Memories in the Present. Aquatic Imaginaries in Contemporary Cinema

Abstract

Considering this interplay between nature and culture, it is suggestive that aquaticspaces are even less considered in analyses that deal with histories of landscape andtheir connection with social memory, even when water seems an appropriate motifto open both utopian and dystopian settings. In their cultural history of the naturalelements, Böhme and Böhme write about the utopian and dystopian dimensions ofdifferent bodies of water: whereas ?an archaic fear of mankind is concentrated in theuntamed sea?, a space that itself is a deterritory, a chaos difficult to control, riversare conceived both as streams of life and as the location of a second paradise.5 Onthe basis of this cultural ambivalence towards water, it is interesting to consider howrecent audiovisual works utilise liquids?such as rivers and oceans?that identify submergedgestures and evanescent memories, and in so doing foreground situations ofpolitical violence that are inscribed in the very surface of landscape.