'While the study of memory and film extends itself to a number of national cinemas, with potentially different stakes in the form and nature of cinematic remembrance, this volume takes Hollywood, and the cultural history of the United States, as its principal focus of concern. Notwithstanding the dominance of Hollywood in world cinema, and its capacity to harness debates about the nature of popular film, America has become central to critical discussions about the status and bearing of memory in the cultural sphere. As I have written elsewhere, these discussions have focused on two principal questions or concerns.6 Firstly, the question of what (or not) is remembered in cultural life and practice has been carried into a number of debates within the United States figured around the content and transmission of memory within educational curricula and public and popular representation. This has derived, not least, from a deepening sense of the plural and discontinuous histories that have challenged ideas about the singularity of American experience, and that have led to battles of value fought over the (re)conception of the cultural centre. The balance of memory and forgetting in American culture – what is remembered, by who and for who – has in recent years become entwined in hegemonic struggles fought and figured around the negotiation of America’s national past. These struggles sharpened significantly in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a moment of reported ‘culture war’ where consensual narratives of American identity were (seen to be) challenged by an emergent politics of difference. According to Robert Burgoyne, Hollywood played its part in these struggles, in some cases reasserting traditional narratives of nation and, in others, addressing the ‘recovered memory’ of the American nation-state – taking on traumas such as slavery, genocide, political assassination and the war in Vietnam – to express a reconfigured sense of American identity.7 The 1990s, in particular, were a time when the metanarratives of American memory began to strain for legitimacy against the multiple pasts of the marginalised. This must be set within a broad climate where national identity itself was, and continues to be, called into question by transnational political and economic restructuring. If memory discourses have accelerated in response to crucial changes in the ideological structure of US society – symptomatic, according to Andreas Huyssen, of a more Introduction 3 general challenge to progressive Western paradigms of history, modernity, and nation8 – Hollywood has functioned strategically in the articulation and codification of the cultural past. Although varied in its discursive contribution to the ‘field of national imaginings’ that Burgoyne describes, Hollywood has shown a concerted fascination with cinematic renderings of American history and memory, levied in films such as Glory (1989), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Dances with Wolves (1990), JFK (1991), Malcolm X (1992), Forrest Gump (1994), Nixon (1995), Lone Star (1996), Amistad (1997), Titanic (1997), Pleasantville (1998) and Saving Private Ryan (1998), to name just a few. Whether or not these films represent an anxious response to the ‘end of history’, a revisionist programme of alternative remembrance, or something more benign, memory has garnered a powerful currency in the discursive operations of contemporary American film.'
