evils of life and correctly appreciate its good sides.
Alexander Green
The worst mistake you can make in life is to be afraid of making a mistake all the time.
Elbert Hubbard
They learn from their mistakes, and make a career from others.
Mikhail Zhvanetsky
Any passion pushes you to make mistakes, but love pushes you to the stupidest ones.
Francois La Rochefoucauld
Many men, having fallen in love with a dimple, mistakenly marry the whole girl.
Stephen Leacock
Just a few years ago she still complained about herself, was still capable of heroic deeds, but now she has learned to adapt to her own mistakes. She knew that the same thing happens to other people: they get used to their mistakes and mistakes to such an extent that they gradually begin to confuse them with their merits. And then it’s too late to change anything in your life.
Paulo Coelho
The only real mistake is not correcting your past mistakes.
Confucius
My mistake was that I expected fruit from a tree that could only bear flowers.
Honoré Mirabeau
To err is human, to forgive is divine.
Alexander Pope
You can always forgive yourself for mistakes if you only have the courage to admit them.
Be more tolerant of other people's mistakes. Perhaps you yourself were born by mistake.
Alexander Kumor
Listeners who are too smart are boring to deal with. They think they know everything, and they are wrong.
Dmitry Yemets
Every woman's mistake is a man's fault.
Johann Herder
Making a mistake and realizing it is wisdom. Realizing a mistake and not hiding it is honesty.
Close the door to all error and truth cannot enter.
Rabindranath Tagore
Anyone who thinks that he can do without others is greatly mistaken; but he who thinks that others cannot do without him is even more mistaken.
Francois La Rochefoucauld
He who does nothing never makes mistakes.
Theodore Roosevelt
A man who does not make mistakes receives orders from those who do.
Herbert Procnow
Everyone calls their own mistakes experience.
Oscar Wilde
Anyone who deeply examines his soul catches himself making mistakes so often that he inevitably becomes modest. He is no longer proud of his enlightenment, he does not consider himself superior to others.
Claude-Adrian Helvetius
To make mistakes is the property of man, to forgive is the property of the gods.
Alexander Pope
Do you want to win your mentor's favor? Give him the opportunity to correct your mistake from time to time.
Wieslaw Brudzinski
Archery teaches us how to seek the truth. When a shooter misses, he does not blame others, but looks for the blame in himself.
Confucius
It is much easier to find error than truth.
Johann Goethe
The mistake is from God. So don't try to fix the mistake. On the contrary, try to understand it, penetrate its meaning, and get used to it. And liberation will come.
Salvador Dali
If any chance is even one percent higher than others, try it. Like in chess. They put you in check - you run away. And while you are running away, the enemy may make a mistake. After all, no one is immune from mistakes, even the strongest players...
Haruki Murakami
There is no shame in admitting to a person your mistake.
Catherine II
In life, everyone must make their own mistakes.
Agatha Christie
Nature never makes mistakes: if she gives birth to a fool, it means she wants it.
Henry Shaw
Admitting your mistakes is the highest courage.
Alexander Bestuzhev
Experience is the sum of mistakes made, as well as mistakes that, alas, were not possible to make.
Francoise Sagan
When you finally realize that your father was usually right, you yourself have a son growing up convinced that his father is usually wrong. If you don't learn from your mistakes, there's no point in making them.
Lawrence Peter
We do not need to step on the same rake that we already had.
Victor Chernomyrdin
I won't refuse to live my life again from beginning to end. I will only ask the rights enjoyed by the authors to correct the errors of the first in the second edition.
Benjamin Franklin
The weak are often cruel, because they stop at nothing to eliminate the consequences of their mistakes.
George Halifax
It's better to make mistakes with everyone than to be smart alone.
Marcel Achard
Those who admit mistakes too easily are rarely able to correct themselves.
Maria-Ebner Eschenbach
Our mistake often lies not in what we did, but in our regret about what we did...
Samuel Butler
A truly thinking person draws as much knowledge from his mistakes as from his successes.
John Dewey
Only those who do nothing make no mistakes. But doing nothing is a mistake.
Emil Krotky
Blessed are those who forget, for they do not remember their own mistakes.
Friedrich Nietzsche
You should not be timid for fear of making mistakes; the biggest mistake is to deprive yourself of experience.
Luc Vauvenargues
We dye our hair a different color each time so as not to make the same mistake twice.
Yanina Ipohorskaya
None of us would tolerate mistakes like ours from others.
Oscar Wilde
We easily forget our mistakes when they are known only to us.
Francois La Rochefoucauld
We don't like to be pitied for the mistakes we've made.
Luc Vauvenargues
There are people who don't make mistakes. These are those who others think for.
Henryk Jagodzinski
The biggest mistake is trying to be nicer than you are.
Walter Bagehot
It is better to make a mistake yourself than to point out the mistake to your husband.
George Halifax
Our main mistake is not that we believe that women love us, but that we believe that we love them.
Sasha Guitry
The mistake of one is a lesson for another.
All people make mistakes, but great people admit to mistakes.
Bernard Fontenelle
Bertrand Russell
There is only one innate error - this is the belief that we are born for happiness.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Even if everyone has the same opinion, everyone can be wrong.
Bertrand Russell
Never point out mistakes unless you know how to fix them.
George Shaw
How clearly people understand their mistakes is evident from the fact that, when talking about their behavior, they always know how to present it in a noble light.
Francois La Rochefoucauld
In most disputes one can notice one mistake: while the truth lies between the two views defended, each of the latter moves further away from it, the more passionately it argues.
Rene Descartes
“Do you think I’m an idiot?” - “No, but I could be wrong.”
Tristan Bernard
I know that I am fallible and often make mistakes, and I will not be angry with someone who wants to warn me in such cases and show me my mistakes.
Peter the Great
You can become perfect at making the same mistake.
Alexander Kumor
Are we not making the mistake of a child who hits the chair he bumps into when driving around a murderer?
Georg Lichtenberg
Others imagine that they know a bird with complete certainty if they have seen the egg from which it hatched.
Heinrich Heine
The teacher said: “My case seems hopeless. I have never met a person who, knowing about his mistakes, would admit his guilt to himself.”
Confucius
It is not correcting a mistake, but persisting in it that brings down the honor of any person or organization of people.
Benjamin Franklin
People's mistakes in their calculations of gratitude for services rendered occur because the pride of the giver and the pride of the recipient cannot agree on the price of the benefit.
Francois La Rochefoucauld
Nothing teaches you more than realizing your mistake. This is one of the main means of self-education.
Thomas Carlyle
Fear of the possibility of error should not deter us from seeking the truth.
Claude-Adrian Helvetius
A mistake in life is an offense that did not bring pleasure.
Sidonie Colette
Woe to the people who never make mistakes: they are always wrong.
Charles Lin
If it is true that humanity learns from its mistakes, a bright future awaits us.
Lawrence Peter
The smartest thing in life is still death, for only it corrects all the mistakes and stupidities of life.
Vasily Klyuchevsky
The greatest mistake that is usually made in education is not teaching youth to think independently.
Gotthold Lessing
People rarely commit one indiscretion. The first indiscretion is always to do too much. That is why they usually do a second one - and this time they do too little...
Friedrich Nietzsche
Moving among scientists and artists, it is very easy to make a mistake in the opposite direction: often in a remarkable scientist we find a mediocre person, and in a mediocre artist we very often find an extremely remarkable person.
Friedrich Nietzsche
What a mistake it is to want to destroy something from which you cannot benefit.
Bernard Werber
It is much easier to find an error than the truth. The error lies on the surface, and you notice it immediately, but the truth is hidden in the depths, and not everyone can find it.
Johann Goethe
The most disastrous mistake that has ever been made in the world is the separation of political science from moral science.
Percy Shelley
By digging up errors, they waste time that, perhaps, would be used to discover truths.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Truth spoken without love creates error.
Gilbert Sesbron
It doesn’t take much to notice mistakes: giving something better is what befits a worthy person.
Mikhail Lomonosov
Dictate unintelligibly so that you reserve the right to decide who made a mistake.
Wieslaw Brudzinski
The incorrect use of words leads to errors in the field of thought and then in practical life.
Dmitry Pisarev
A successful person is a person who makes others pay for his own mistakes.
Gilbert Sesbron
Those who think that a people undergoing a revolution can be easily defeated are mistaken; on the contrary, he is able to defeat others.
Charles Montesquieu
A reprehensible mistake is made by those who do not take into account their capabilities and strive for conquest at any cost.
Niccolo Machiavelli
Of those who are close to you, encourage not those who praise everything you have done, but those who severely scold you for your mistakes.
Basil the Macedonian
Women are no less capable of making mistakes.
Lawrence Peter
Old bugs often cost more to fix than new ones.
Wieslaw Brudzinski
He who has stopped loving and making mistakes can bury himself alive.
Johann Goethe
A scientist is like a mimosa when he notices his own mistake, and a roaring lion when he discovers someone else's mistake.
Albert Einstein
The fact that people do not learn from the mistakes of history is the most important lesson of history.
Aldous Huxley
To avoid mistakes and disappointments, always consult with your wife before starting an affair.
Edgar Howe
A fool who accidentally tells the truth is still wrong.
Our greatest mistake today is that we always confuse two opposite positions with one another and consider them to be one position. One of them is science, and the other is faith...
Mirza Akhundov
When the mind gives way to impulse or anger and blind rage insults a friend by action or word, then later neither tears nor sighs are able to correct the mistakes.
Ludovico Ariosto
Shyness may be appropriate everywhere, but not in admitting one’s mistakes.
Gotthold Lessing
Truth is a perfect mistake, just as health is a perfect disease.
A punctual person makes all his mistakes exactly on time.
Lawrence Peter
Getting angry means taking out the mistakes of another on yourself.
Alexander Pope
No mistake costs us as little as prophecy.
Oscar Wilde
Tolerance is when you forgive other people's mistakes; tact - when they don't notice them.
Arthur Schnitzler
A great man is judged only by his main deeds, and not by his mistakes.
When you write from dictation, your individuality can only be shown through mistakes.
Wieslaw Brudzinski
You can blame the mistakes of a great man, but you shouldn’t blame the man himself because of them.
Georg Lichtenberg
Great people make mistakes too, and some of them so often that you are almost tempted to consider them insignificant people.
Georg Lichtenberg
The present is a consequence of the past, and therefore constantly turn your gaze to your backside, which will save you from significant mistakes.
Kozma Prutkov
It is a big mistake to think that a sense of duty and compulsion can help one find joy in looking and searching.
Albert Einstein
In order for one person to discover a fruitful truth, it is necessary for a hundred people to burn their lives to ashes in unsuccessful searches and sad mistakes.
Dmitry Pisarev
Almost all of our mistakes are essentially of a linguistic nature. We create difficulties for ourselves by inaccurately describing the facts. So, for example, we call different things the same and, conversely, we give different definitions to the same thing.
Aldous Huxley
Humans tend to make mistakes. Only those who admire us are not mistaken.
Oliver Hassenkamp
In politics, as in grammar, the mistake that everyone makes is proclaimed the rule.
Andre Malraux
Let people make any mistakes to their detriment, just to avoid the worst misfortune - submission to someone else's will.
Luc Vauvenargues
People are unaware of mistakes they don't make.
Samuel Johnson
In the rapture of victory, mistakes are forgotten and extremes arise.
Gilbert Chesterton
If two mistakes do not bring results, try the third.
Lawrence Peter
The greatest mistake in parenting is excessive haste.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Experience allows us to recognize a mistake every time we repeat it.
Franklin Jones
What a pity that we do not live long enough to benefit from the lessons of our mistakes.
Jean La Bruyère
Many would rather consider it a virtue to repent of mistakes than to try to avoid them.
Georg Lichtenberg
One of our most disastrous mistakes is to spoil a good deed by poorly implementing it.
William Penn
“Would you give your life for your beliefs?” - "Of course no. After all, I could be wrong.”
Bertrand Russell
Who would deny that all people are desperate lovers of truth, because they so openly and sincerely repent of their mistakes, and not a day goes by that they do not contradict themselves.
Jonathan Swift
I respect all kinds of deviations from common sense: the more ridiculous the mistakes a person makes in your presence, the more likely it is that he will not betray or outwit you.
Charles Lamb
There are few mistakes less excusable than the means to which we resort to conceal them.
Francois La Rochefoucauld
Philosophy studies the erroneous views of people, and history studies their erroneous actions.
Philip Guedalla
Each person has his own special way of making mistakes, especially since mistakes often lie in misunderstood accuracy.
Georg Lichtenberg
When we become clear enough to correct our own mistake, we begin to see the danger involved.
George Halifax
Perhaps two errors fighting each other are more fruitful than one truth reigning supreme.
Jean Rostand
People are much less mistaken when they admit their ignorance than when they imagine themselves to know everything that they really do not know.
Joseph Renan
The human race is a mistake. Without him, the universe would be infinitely more beautiful.
Bertrand Russell
The mistakes of young people are an inexhaustible source of experience for those who are older.
Wieslaw Brudzinski
The husband, like the government, should never admit to mistakes.
“Blessed are those who forget, for they do not remember their own mistakes.” A quote from Friedrich Nietzsche can be found in any collection of aphorisms. Indeed, the imperfections of memory have their own—and, let us note, considerable—advantages.
“The Man Without a Past”, 2002, dir. A. Kaurismäki
Perfect memory as perfect beauty is, to say the least, unviable. In Claude Chabrol's The Monstrous Decade, a tale of amnesiac failure, the thunder hero played by Orson Welles tells an anecdote about a scientist whose beloved, a girl of unprecedented beauty, had only one flaw - a mole. The speck drove the scientist so crazy that he did not give up hope of eliminating it with the help of some miraculous remedy. One fine day, a scientist invented an elixir that was supposed to rid the girl of the mark. After long hours of argument and persuasion, the girl listened to her lover, drank the solution, and gradually the mole disappeared. The beauty herself died along with her.
No one can retain in memory everything down to the last detail, down to the smallest meaningless moment. Childhood is hidden in the haze. Misfortunes are clouded. Memory is gaps, doubts and dreams. Often - illusions, petrified in our eyes by an undeniable truth, a lie, remembered as the truth. These shortcomings and omissions make human memory a unique and living system. Perfect memory is a computer hard drive, understandable, logical, devoid of aberrations and approximations. Ordered and therefore dead.
And yet, why is any ambiguity that arises in the human brain so frightening? Does a break in the event thread provoke immediate recall? And a person who has forgotten even the smallest thing wrinkles his forehead, frowns and is indignant about the fact that has disappeared from his head?
Order in memory guarantees order in social connections: name, address, phone number, knowledge of friends and relatives, who are the essence of society - go beyond these limits, and you seem to be a nobody. So, a free atom in an infinite void. Here it would be good to mention the “Wait for Me” program and the tears of happiness in the eyes of the lost ones found. I don’t want to believe it, but it seems that leaving the social network is truly unbearable. He who has forgotten is ready to do anything to cling again to the body of common existence.
“Speak, memory!” we ask, signaling that each person is nothing more or less than a collection of memories. Pleasant, bitter, amazing, scary, unique, and more often, probably, ordinary. Memory is the main human obsession, and fixation on it is explained not only by the desire to clearly imagine what rank, rank, name you are in and what you did yesterday from nine to eleven. Remembering means connecting the past and the present. And “not remembering” means losing the past, risking losing the future. Falling away from memory, like falling away from the past, dooms one to construct a new life, a new (sometimes phantom) yesterday, and then an illusory one today, impossible in a different situation tomorrow. This is how the heroes of science fiction films about time travel change the future. Once you undo something in the past (read: forget), reality in the future mutates irreparably and unpredictably.
Unconsciousness, therefore, is a guaranteed way to deform, if not the surrounding space, then at least oneself - this way you can adapt to reality. Reset the accounts at once, reset them to zero, press the reset button. Not evolution, but revolution, which man fears and secretly desires. It should be better further. “February is a busy month because of Valentine’s Day,” says the doctor who runs Lacuna, an office that relieves clients of hateful memories (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” 2004). Who hasn't dreamed of erasing failed love from their memory? Although, there are probably more unpleasant things.
Oblivion is necessary. The persistence of Odysseus, striving for Penelope’s weaving thread of memory, is understandable and commendable, but even more understandable is the desire of his companions to taste the lotus that gives oblivion. If the past weighs heavily, how not to become a lotophage? Refusal of memory promises a life of a clean slate, a chance to escape. The world caught me, but did not catch me - almost every noir hero dreams of this. Heroes with strong fists, steep chins and scorched hearts had a lot to forget. Some fled from the law (“I’m a Gang Fugitive,” 1932), others from former acquaintances (“Out of the Past,” 1947), trying to get lost under other people’s names and biographies in the vast American space. It was in noirs that amnesia (as a mental state) grew from an amusing genre device (as, say, in Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator”) into a phenomenon of truly epic proportions. It is good to run of your own free will, but when unconsciousness hits you uncontrollably, it is a personal catastrophe, a trauma that turns life into a nightmare. Who are you? What is your name? Who is your friend? How did you spend yesterday? The eternally hungover hero of the noir asked himself these questions, waking up in a pool of blood next to a cold corpse. Often female. I was drunk, I don’t remember anything... If memory is the only witness to your innocence, losing it is especially unpleasant.
“Remember”, 2000, dir. K. Nolan
Memory games were an indispensable element for noir. “Remembering” as a process is very reminiscent of a criminal investigation with endless interrogations and collection of evidence. Memory is the perfect indictment, and it is no coincidence that noir is fixated on such a device as the flashback. A flash, a glow, a momentary glimpse - yes, I remember! Remembering, like visiting the dentist, is both necessary and scary. For all the heroes of the black series - private detectives, spies, assorted femmes fatales - the past, at best, seems like a black hole into which one should not look (Mr. Arkadin, 1955); at worst, it really is.
Over the past two decades, from a genre device exploited only by dark detective stories and tear-jerking TV series (every nation has its own Budulai), amnesia has suddenly turned into a topical plot. The revival of noir in the 80s seemed to open the gates through which amnesiac cranks burst into simple comedies, big-budget science fiction and modest European dramas. Even film spies, who by their profession seem to be obliged to remember everything, had to reformat. The James Bond of the new era, codenamed Jason Bourne, kills with the words: “I don’t know who I am or where I’m going,” and after him this mantra is repeated by a crowd of heroes who are ready to do anything to discover traces of their connection with an unfamiliar space.
Amnesia takes people out of context, pushing them to find a new life, and one would like to interpret the mass unconsciousness of screen characters as an unequivocal recognition: the usual algorithms for interacting with space do not work in the modern world. We need to come up with new ones. You have to survive somehow. The protagonist of the acclaimed thriller about memory loss “Memento” (2000), for example, sees precisely in his mental illness a way to adequately talk with others. In a hyper-fast society of instant coffee, instant pictures and instant connections, short-term memory failures seem to be beneficial. The disease gives the hero the opportunity to edit instant memories, remembering only what he wants to remember. But it's good to have something to edit. What if you don’t remember anything at all?
Not everyone will be able to overcome the fear of a “blank slate” in order to write at least a couple of fresh words, as, say, what happens in “The Man Without a Past” (2002) by Aki Kaurismäki, where the hero, thanks to memory loss, is reborn to a new, better life. More often, the lost one is left to wander as a somnambulist in a space incomprehensible to him. An example of the latter is Schultes (Schultes, 2008). Already an outsider by name and accent, this hero, thanks to a mind game, becomes a true outsider. Cut off from the past, he feels more acutely and involuntarily forces the viewer to plunge headlong into the muddy river of the present. The same delegate of pure reason in a distorted world was once the tsarist non-commissioned officer Filimonov, who was looking for his wife in the not exactly hostile, but incomprehensible space of Soviet Russia (“A Fragment of the Empire”, 1929).
The best maps of the area are drawn with a fresh mind. The scouts of unconsciousness are chosen in a world that has undergone a serious upheaval. You need to look around, understand what's what. It is significant that the main suppliers of shell-shocked people in the cinema of the 20th century were two world wars (only on our list are “Wreck of the Empire”, “The Great Dictator”, “Enchanted”, “The High Wall”, “The Long Sunday Engagement”). The military operations that erase the boundaries of the old world today are not measured by the advances and retreats of armies and the length of great fronts. Even such a “geopolitical” catastrophe, as our Prime Minister put it, like the collapse of the “USSR” project (amnesiac passengers of the “Armavir” Abdrashitov-Mindadze floated out from under it) does not look so large-scale in comparison with the changes that the breakthrough promises us into virtual space.
Memory adapts itself to the requirements of the electronic environment. Once upon a time, manuscripts did not burn, but if they did, the glow of their fire was remembered for a very long time. Now the time has come when the safety of memory is determined by the save and delete buttons. It's simple: ok or cancel. Digital evolution has made memory the property of the computer and the Internet, which, of course, remembers better than the human head - there is a search engine for every forgotten thing. To manipulate memory, hypnosis, psychotropic drugs and other antediluvian means are no longer needed. It is enough to simply edit entries in an online diary or change the content of a personal page on a social network. Everything is reversible.
Information and memory have always been fragile matters, but today they have completely turned into something ephemeral. Modern man, like the hero of Philip K. Dick, does not wake up with the question: “Who am I?” He lives with this question. He does not crave a change of fate and is not afraid that the familiar world, having fallen into unconsciousness, will suddenly ripple. What to strive for and what to fear? He is already living a different, virtual (which in translation, let us remember, means “real”) life in the vastness of electronic networks. Tweaking your memory and editing reality. In the evening, freed from real (is it real?) life, an ordinary clerk can be a socialite and a salon philosopher, a columnist for an economic newspaper can be a fashionable poet, and an exemplary housewife can be a warrior of light with a damask sword at his right hand. The question “to forget or to remember?” Today it is no longer installed. And if it is staged, it turns out like in “The Matrix” (1999). There are two pills: if you eat the blue one, you will forget yourself as usual; if you eat the red one, you will have to forget everything that happened.
SHARP OF THE EMPIRE, 1929, Friedrich Ermler
1918 Civil war, winter darkness, a military train, near which horses, people, and dead bodies were mixed in a heap. The train leaves, and among the barefoot corpses left behind, one is found, booted and alive. Shell-shocked at the front of the First World War, an unconscious man with a tangled beard drags a barely breathing serviceman by the legs. Next is gluing. Ten years of darkness. 1928 Peace and tranquility. The brass station bell rings rhythmically, the sign on the platform has a dignified shine. A bedraggled, lost bearded man suddenly wakes up from unconsciousness, seeing a vaguely familiar female face in the window of a passing train. Memories come flooding back to him all at once. The sewing machine rumbles with machine-gun shots, the St. George's Cross flashes as a reminder of how he fraternized with the Germans on the front line. The name and rank come up: non-commissioned officer Filimonov.
Having appointed the lost non-commissioned officer as a spy for the new system, Friedrich Ermler expects from him not so much an impartial testimony about the beauty of the new life, but rather confirmation of the irreversibility of socialist changes. Making the sign of the cross, the messenger of the old world must travel all the way to Leningrad in order to take a neophyte’s look at the young Soviet country and recognize the rightness of renouncing the past. There are no more security guards, the factories belong to the workers, and in everyday life there are continuous advantages. With awkwardness you remember the rootless Bender, who at about the same time shared mattresses in Berthold Schwartz’s hostel. Filimonov does not stoop to mattresses. After feeling a little sad about the old order and listening to a lecture in the workers' canteen, Filimonov gets a job at a factory, where it turns out that he is ready for socialist life almost better than those whose memory is fine. “Oh, you, the wreckage of an empire,” says Filimonov to his ex-wife and her current husband, a cultural worker with the habits of a household satrap.
WITCHER / Znachor 1937, Michal Washinsky
Returning home after a serious operation, Professor Vilchur finds a note on the table from his departed wife and falls into either rage or prostration. Rushing out of his apartment in search of his runaway wife, the professor wanders for a long time through the streets of Warsaw at night until he is bumped into by an impudent beggar who, peppering his Polish speech with foreign words, first asks for money for alcohol, and then tricks the doctor into buying a full dinner. For dessert, the professor gets hit on the head in the nearest gateway. Documents, money, clothes, and most importantly, the memory of oneself disappear. After tragic wanderings, which, however, fit into only a couple of short scenes, Vilchur joins the family of a wealthy miller. Having settled in his house, unexpectedly for everyone (including himself), he cures the miller’s son Vatsik. The news of the miracle doctor spreads throughout Polish cities and towns.
System-forming knowledge is automatic: healing skills function in Vilchur regardless of personal memory - hands remember better than heads. Profession determines both consciousness and being. Actually, that’s why the film is called “The Witch Doctor” (the sequel will be called “Professor Vilchur”). The profession becomes a path leading to personal memories. Also in Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop, where a dead policeman with a zero memory successfully continued to exist as a law enforcement machine, signs of the past appeared in the utilitarian professional motor skills. Death only marked the erasure of personal memories, without essentially changing anything: the pistol spun in his hand as in his previous life. Having survived social death, Vilchur is preserved by his profession, it preserves him, becoming the only support in an unknown space, the root identifying knowledge - like the memory of how to hold a spoon and how to sit on a chair. Without his work, he is not a man.
THE GREAT DICTATOR / The Great Dictator, 1940, Charlie Chaplin
After an unsuccessful landing of a military airplane and fifteen years of oblivion, a Jewish hairdresser, strikingly similar to the unpleasant dictator Adenoid Hynkel, emerges from the hospital. It turns out, apparently, to his own destruction: detachments of stormtroopers are prowling the streets, and the word “kike” is written in whitewash on shop windows here and there. And he doesn’t even know who to shout “Heil” to.
By repeating, perhaps deliberately, Ermler’s plot structure “war - amnesia - new world,” Chaplin seems to be shooting two birds with one stone. On the one hand, the unconscious hairdresser is the only one who can look at the current situation in Tomania with the eyes of a “normal” person and, for example, without fear of repelling the presumptuous Nazi youth. On the other hand, the protagonist’s fifteen-year unconsciousness becomes a completely transparent metaphor for the general state of the Toman brains. Indeed, you need to completely forget about everything in order to, having lost one war, start another. Memory problems appear to be nationwide. The stormtroopers cannot remember what their leader looks like, recognizing the almighty Hynkel in the barber only when the barber puts on a military uniform. And the great Adenoid himself clearly lost his orientation in space. Games with the globe, dreamy erotic attacks on the secretary, hysterical leaps from thunderous rage into lisping sentimentality. The inadequacy of the leader of a country plunged into Nazi madness is obvious. The only way to maintain at least the illusion of normality is a strict daily routine: meetings, meetings, speeches. Zombie routine turns out to be an excellent memory substitute.
Spellbound 1945, Alfred Hitchcock
An attractive young man arrives at a secluded psychiatric hospital and introduces himself to the clinic staff as Dr. Edwards - this talented psychiatrist is soon to take over as chief physician. But during the first friendly dinner, the doctor has a seizure at the sight of a white tablecloth, which prompts his new colleagues to sadly reflect on the mental health of their future boss. The beautiful doctor Constance begins to observe Edwards, who comes to the conclusion that the man who came to the clinic is not only not a psychiatrist, but does not even remember who he is. At the same time, news reaches the hospital that the real doctor has disappeared during a ski trip. Suspicion falls on a mysterious stranger. Deciding to undertake her own investigation, Constance drags False Edwards to her teacher, psychoanalyst Bryulov, played by the nephew of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov.
In Spellbound, the treatment of amnesia is presented with Hitchcockian lavishness, in all the cold brilliance of psychoanalytic science. Hypnosis, heart-to-heart conversations, dream solving sessions. Trauma, amnesia, psychotherapy. The characters suspiciously often utter the phrase “feelings of guilt,” finding the cause of the mysterious headache in it. This clever phrase, however, does not reveal the essence of the problem: that is, here is a pure Hitchcockian “MacGuffin.” What kind of “feelings of guilt”, why “feelings of guilt”? But it sounds good.
Amnesia, in turn, is presented as real insanity. It causes monstrous changes in the patient's personality. The further you go, the more the unconscious citizen looks like a dangerous madman literally with a razor in his hand. Calming the patient with milk and sleeping pills, the combined efforts of Bryulov and Constance achieve the impossible - they remove the blockage from memory and at the same time return the patient’s mental health. That is, memory in this case acts as the only guarantor of normality, protecting a person from falling into the abyss of the unconscious. The dream of the unconscious protagonist, played by Gregory Peck, was designed by the surrealist Dali. Fear, madness, nightmare - that's what amnesia is.
HIGH WALL / High Wall 1947, Curtis Bernard
“The High Wall” follows the same plot lines as “Spellbound.” Compassionate psychiatrist Lorrison decides to help a patient accused of murdering his wife. Black hair, crazy eyes, neurotic gestures. The case, however, does not seem so complicated: Stephen Kennett, a pilot who hit his head during World War II, is caught by the police at the scene of a car accident; A woman, his wife, was found strangled (apparently by Kenneth himself) in a wrecked car. The matter is complicated only by the fact that the suspect cannot remember either the moment the murder was committed or how he ended up in the ill-fated car. So the court declares Kenneth insane and places him in a psychiatric clinic, instead of immediately putting him in the electric chair.
The Wall, in its spectacular and slightly absurd beauty, is a quintessential noir. The tragedy of the main character is also typical - a forcedly “abnormal” person who longs to live the “normal” life of an ordinary person and takes the most extreme measures to achieve this state. “Be reasonable,” the beautiful psychiatrist begs, but turning to reason, the call of the memory spurred by hypnosis cannot be drowned out. Memory becomes the most important evidence, the only clue leading to the true killer, and the process of “remembering” takes on a distinctly detective flavor. At stake is not just mental health, but, more importantly, a good name and usual social status - the search for the true killer is clearly not conducted out of love for the deceased wife. The situation is somewhat paradoxical: “memory loss” seems to be a protective mechanism of the psyche, but it is the person without memory who feels especially unprotected in the regulated society of normal people. Waif is reckless and capable of anything to remember.
Fear in the Night 1947, Maxwell Shane
Typical young clerk Vince wakes up in a cold sweat. He dreams of a mirrored room, where they strangle him, and he, fighting back, pierces his offender with an awl. In the morning, the young man wakes up, the remnants of the dream disappear from his head, but suddenly, looking in the mirror, he sees fingerprints on his neck. Sweat appears on his face - he really killed someone, but he doesn’t even remember who. The only memory that pops up in his head is that before leaving, he locked the body of the murdered man in one of the mirrored cabinets.
Dreams echo memory. At some point, nightmares become the most tangible evidence of the existence of the past. It is not for nothing that such attention is paid to dreams in Hitchcock’s Spellbound, and it is by interpreting dreams that psychotherapists restore memory. The confused brain (in “Fear” memory lapses are explained by hypnosis) seems to be encrypting a backup copy of information in dreams. When asked whether dreams can be trusted, director Maxwell Shane confidently answers “yes.” Believe. The rest is even more illusory.
There seems to be something extremely important in the fact of equating memory with a nightmare. Memory distorts real facts, turning the most harmless things into chimeras and leaving the truly monstrous things unattended.
MISTER ARKADIN / Mr. Arkadin 1955, Orson Welles
“A great and powerful man once asked the poet: “What can I give you from what I have?” The wise poet replied: “Anything except your secret.”
The poetic epigraph of “Mr. Arkadin” precedes an equally poetic story. European adventurer Van Stratten decides to become attached to the fortune of a mysterious loud bearded man named Arkadin (he has a castle, a yacht, an airplane and even a Rolls-Royce with a musical horn) and begins to energetically court his daughter. Having noticed an inquisitive young man, the cunning Arkadin gives Van Stratten a task: to compile a secret dossier on himself. According to legend, the rich man does not remember who he was until 1927, when he allegedly woke up on the street, knowing only his name. In fact, Mr. Arkadin is going to use the services of Van Stratten in order to remove those who remember anything about his dark deeds. Van Stratten follows in the footsteps of Arkadin, compiling reports about his either Polish or Georgian origin, while witnesses to the glaring facts methodically and without a trace disappear behind him.
The mystifier Wells, who reconstructed other people's memories in Citizen Kane, starts a campaign of digging through other people's underwear in Arkadina to illustrate a not exactly extravagant, but non-trivial idea - in order to really get rid of the past forever, you need to remember everything thoroughly. Only by running a bloodhound through the waves of your memory can you achieve true oblivion. Van Stratten is assigned to a course of psychotherapy. You need to collect the details of your biography that are unimportant at first glance, so that you can then erase the existing puzzle from your memory at once.
RUNWAY / La Jete`e 1962, Chris Marker
Humanity, having survived the Third World War, is barricading itself from the chaos and pervasive radiation underground. Energy and food are about to run out, and the government of the winning side decides to experiment with prisoners. The object of the experiments is memory. The brains of the experimental subjects are bombarded with memories - they are naturally pumped into a vein with a syringe - according to scientists, this should free the consciousness of the experiment participants and send them first to the past, and then to the future, where they can learn the recipe for saving the dying Earth.
Memory seems to be the only crutch on which humanity, limping on both legs, can lean. The past may be in the past - the global catastrophe that befell the human race in "Runway" leaves no chance for the old life - but painstaking work on memories turns the deeds of bygone days into something radically superior to the present. The gloomy dungeons of the Paris of the future cannot be compared with the bright sky of Orly airport, walks through spring Parisian gardens or a romantic date at the Natural History Museum. A bright memory becomes an ideal shelter from the catastrophe that happened in reality. The presence of experience of a past life and even, in a good way, an obsession with a past life make possible not only time travel, which is life-saving for civilization, but also the continuation of life in general in the present. The only one who remembers saves the Earth, which is forced to reject the experience of a past life and has fallen into unconsciousness. The form in which “Runstrip” exists—a montage photo film—is also not accidental. As The Kinks once sang: “People take pictures of each other just to prove that they really existed” - i.e. “People take pictures of each other to prove that they really existed.” Photography is the best proof of a past life and a cure for unconsciousness.
THE MONSTER DECADE / La Decade Prodigieuse, 1970, Claude Chabrol
He wakes up - his hands are bloody. Opens the window - there is Paris. Leaves the room and asks himself: “What day is it today? What number? What's the address here?
To come to his senses, a young man named Charles, suffering from memory lapses, goes to his rich and all-powerful father Theo (the name is telling - the father played by Orson Welles is truly godlike), where he must spend ten days in the company of his stepmother and his university teacher. The teacher loves Charles, believing, however, that he is clearly not himself, and Charles is having an affair with his stepmother, and on the verge of disaster - the blackmailer, who has followed the trail of the love affair, promises to tell his father about everything if a large monetary reward is not paid. Against this background, the strange illness of Charles, who is falling into unconsciousness, worsens. It’s not for nothing that Chabrol was sometimes called the “French Hitchcock.” In The Decade, the crimes are implicated in psychoanalytic secrets and complexes, and the lead actor, Anthony Perkins, deliberately acts as a kind of Norman Bates in this story. The similarity is reinforced not only by the love-hate motives for the father, but also by the presence of several scenes with a rather ferocious grandmother, not looking up from the bottle. However, Hitchcockian overtones can hardly explain the rather wild atmosphere of this picture. Its deliberate biblical symbolism, the green nose, for some reason stuck to the face of Orson Welles, as well as the incredible costumes and mannerisms of the characters. Time in Theo's house seemed to freeze in the twenties of the last century. The castle, like son Charles, falls into oblivion; and real problems are sent to the basement of the subconscious. It is no coincidence that Theo keeps his half-crazed alcoholic mother in a separate closet, and his fear of his father is repressed into a hefty plaster statue of Zeus, which Charles sculpts. In this estate, everyone wakes up with their hands stained with blood.
EVERYONE IS FOR HIMSELF, AND GOD IS AGAINST ALL / Jeder fur sich und Gott gegen alle 1974, Werner Herzog
An oblivious, but quite grown-up man appears on the streets of Nuremberg to make a splash in the regular life of a clearly defined space in German. He cannot speak properly, eat while sitting at a table and has never worn boots, but he can write his name - which he does when he is taken to the police.
The case of Kasper Hauser can probably be considered the case of a man who really had no past. It’s as if he was grown in a flask, like some kind of homunculus. No relatives, no friends, no memories, no prejudices. Along with memory, Kaspar also lacks traditional ideas about the world, usually laid down in childhood. Despite his extreme backwardness, Casper quickly adapts to his new civilized space. However, Herzog is hardly interested in the social context of the case of the “natural” man Hauser. The historical curiosity is rather an occasion to formulate Herzog’s eternal questions. What is man as a species, apart from the centuries of social memory and civilization layered on him? Who are we? Where? Why does every person, like Kasper, long to learn how to live in society, but until the end of his life he cannot comprehend this science? You know - answer.
PARIS, TEXAS / Paris, Texas 1984, Wim Wenders
In the Texas desert they find an overgrown, silent little guy in a red cap. The only document the foundling has is a business card, which, as it turns out later, belongs to his brother. Having learned about the whereabouts of a relative, he immediately leaves for Texas. The provincial one-story suburbs of America, its faceless diners, endless asphalt highways, equally endless deserts along the roadsides and identical gas stations turn out to be an ideal environment for losing oneself. Memory is not needed by tumbleweeds. The only way to somehow cling to space, to take root in it, is to endow the surrounding things with individuality that is not originally inherent in them. This is what the lost Travis does, carrying in his pocket a photo of the purchased desert plot of land (Paris, Texas), where, as it seems to him, he was conceived; for a long time choosing from identical rental cars the only one that means something to him. The main anchor in this anonymous space for Travis is his young son, whom he, however, barely remembers.
But amnesia is not a one-sided phenomenon: as soon as you forget what makes up your life, life forgets about you. And during the four years of absence, Travis was completely forgotten by his son. The child turns out to be a marker of amnesia: Travis himself, like a child, is forced to build his relationship with reality anew. Together they go in search of their lost wife and mother, who they find in a peep show booth. This peep show seems to be a fairly transparent metaphor: a dressing room with opaque glass in one direction becomes an ideal example of communication with memory. The past is, indeed, a strange thing: you see it, but it doesn’t see you. It belongs to you, but does not own you.
ANGEL HEART / Angel Heart 1987, Alan Parker
The handsome, stubbly detective Garry Angel receives a completely standard order: he needs to find a lost person - the former singer Johnny Favorite, who died in hospitals after the war. The order is made by an elegant stranger with an unpleasant look and sharp nails - the missing Johnny owes him something. The name is Mr. Louis Cypher. At every opportunity, the customer hints that he has already met the Angel somewhere, but Harry himself either forgot or is really not familiar with the mysterious foreigner. At least, he denies the possibility of such a meeting until he becomes immersed in a case that, the further it goes, the more it smacks of mysticism. Every witness that Harry visits dies a terrible death soon after the visit, and the detective himself has strange dreams about an ominous red window in a cheap New York hotel. Alan Parker in Angel Heart seems to successfully play out the standard film noir - a man wakes up covered in blood, remembers nothing, but believes that he is innocent and proves it over time. The only difference is that here the situation is reversed: the Angel is guilty of everything, there is no one to prove his innocence, and the fact that you yourself believe in it is your personal problem. The angel kills, forgets, then comes to the crime scene to stir up the evidence and automatically cover his own tracks. In fact, Parker borrows the plot from “Mr. Arkadin”: in the place of the fool Van Stratten investigating a senseless case is detective Angel, and in the place of the fat customer is the devil himself (Wells would have been glad if he had lived to see the release of Parker’s film). Lucifer, as a real psychotherapist, leads Angel to solving the riddle in several sessions. The angel experienced mental (in the most literal sense) trauma. But stop running from yourself, you need to face the past, come to terms with the future and calmly take the elevator down to hell.
ROBOCOP / Robocop 1987, Paul Verhoeven
Death in RoboCop is given as the last and main trauma that happens to a person. But it has nothing directly to do with memory loss. “We had to wipe his memory,” the nameless doctor says, as matter-of-factly as if he was rebooting a computer. The murdered guard Murphy becomes material for the creation of an incredible cyborg designed to fight urban crime. A metal armored body connects to a human head. The reset brain is re-taught what is good and what is evil. This is no longer memory, this is a computer bios, a decision-making algorithm reduced to ones and zeros - “yes” and “no”. This is a program combined with a target identification, voice warning and firing system. But the body, even a metal one, remembers more than the mind. And the electric man dreams of real, not electric, sheep. One memory is enough for the dead man to unfreeze and go out of control. The machine, having acquired memory, turns into a person capable of violating instructions and algorithms. The most striking "flashback" moment in RoboCop is the iron idol's tour of his former home. The robot probes the house with visual sensors: tables, shelves, chairs. The past suddenly flashes at him like an instant Polaroid snapshot.
OVERBOARD / Overboard 1987, Gary Marshall
A wealthy socialite falls overboard her own multimillion-dollar yacht during a night storm. From the hospital, the lady falls into the hands of a carpenter with the telling surname Proffit. She once refused to pay him for work done. The carpenter is no slouch - he convinces the would-be drowned woman that they have been husband and wife for many years with a horde of idiot children, a ruined house and a lot of financial problems. Such a past can hardly make anyone happy. But gradually the former millionaire gets used to her new fate - she learns to cook lunches, walk her children to school, and bring her proletarian husband beer from the refrigerator. Moreover, a dubious plan to tame the obstinate rich woman develops into great love. The traditional screenplay trick of retrograde amnesia turns into an opportunity to start a new life. The only piquant thing is that this opportunity is realized against the will of the victim.
“You know,” the heroine says every now and then to her imaginary husband, “I’m so ashamed - I don’t remember anything.” And the husband comes up with more and more humiliating memories. The situation is resolved in a true operetta spirit: the monstrous character of the victim is corrected, the deception is forgiven, the old is forgotten. Oh, if only everything were really that simple.
Total Recall 1989, Paul Verhoeven
Douglas Quaid dreams about Mars, although he has never been there himself. When he wakes up, he dreams of Mars in reality. To test his dreams, Quaid turns to the Rekall company, which is ready to send clients anywhere and for minimal money - specialists program the memory for any impression. But something goes wrong during the procedure: false memories affect an area of erased memories, and Quaid, alarmed and pursued by some thugs, decides to go to the red planet to now remember everything.
Before the memory implantation procedure, Rekall doctors say: “Memories are better than reality.” Evaluate the accuracy of what is said. Firstly, it really is better, and secondly, they are definitely not reality (however, “if your brain notices any differences, you get your money back”). Memory is edited, changed, erased. And not only in this world of Philip-Dick game: strange robot taxi drivers, mutants and flights to Mars and Saturn. Consciousness doubts almost everything related to the external environment. These doubts do not leave Quaid even for a second. “My life... or did I dream about you.” Where do real memories end and fake ones begin, is he really a secret agent or just a construction worker who paid 1000 credits to be forgotten? These questions are not answered even with the end credits. Why? Because a person believes in what he wants to believe. He remembers those moments that give him pleasure, and mercilessly erases the unpleasant from his memory.
DIE AGAIN / Dead Again 1991, Kenneth Branagh
In the late 40s, a popular Hollywood composer with the musical surname Strauss allegedly kills his wife Margaret with a pair of scissors. Before being executed in the electric chair, the condemned man says: “I love my wife and will love her forever.” The words come true in full. The souls of the composer and his beautiful wife move into new bodies, completely identical to the previous ones - belonging to Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson. The new incarnation of Strauss is engaged in a private detective practice, the new Margaret (now called Grace) suffers from retrograde amnesia with terrifying nightmares - every night she dreams of being cut with beautiful sharp scissors.
Branagh's neo-noir is a detective inflated by a mystical fog. Conandoyle's conversations with dead souls, hypnotists and dream interpreters push the boundaries of memory: one human life is no longer enough for memories. The amnesia victim must remember not his current life, but what happened before. And although death and birth are traumas, after which there should seemingly be no more memories, the experience of Margaret/Grace proves the opposite. She will not only remember, but will also point out her real killer. She would rather forget her “new” self than give up the memory of how she was once stabbed to death.
SHATTERED 1991, Wolfgang Petersen
The car takes off from the mountain road and flies for a long time along a rocky slope. Incredibly, two (passenger and driver) survive. The accident completely erases the man’s face - plastic surgeons are now working on the bloody mess, but this is not the main thing - along with his face, the understanding of who he is and where he was going disappears. Doctors make a diagnosis of psychogenic amnesia. All personal memories disappeared. Maybe for a week, or maybe forever. After a series of plastic surgeries and a course of rehabilitation, Dan, that’s the name of the hero of “Shattered,” begins to believe his reflection in the mirror, re-accustoms himself to bad habits, but gradually comes to the conclusion that he does not own Tom Berenger’s nose (he plays the main role), nor the memories that a caring wife is trying to impose. So who do they belong to?
Memory and appearance - a person has nothing else. Behind the plot twists of “Shattered” there is an essential question: what remains of a person if his face and past are replaced? Character, soul, dreams? The problem matches the old paradox about a knife in which the blade was first replaced, and then the handle. Can we assume that the knife remains the same? And what is the same about him now? Connection point?
Having unearthed the truth, Dan is left shattered. Identification is not possible. And who knows what awaits him behind the final credits.
WHAT CONCERNING HENRY / Regarding Henry, 1991, Mike Nichols
Hypocritical New York lawyer Henry Turner (who would stick a knife in anyone's back) decides to go out for cigarettes one evening and unexpectedly becomes a witness and then a victim of a robbery. The criminal shoots him first in the chest, then in the head. And although the lawyer, apparently, has no heart, and the well of his mind is protected by a steel forehead, the bullet still hits an important artery and leads to oxygen starvation of the brain. Lying in the hospital, the lawyer is drooling, can neither stand up nor sit down, and looks at the world with the piercing gaze of a big child. Life has to start all over again: sort out the cubes, learn to hold a spoon, walk and read. Benevolent and melodramatic (despite the fact that the script was written at the very beginning of his career by the main producer of modern Hollywood, JJ Abrams), Nichols’ film examines amnesia as a kind of social rehabilitation course. After two shots, cruel Henry not only forgets all the peculiarities of his hellish profession, he also becomes an exemplary family man (he previously forbade his child to take food out of the kitchen, and cheated on his wife with his secretary) and even makes real friends. I wonder if he would drink beer in the kitchen with a black masseur until all his arrogance leaked out through a small bullet hole in his forehead? Moreover, the radical improvement of the hero provokes evolution in the space around him. The wife agrees to recall her daughter from the boarding school she hates, and the daughter suddenly discovers that the father who frightened her is a rather nice person. Truly great are your possibilities, amnesia!
ARMAVIR, 1991, Vadim Abdrashitov
The Armavir liner crashes. The survivors Semin and Aksyuta are looking for the missing Marina, the daughter of the first and the wife of the second, but she does not recognize the people close to her.
Panning over dozens of lost passengers distraught after the disaster, it is no coincidence that the camera chooses Aksyuta and Semin as heroes. Two officers who have forgotten themselves - Semin does not remember anything at all except his unsinkable love for his daughter - are looking for more than just a daughter and a wife. They are looking for their homeland, which somehow suddenly decided to change its name and live a different life with another person (a neat drunk, played by Sergei Garmash). “What fell was lost. - How is that? - And like this!" One forgets the past, because one cannot live as before. The other, having become the past, must be forgotten, must disappear.
By combining in their film the parable convention and the real story of the crash of the Admiral Nakhimov liner, Abdrashitov and Mindadze not only record the moment of the collapse of the Soviet empire as a social and class system, they create an ideal metaphor for the apocalypse. The moment Armavir hits the rocks, the future seems to cease to exist. The present, like a broken record, repeats itself - the victims of the crash dance in the park to music captured from the ship and repeat meaningless words until the mourning ends and reality resets itself. “The ship is sinking, and I’m alone, and there’s no one around, which means the past is over.”
SIMPLE FORMALITY / Une Pure Formalite` 1994, Giuseppe Tornatore
After a shot and a frantic run through the rainy autumn forest, the venerable writer Anof goes out alone onto the road, where he is stopped by a passing patrol. Dirty, wet and without documents, the novelist ends up at the police station to tell the commissioner about what happened to him, who, as it turns out, is a big admirer of his talent. Only Anof doesn’t remember anything. He doesn’t know how he ended up in the forest, what he was running from, or even why he was clean-shaven today, although he usually wore a full beard. But we are talking about murder. Therefore, starting with compliments, the interrogation becomes more and more harsh, evidence collected at the crime scene and even assault are used. The facts of the suspect's life line up to tell the story of the death. It remains to understand who was killed.
“Having completed half my earthly life, I found myself in a dark forest” - at the very beginning of the film, Tornatore actually directly illustrates a line from Dante, so by the middle you begin to guess whose death the mysterious commissioner is talking about and which department belongs to the investigative body with a leaking roof, where Anof was detained until the circumstances were clarified. What Anof had forgotten suddenly begins to arrive at the police station in whole bags. A shirt, cropped hair, a pistol from which the shot was fired, piles of photographs - it turns out that the writer photographed everyone with whom life encountered him - nameless ghosts and shadows suddenly come to life under the inquisitive gaze of the interrogator. “And who is this? And that one? When did you meet him? Tell us about it. Remember, remember."
THREE LIVES AND ONE DEATH / Trois Vies & Une Seule Mort 1996, Raul Ruiz
Paris is a city of wonders. One Parisian (Marcello Mastroianni) spent twenty years in a bad apartment with elves, and these years flew by for him like one day. He's older, it's true, but he doesn't remember anything. Another Parisian, a professor-anthropologist (also Marcello Mastroianni), decided one day, while climbing one of the stairs of the Sorbonne, to forget about his past life and turn from a professor into a clochard. And he was very successful in this swindle: at least he earned no less than at the department. His unconsciousness continued until he met a prostitute who seemed to be running away from a pimp in a white suit, but in fact turned out to be an enterprising businesswoman. Finding himself at the home of the priestess of love, the professor briefly comes to his senses to burst into an angry tirade about a book by Carlos Castaneda discovered on a shelf.
Paris by Raoul Ruiz is a perfect parody of the structure of the modern world, where almost every real person has a parallel life - a virtual one. The weirdo locked up by the elves looks like a hermit suffering from an Internet addiction. And the professor who passionately wants to be a clochard in order to get rid of the qualities inherent in the professor, and the businesswoman who dresses up as a call girl in order to forget about contracts and meetings of the board of directors, are virtual heroes who invented themselves. Having met, the prostitute and the clochard fall in love with each other without memory (the phrase most adequately describes what happened), but the professor and the director’s wife cannot live together. The past weighs on them.
The Long Kiss Goodnight 1996, Renny Harlin
“I entered this world as an adult,” provincial teacher Samantha Kane does not particularly lament the fact that her own past is a mystery to her. Central retrograde amnesia is a bad disease, but Samantha says you can live with it. In the end, Samantha is raising a daughter, dating a good guy, teaching at school, and, in general, in the village where she ended up, she is the first beauty. Memory catches up with her by chance. On a winter road, a car's bumper meets the antlers of a deer running across the highway, and Samantha loses consciousness not as a provincial teacher, but as a completely different person. Skills from her past life - Samantha used to be a secret assassin in the service of the American government - return. Slowly but surely. First in the kitchen - mastering a knife, then Samantha, without prompting, remembers how to assemble and disassemble a sniper rifle. A cynical, brightly made-up blonde looks at the homely brunette from the mirror and almost asks for a cigarette. And to top it all off, very unpleasant people from a past life are hunting for Samantha.
A blow that led not to the loss, but to the return of memory, and amnesia as the shortest path to a split personality - the genre irony in The Long Kiss Goodnight is evident (the script was written by Shane Black, known for his deadly humor), but, in addition to irony, in the story of transformation An exemplary non-smoking brunette can discern a rather bitter moral in a deadly smoking blonde: sometimes it may be hard to remember, but forgetting is usually even harder.
DARK CITY / The Dark City 1998 Alex Proyas
Every midnight, the city, which looks like the set of a perfect noir (here the sun never rises and steam escapes from the blackened manholes), stops to start all over again. Cars stop honking, residents fall silent, and houses, streets and the horizon itself, on the contrary, begin to rumble with incredible excitement. Huts turn into palaces, avenues become alleys, and a good doctor comes to people and injects a green special solution into their veins to reset the old life and write a new memory in the head (see “Runway” by Chris Marker). A banker can become a beggar, a policeman can become a “godfather,” and a respectable man in the street can become a maniac who wakes up over a corpse.
The experiment is carried out by strange pale aliens in black cassocks with astrakhan collars. The goal of the project is formulated vaguely - in theory, a transforming city built in space should provide aliens with knowledge about such a mysterious matter as the human soul. It is memory, and not existence, according to the pale-faced, that determines a person’s consciousness and his soul. Remembering too much means having power; learning to manage your own and other people’s memories means becoming the master of space.
REMEMBER / Memento 2000, Christopher Nolan
A man in a fashionable but wrinkled suit drives a Jaguar around an unnamed town, looking for his wife's killer. A person has a chronic problem in the brain: memory is structured in the shortest segments, and the investigation has to be started anew almost every hour. In order not to get lost in his own evidence and information, a person carries a Polaroid and a pen with him. In case of particularly important evidence of a crime, tattoos are applied to the body. “We all need memory to know who we are,” a man once convincingly concludes. Although for him there is only one objective memory of himself - this is his illness. A fact that is confirmed every few hours.
A nameless American province with nameless eateries, roads, elementary particles of houses and people is an ideal environment for the development of his disease. The suit from someone else's shoulder fits Leonard (is that his name?) perfectly, and the car, in turn, fits the suit perfectly. Everything is interchangeable, complementable and rearrangeable. Fragmentary memories recorded on the body and tiny snapshots are pieces of an ideal puzzle, from which you can put together any picture if you wish. The killer Leonard is looking for could be anyone. Or maybe it was he who killed his wife, but he simply forgot, didn’t believe it, went to check, and went on eternal detective watch.
Christopher Nolan verifies the delirium of an oblivious hero with a mathematically precise structure. The film is started backwards from the final scene to the plot (that is, to the solution). Corpses get up and walk, acquaintances turn into strangers, tattoos disappear as if they were written in invisible ink, Polaroids blur into dark spots. Before our eyes, a complicated story turns into a neat skein of information - an anamnesis that requires not the spectator's empathy, but the objective view of a doctor.
MULHOLLAND DRIVE / Mulholland Drive, 2001, David Lynch
A brunette who has lost her memory under strange circumstances wanders into an empty apartment to catch her breath. “I had an accident, and then I came here,” she explains to the blonde who moved into the apartment. Introduces herself as Rita after seeing the Gilda movie poster on the bathroom wall. Rita has a bag full of dollars and a blue Suprematist key. The blonde, whose name seems to be Betty, decides to help Rita remember who she is.
The world is not what it seems, and we are not who we think we are. “Mulholland Drive” is the dream of a man who would like to be different and who, most likely, no longer exists at all.
This is probably Lynch's most accessible film. All ends meet in it, and there is always an explanation for gaps in reality. The dream about Rita and Betty is seen by actress Diane Salwyn, who ordered the murder of her friend Camilla Rhodes. The order has been completed, and now Diane is either trying to force this fact out of her memory, or to correct what happened in her dream. Anyway, Betty is a spitting image of Diane and meets Camilla, i.e. Rita, alive and well. In her sleep, Diane manipulates her own memories, and Rita, a copy of her friend generated by the dream, is doomed to unconsciousness. Diane equates amnesia with a comfortable helplessness. She must help Rita. Program it with a new memory and cut off bad memories of the bad past. Such manipulation, however, cannot go unnoticed. First of all, for the manipulator himself. This is fully evidenced by the scene in the Silencio Theater that reveals the nature of Diane’s dream. “There is no orchestra. It’s just a recording – and yet we hear the orchestra,” says the compere from the stage. An illusion is just an illusion, no matter how real it may seem.
MAJESTIC / Majestic 2001, Frank Darabont
Aspiring Hollywood scribbler Peter Appleton finds himself in the midst of a witch hunt. The script for the second film was postponed, the studio was kicked out - investigators from the commission are knocking on the door. Having drunk out of grief, Peter gets behind the wheel and on the way home falls along with the car from a nearby bridge. He hits his head, swims a couple of kilometers downstream, opens his eyes in the morning, and nothing. What's his name, who does he work for, how did he end up here? - Peter will not answer any of these questions. The residents of the town to which he sailed will answer for him - in St. Petersburg they will identify a guy who went missing during World War II. Dad (the owner of the local Majestic cinema), the bride (they went to kiss her at the lighthouse) and friendly neighbors will appear. Only the arrival of the FBI will prevent you from living your fictitious life to the end.
In his heartbreaking melodrama, Frank Darabont clearly takes cues from Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator.” Amnesia in his film is also associated with the phenomenon of a double, and joyful people just as sincerely welcome the ignorant false hero, reverently played by a popular comedian. Even the final speech, delivered by Peter Appleton at the meeting of the Committee on Un-American Activities, in some sense parodies the speech of Chaplin's hairdresser. Appleton, like the hairdresser, urges listeners to come to their senses. But if Chaplin's hero was soulful, Jim Carrey does not want to be unfounded. From his pocket he takes out the most powerful evidence - the Constitution of the United States of America. “Remember, we were promised freedom of opinion?” - Carrie asks, and the venerable elders actually remember something like that.
THE BOURNE Identity, 2002, Paul Greengrass
From the body of a stranger saved on the waters, like Jonah, a capsule with a laser message is removed - a tiny device projects the number of a secret deposit box in a Swiss bank onto the wall. No more information. What's your name, where did you come from? The rescued person can answer these questions in several European languages: “I don’t know.” He also weaves sea knots and masters jiu-jitsu techniques. However, opening a secret box in a bank also yields little: in a fireproof bandura, a fair amount of money is found, about ten passports for different names, and most importantly, a gun barrel.
In "Bourne", it seems, the story of how Dr. Watson unraveled the professional identity of Sherlock Holmes was retold quite wittily. “Knows how to shoot, is interested in chemistry, knows everything about the criminal world, but has not read Dickens. Who could such a person be?” the doctor reasoned in fear. Jason Bourne, who travels half of Europe in search of his name and occupation (this is according to one of the passports, and could just as easily be Michael Caine or Foma Kinyaev) also assumes the worst. He is an undercover spy, a killer on the TsERU's salary. His task was to get lost among strangers, to live a fake life, and he got lost. Searching for his former self, Bourne stumbles upon emptiness. He recognizes a name that means nothing to him: David Webb. One day his real life ended. But not with memory loss, but with joining the secret service. I wonder, if Otto von Stirlitz once hit his head and identified himself by the party card in his breast pocket, how would he end the war?
A MAN WITHOUT A PAST / Mies Vailla Menneisyytta, 2002, Aki Kaurismäki
“It’s better for you: life goes forward, not backward” - any disaster can become a suitable starting point, and if you are not a completely lost person, then you can certainly extract good from even the worst. The idea, in general, is not exactly new, but nice. Moreover, Kaurismäki, in his “Man Without a Past,” confirms it with such optimistic zeal that you believe.
Beaten by gopniks and then thrown into the dustbin of life, the welder begins to build his new existence with the thoroughness of a castaway Robinson Crusoe. He washes the floor in the trailer he inherited, puts a jukebox in it, plants potatoes in a vacant lot nearby, and tame a dog named Hannibal. Next there will be a music group, love, even friends will appear that never existed. One of the final scenes, where an old-fashioned welder eats sushi with chopsticks and drinks sake, is the final test of human adaptability. In Aki Kaurismäki's indispensable timelessness of scenery and costumes, amnesia does not seem and is not a shock akin to the apocalypse. On the contrary, trauma binds M (in the credits the main character is designated by one single letter) to life much more firmly than the previous forty years of earthly existence.
WITHOUT MEMORY / Novo 2002, Jean-Pierre Limozin
“It’s okay - it’s already in the past.” "Sorry, I forgot." Graham, a small office worker - either an electrician, or a cleaner, or both at once - repeats these two phrases more often than others. Graham has a mental disorder. As soon as he is distracted for a second from what he is doing, his brain loses its support in reality. Names and facts fly out of my head. He doesn’t remember what he was doing fifteen minutes ago. To avoid getting lost, Graham has a special notebook with a diagram of how to get to work; there is a photograph of the house where he lives; Some other facts are indicated that you simply need to know. It’s suspicious, but Graham doesn’t seem to feel any discomfort from his illness. Firstly, he himself is pleased - every day there is something new. And secondly, girls love Graham for his handsome face, good-natured character and eternal freshness of feelings. One young lady writes her name on his chest with a permanent marker: “When it disappears, you will forget me.” And on Saturdays, the boss arranges such sexual harassment for Graham that even the all-seeing eye of the security camera turns red (its lovers prudently cover it with duct tape). But the next morning Graham, unlike the same cell, no longer remembers anything about what happened. He doesn’t know much about anything at all, this simple European guy Graham. Everything is always without a routine for him, just like the first time.
“You can’t trust a man without memory,” declares one of the heroines, tired of the constant struggle for a forgetful macho. Memories are the only truly intimate thing, and sharing memories means being intimate. With a person without memory, true intimacy turns out to be impossible. Graham, with his memos of life carefully written down in a book (here I would like to see criticism of the civilization of electronic diaries and social communication networks, but the film is clearly not up to that) really turns out to be a fictional man. Anyone can manipulate him, inventing more and more details of his life and love, putting together a suitable puzzle of the present from the fragments of the past. It turns out that starting your life over every hour is not the smartest decision.
PAYMENT / Paycheck 2003, John Woo
Engineer Jennings has great talent: in a couple of months he is able to do what an entire institute would spend years on. In addition, he is ready to completely erase these months from his life - employers should not worry about the secrecy of their intellectual property. After each of his hacks, Jennings erases his memory. However, one day he will prefer a puzzle to the round sum of the next fee.
Three years of work are like one big blackout, and my memory is like a pile of garbage. Receiving a package of unfamiliar personal items, Jennings is forced to begin untangling himself. Moreover, it is unclear what you should rely on more: on the landmarks left to yourself or on sudden flashes of your own or someone else’s memory. Things don't fail because they exist in reality. And memory... It seems that ephemeral memory is reified: it is a dream that must become reality, a prediction that has come true, which you follow unwillingly. The seen future (namely, the foresight machine Jennings invented in the forgotten three years of his life) turns into the past and becomes obligatory for implementation. And those who do not remember the past can manipulate tomorrow and change it.
A LONG SUNDAY ENGAGEMENT / Un Long Dimanche de Fiancailles, 2004, Jean-Pierre Genet
1919 The First World War is over, but the brave lame Matilda refuses to believe the funeral, according to which her beloved Manek was left to die behind the front line for deliberately harming himself (in other words, “self-inflicted gunshot”). Matilda wished that Manek was alive and now believes in the incredible. This is her approach to life. From an ordinary front-line case, Matilda creates an unprecedented detective, which she herself, having hired a private investigator, unravels. Collecting a chain of clues and evidence, Matilda moves towards a solution that is easy to predict for anyone who, like her, believes in the bonds of eternal love, happy endings and brilliant (or perhaps banal) coincidences. A miraculous rescue, lost memory, mixed up army dog tags - reality gives way to fate.
The amnesia of the shell-shocked groom becomes the plot anchor of “The Engagement” - how else to explain why the living Manek never contacted his beloved. Compensation for the forgotten occurs thanks to Matilda’s extraordinary memory. She seems to remember what happened for her fiancé. Meeting with Manek's colleagues, the bride reconstructs the events of the day when he was supposed to be killed, and thereby brings him back to life. The details turn out to be an ideal means for returning memory: a red mitten, the letters “MMM” (“Manek is Matilda’s husband”), embossed on the trunk of a tree torn out by a shell, the menu of the last meal of the condemned, told by the cook. This is how the space of memories is formed. Memory becomes a universal cure for death, because death and oblivion are interdependent elements. Genet supports this extraordinary Mathildean recollection by the very form of “The Long Engagement,” which also represents a feat of recollection. His film is a love letter to a Paris that doesn't exist - hats and feathers, thin women's waists, architecturally complex men's mustaches, dusty pavements and lace windows through which golden postcard air flows. Memory moves by love, and love exists only as a memory of that single moment of ideal, incomprehensible love.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2004, Michel Gondry
“The pages are torn out—I don’t remember doing that.” Double amnesia is already funny. Not only are the pages from the diary gone, but I also forgot about it.
A shabby but still dreamy young man, Joel, learns that after another disagreement, the eccentric girl Clementine has decided to throw him out of her life forever. And quite literally - she found an advertisement in the newspaper for a company that removes disturbing memories from her head, collected all the things that connected her with Joel, and the very next day she went to work without any second thought. Joel came to her to make peace, but she didn’t even pay attention to him. Then, in a thirst for revenge, he turned to the same company, did a couple of tests, came home early, drank sleeping pills and prepared to erase.
Most of the film is a very detailed depiction of the process of erasing memory. This is not a flash of Men in Black. Here you need to be careful and at the same time diligent. It's like you're wiping something with a pencil eraser.
But here the film’s slogan comes into play: “You can erase love from your memory. To be thrown out of the heart is another story.” Love, indeed, turns out to be a rather quirky matter. Devastated Joel, with his crippled diary, is drawn to the winter beach where he once met Clementine. He doesn’t remember this, but his legs somehow move on their own. Clementine meets him again on the train - apparently also from the beach. “Their hearts shine with innocence” is the traditional translation of the line from Alexander Pope’s poem that serves as the film’s title. And it’s probably worth continuing: “Their prayers are pleasing to the Creator.”
“Blessed are those who forget, for they do not remember their own mistakes” - yes, yes, that’s right.
