The Trouble with Mediated Memories

Abstract

From its invention at the end of the nineteenth century, film has become increasingly intertwined with the formation of individual and collective memories around the world, not only in terms of the events and people films depict but also as part of the historical record themselves. Although the extensive circulation of Nordic silent film in Australasia in the early decades of the twentieth century has been almost entirely forgotten, digitized local newspapers confirm the extraordinary popularity of Nordic screen actors and narrative feature films in Australia and New Zealand in the silent era, both prior to and following World War I. These ephemeral early Nordic fiction films introduced viewers to events that had never happened and imaginary people in places that don’t exist, thereby mediating prosthetic or false memories, but were themselves quickly replaced by newer products, leaving little trace of their passage. This article reconstructs part of the lost circulation history of Nordic silent films in Australasia, with a particular focus on Asta Nielsen and Urban Gad’s The Great Moment (1911) and Valdemar Psilander and Clara Wieth’s Temptations of a Great City (1911), in order to illuminate the interplay of manipulated recollections and incomplete archival narratives in the contested construction of cultural memory.