Blessed are those who forget, for they do not remember their own mistakes. Amnesia: background. Every discussion of love destroys love

Beauty is harmony; it's a source of peace...

Every discussion of 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 house ?!
Preparing sometimes for offsets,
Above a book or notepad
They often sat together until late at night.

She got tired easily
And if you suddenly fell asleep,
He washed dishes under the tap and swept the room.
Then, trying not to make noise
And shy of oblique glances,
Secretly, behind a closed door, he washed clothes at night.

But who will deceive the neighbors -
He will probably become a magician.
Their friendly swarm of wasps buzzed over the pot steam.
They called her "lazy"
His - sarcastically - "mistress",
They sighed that the guy was a rag and his wife was under his heel.

They became engineers.
Years passed without quarrels and sadness.
But happiness is a capricious thing, unstable at times, like smoke.
After the meeting, on Saturday,
Returning home from work
He once found his wife kissing another.

There is no worse pain in the world.
Would be better off dead!
For a minute he stood in the doorway, staring into space.
Didn't listen to explanations
Did not begin to sort out the relationship,
He took neither a ruble nor a shirt, but silently stepped back...

For a week the kitchen was buzzing:
"Tell me what 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
Maybe that's what true love is!

"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, we note, considerable - pluses.

"A Man Without a Past", 2002, dir. A. Kaurismaki

Perfect memory, like perfect beauty, is at least not viable. In Claude Chabrol's Monstrous Decade, about amnesiac failures, the thunderous hero played by Orson Welles tells an anecdote about a scientist whose lover, 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 bringing him down 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 obeyed her lover, drank the solution, and gradually the mole disappeared. The beauty herself died with her.

No one can keep in memory everything to the last detail, to the smallest senseless moment. Childhood is hidden in the haze. Unhappiness is clouded. Memory is lacunae, 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 disk, 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? Breakage of the event thread provokes 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 relationships: name, address, phone number, knowledge of friends and relatives who are the cell of society - go beyond these limits, and you seem to be nobody. Thus, a free atom in an infinite void. Here it would be nice to mention the “Wait for me” program and tears of happiness in the eyes of the lost women found. I don't want to believe it, but it seems that leaving the networks of social order is really unbearable. He who has forgotten is ready to do anything, just to cling to the body of common existence again.

"Speak, memory!" we ask, signaling that each person is nothing more, nothing less than a collection of memories. Pleasant, bitter, amazing, terrible, unique, and more often, probably, ordinary. Memory is the main human mania, and obsession with 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. To remember is to connect 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 the construction of a new life, a new (sometimes phantom) yesterday, and then an illusory today, tomorrow impossible in a different situation. This is how the heroes of science fiction films about time travel change the future. It is worth canceling something in the past (read: forget), and the reality in the future irreparably and unpredictably mutates.

Unconsciousness, therefore, is a guaranteed way to deform, if not the surrounding space, then at least oneself - this way you can adjust to reality. Clear the scores at once, reset to zero, press the reset button. Not evolution, but revolution, which man fears and secretly desires. Next should be better. “February is a busy month because of Valentine's Day,” says the doctor who runs the Lacuna office, which rids clients of hateful memories (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2004). Who has not dreamed of erasing failed love from memory? Although, perhaps, there are things more unpleasant.

Forgetfulness is necessary. The resilience of Odysseus, striving for Penelope, who weaves the thread of memory, is understandable and laudable, but even more understandable is the desire of his companions to taste the lotus that gives oblivion. If the past weighs on you, how not to become a lotophager? Rejection of memory promises life from scratch, a chance to slip away. The world caught me, but did not catch me - almost every noir hero dreams of this. Heroes with strong fists, steep chins and a scorched heart had something to forget. Some fled from the law (“I am a gang fugitive”, 1932), others from former acquaintances (“From the Past”, 1947), trying to get lost under false names and biographies in the vast American space. It was in film noir 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. Running of your own accord is good, but when unconsciousness falls on your head uncontrollably, it is a personal disaster, 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 noir hero 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. C. Nolan

Memory games for noir were an indispensable element. Already very "remembering" as the process resembles a criminal investigation with endless interrogations and collection of evidence. Memory is the perfect indictment, and it's no coincidence that film noir's obsession with flashbacks is no coincidence. Flash, radiance, momentary glimpse - yes, I remember! Remembering is like a visit to the dentist - both necessary and scary. For all the heroes of the black series - private detectives, spies, various femmes fatales - the past at best seems like a black hole that is not worth looking into (Mr. Arkadin, 1955), at worst it really is.

Over the past two decades, amnesia has suddenly turned from a genre device exploited only by gloomy detectives and tearful serials (every nation has its own Budulai), into a topical story. The 1980s resurgence of film noir opened the door for amnesiac cranks to rip into low-key comedies, big-budget sci-fi and low-key European dramas. Even film spies had to reformat, who, by their profession, seem to be obliged to remember everything. James Bond of the new time, codenamed Jason Bourne, kills with the words: “I don’t know who I am and where I’m going,” and after him this mantra is repeated by a crowd of heroes ready to do anything to find traces of their connection with an unfamiliar space.

Amnesia is taken out of context, pushing them to find a new life, and one would like to interpret the mass unconsciousness of on-screen heroes as an unambiguous recognition: the usual algorithms for interacting with space in the modern world do not work. We need to come up with new ones. You need to survive somehow. The protagonist of the sensational thriller about memory loss "Memento" (2000), for example, sees his mental illness as a way to adequately talk with others. In the fast-paced society of instant coffee, snapshots, and instant connections, short-term memory lapses seem to be beneficial. The disease gives the hero the ability to edit instantaneous memories, remembering only what they want 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, it happens in “A Man Without a Past” (2002) by Aki Kaurismäki, where the hero, due to memory loss, is reborn to a new, better life. More often, the lost one is left to wander like a somnambulist in space incomprehensible to him. An example from the latter is Schultes (Schultes, 2008). And so alien by name and accent, this hero, thanks to a game of reason, becomes a real 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 tsarist non-commissioned officer Filimonov, who was looking for his wife in the not exactly hostile, but incomprehensible space of Soviet Russia, once acted as the same delegate of pure reason in a warped world (“Fragment of an Empire”, 1929).

The best maps of the area are drawn up with a fresh mind. The scouts of unconsciousness are getting out into a world that has experienced a serious shake-up. You need to look around, understand what's what. It is significant that two world wars became the main suppliers of the shell-shocked in the cinema of the 20th century (only in our list - "Fragment of the Empire", "The Great Dictator", "Enchanted", "High Wall", "Long Sunday Engagement"). The fighting that today erases the boundaries of the old world is 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 Abdrashitov-Mindadze’s “Armavir” floated out from under it) does not look so big in comparison with the changes that a breakthrough promises us into virtual space.

Memory adjusts itself to the requirements of the electronic environment. Once upon a time, manuscripts did not burn, and if they burned, then 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. Memory manipulation no longer requires hypnosis, psychotropic drugs, and other antediluvian drugs. It is enough just to edit entries in a network diary or change the content of a personal page on a social network. Everything is reversible.

Information and memory have always been shaky 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 issue. He does not long for a change of fate and is not afraid that the familiar world, overturning into unconsciousness, will suddenly ripple. What to strive for and what to fear? He is already living a different, virtual (which in translation, we recall, means “real”) life in the vastness of electronic networks. Altering your memory and editing reality. In the evening, freed from real (is it real?) life, an ordinary clerk can be a secular lion and salon philosopher, a columnist for an economic newspaper - a fashionable poet, and an exemplary housewife - a warrior of light with a damask sword at the right hand. The question "forget or remember?" no longer installed today. And if it is put, it comes out, as in The Matrix (1999). There are two pills: eat the blue one - you will habitually forget, the red one - you will have to forget everything that happened.

EMPIRE PIECE, 1929, Friedrich Ermler

1918 Civil war, winter darkness, a military train, near which horses, people, dead bodies mixed up in a heap. The train leaves, among the abandoned barefoot corpses one is found shod and alive. Shell-shocked at the front of the First World War, a memoryless little man with a matted beard drags a barely breathing serviceman by the legs. Next is the sticker. Darkness ten years long. 1928 Peace and tranquility. The brass station bell chimes at regular intervals, the signboard on the platform shines with a worthy brilliance. A greasy, lost bearded man suddenly wakes up from unconsciousness, seeing a vaguely familiar female face in the window of a passing train. Memories flood over him. The sewing machine rumbles with machine gun shot, the St. George cross flashes with a reminder of how he fraternized with the German on the front line. The name and rank pop up: non-commissioned officer Filimonov.

Having appointed a lost non-commissioned officer as a spy of the new system, Friedrich Ermler expects from him not so much an impartial testimony of the beauty of the new life, but confirmation of the irreversibility of socialist changes. Signing himself with the sign of the cross, the messenger of the old world must travel all the way to Leningrad in order to take a look at the young Soviet country as a neophyte and recognize the rightness of renunciation of the past. The Okhrana is no more, the factories belong to the workers, and in everyday life there are solid pluses. With awkwardness, you remember the rootless Bender, who at about the same time shared mattresses in the hostel of Berthold Schwartz. Filimonov does not sink to mattresses. After a bit of sadness about the old ways and after listening to a lecture in a working canteen, Filimonov gets a job at a factory, where it turns out that he is almost better prepared for socialist life than those who have everything in order with their memory. “Oh, you, ruins of an empire,” Filimonov says to his ex-wife and her current husband, a cultural worker with the manners of a domestic satrap.

THE ZNAHAR / Znachor 1937, Michal Wasinsky

Returning home after a serious operation, Professor Vilchur discovers a note from his departed wife on the table and falls either into a rage, or into prostration. Rushing out of his apartment in search of his fugitive wife, the professor wanders the streets of Warsaw at night for a long time, until an impudent beggar stumbles upon him, who, sprinkling Polish speech with foreign words, first asks for money for alcohol, and then spins the doctor for a full dinner. For dessert, the professor gets hit on the head in the nearest alley. Documents, money, clothes, and most importantly, the memory of oneself disappear. After tragic wanderings, which fit, however, in just a couple of short scenes, Vilchur is nailed to the family of a wealthy miller. Having settled in his house, unexpectedly for everyone (including himself), he cures Melnikov's son Vatsik. The news of the miracle doctor spreads throughout Polish cities and villages.

System-forming knowledge is automatic: healing skills function in Vilchur independently of personal memory — hands remember better than heads. The profession determines both consciousness and being. Actually, that's why the film is called "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 cop with a memory reset successfully continued to exist as a law enforcement machine, signs of the past showed through in utilitarian professional motor skills. Death only marked the erasure of personal memories, essentially not changing anything: the gun was spinning in his hand as in a previous life. Having survived social death, Vilchur is preserved by the profession, it conserves him, becoming the only support in an unknown space, the root identifying knowledge - like the memory of how one holds a spoon and how one sits 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 plane 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 their own destruction: detachments of stormtroopers roam the streets, on the shop windows here and there they write the word “Yid” in whitewash. And he doesn’t even know who to shout “Heil”.

By repeating—perhaps deliberately—Ermler’s “war-amnesia-new world” plot structure, Chaplin seems to be shooting two birds with one stone. On the one hand, a hairdresser in unconsciousness 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, rebuff the presumptuous Nazi thug. On the other hand, the protagonist's fifteen-year-old unconsciousness becomes a completely transparent metaphor for the general state of the Toman brains. Indeed, one must completely forget about everything in order, having lost one war, to start another. Memory problems turn out to be nationwide. Stormtroopers can't 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 itself has clearly lost its orientation in space. Globe games, dreamy erotic assaults on the secretary, hysterical leaps from thunderous fury to 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. The zombie routine turns out to be an excellent substitute for memory.

BEWARE / Spellbound 1945, Alfred Hitchcock

An attractive young man arrives in a secluded psychiatric hospital, who introduces himself to the clinic staff as Dr. Edwards - this talented psychiatrist is soon to take over as chief physician. But during the very first friendly dinner, the doctor has a seizure at the sight of a white tablecloth, which leads his new colleagues to dreary thoughts about the mental health of the future boss. The beautiful doctor Constance begins to observe Edwards, who comes to the conclusion that the person who arrived at the clinic is not only not a psychiatrist, but does not remember who he is at all. At the same time, news reaches the hospital about the disappearance of the real doctor during a ski trip. Suspicions fall on a mysterious stranger. Deciding to undertake his own investigation, Constance drags False Edwards to his teacher, the psychoanalyst Bryulov, played by the nephew of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov.

In Bewitched, the treatment of amnesia is presented in Hitchcockian lavishness, in all the cold splendor of psychoanalytic science. Hypnosis, heart-to-heart talks, dream-solving sessions. Trauma, amnesia, psychotherapy. Suspiciously often, the characters pronounce the phrase "guilt", it is in it that they find the cause of a mysterious headache. This clever phrase, however, does not reveal the essence of the problem: that is, here in its purest form, Hitchcock's "MacGuffin". What is "guilt", why "guilt"? But it sounds good.

Amnesia, in turn, is presented as a real insanity. It causes monstrous changes in the personality of the patient. The farther, the stronger the forgetful citizen is like a dangerous madman literally with a razor in his hand. By calming the patient with milk with sleeping pills, Bryuloff and Constance, having united their efforts, achieve the impossible - they remove the blockage from the memory and at the same time return the patient to mental health. That is, memory in this case is 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, is 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 story lines as Spellbound. Compassionate psychiatrist Lorrison decides to help a patient accused of killing his wife. Black hair, crazy eyes, neurotic gestures. The case, however, does not look so complicated: Stephen Kenneth, a pilot who hit his head during World War II, is caught by the police at the scene of a car accident; strangled (apparently by Kenneth himself) woman, his wife, is found in a wrecked car. The matter is complicated only by the fact that the suspect cannot remember either the moment of the murder or how he ended up in the ill-fated car. So the court finds 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 typical film noir. The tragedy of the protagonist is also typical - a forcedly “abnormal” person who longs to live a “normal” life of an inhabitant and takes the most extreme measures to achieve this state. “Be reasonable,” the beautiful psychiatrist pleads, but, turning to reason, the call of a memory spurred by hypnosis cannot be drowned out. Memory becomes the most important piece of evidence, the only thread leading to the true killer, and the process of "remembering" takes on a distinctly detective tone. At stake is not just mental health, but, more importantly, a good name and familiar social status - the search for the true killer is clearly not out of love for the deceased wife. The situation is somewhat paradoxical: “loss of memory” seems to be a protective mechanism of the psyche, but it is a person without memory who feels especially unprotected in a regulated society of normal people. Waif is reckless and will do 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 he is being strangled, and he, fighting back, pierces his offender with an awl. In the morning, a young man wakes up, the remnants of sleep disappear from his head, but suddenly, looking in the mirror, he sees fingerprints on his neck. There is sweat on his face - he really killed someone, but he doesn’t even remember who. The only memory that pops into his mind is that before leaving, he locked the body of the murdered man in one of the mirrored cabinets.

Dreams echo memories. At some point, nightmares become the most material evidence of the existence of the past. It is not for nothing that such attention is paid to dreams in Hitchcock's Bewitched, and it is by interpreting dreams that psychotherapists restore memory. Confused (in "Fear" memory lapses are explained by hypnosis), the brain seems to encrypt a backup copy of information in dreams. When asked if dreams can be trusted, director Maxwell Shane confidently answers yes. Believe. The rest is even more ghostly.

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 really monstrous without attention.

MR. 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 but your secret.”

The poetic epigraph of "Mr. Arkadin" precedes a no less poetic story. The European adventurer Van Stratten decides to cling to the fortune of a mysterious loud-voiced 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 look after his daughter. Having noticed an inquisitive young man, 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 even remember something about his dark deeds. Van Stratten follows in the footsteps of Arkadin, compiling reports about his either Polish or Georgian origin, while witnesses of glaring facts, meanwhile, methodically and without a trace disappear behind him.

The hoaxer Wells, who reconstructed other people's memories in Citizen Kane, starts a campaign of digging in someone else's underwear in Arkadin to illustrate a not only extravagant, but non-trivial idea - in order to really get rid of the past forever, you need to remember everything well. Only by launching a bloodhound through the waves of your memory, you can achieve real oblivion. Van Stratten is entrusted with a course of psychotherapy. It is necessary to collect the details of the biography that are unimportant at first glance, in order to erase the existing puzzle from memory at once.

RUNWAY / La Jete`e 1962, Chris Marker

Humanity, which survived the Third World War, is barricading itself from chaos and all-pervading radiation underground. Energy and food are about to come to an end, and the government of the victorious side decides to experiment with prisoners. The object of experiments is memory. The brain of the test subjects is bombarded with memories - they are naturally injected with a syringe into a vein - according to scientists, this should free the consciousness of the participants in the experiment and send them first to the past and then to the future, where they can find out the recipe for saving the dying Earth.

Memory seems to be the only crutch on which mankind, limping on both legs, can lean. Although the past is in the past - the global catastrophe that befell the human race in the "Runway" leaves no chance for the former life - but painstaking work on memories turns the deeds of past days into something radically superior to the present. The gloomy dungeons of Paris of the future cannot be compared with the bright sky of Orly airport, walks through spring Parisian gardens or a romantic date in the Natural History Museum. A bright memory becomes an ideal shelter from a catastrophe that happened in reality. The presence of the experience of a past life and even, in a good way, obsession with a past life make it possible not only to save civilization in time travel, but also to continue life in the present in general. The only rememberer saves the Earth, forced to reject the experience of a past life and fallen into unconsciousness. The form in which the "Runway" exists is not accidental - a montage photo film. As The Kinks once sang: “People take pictures of each other just to prove that they really existed” - that is, “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.

MONSTERIOUS DECADE / La Decade Prodigieuse, 1970, Claude Chabrol

He wakes up with blood on his hands. Opens the window - there is Paris. He leaves the room and asks himself: “What day is it today? What number? What is the address here?

To recover, a young man named Charles, suffering from memory lapses, goes to the rich and omnipotent father Theo (the name of the speaker - the father played by Orson Welles is really godlike), where he must spend ten days in the company of his stepmother and his university teacher. Charles's teacher loves, believing, however, that he is clearly not in himself, but Charles has an affair with his stepmother, and on the verge of disaster - the blackmailer who has come on the trail of a love affair promises to tell his father about everything if a large monetary reward is not paid. Against this background, the strange ailment of Charles falling into unconsciousness is exacerbated. Chabrol was sometimes called the "French Hitchcock" for a reason. In The Decade, crimes are implicated in psychoanalytic mysteries and complexes, and Anthony Perkins, who plays the main role, deliberately acts in this story as a kind of Norman Bates. The similarity is reinforced not only by the motives of love-hate for the father, but also by the presence of several scenes with a rather ferocious grandmother, not coming off the bottle. However, Hitchcock's overtones can hardly explain the rather wild atmosphere of this picture. Her deliberate biblical symbolism, a green nose, for some reason stuck to the face of Orson Welles, as well as incredible costumes and mannerisms of the characters. Time in Theo's house seemed to be frozen in the twenties of the last century. The castle, like the son of Charles, falls into oblivion; and real problems go to the basement of the subconscious. It is no coincidence that Theo keeps his half-crazy alcoholic mother in a separate closet, and the fear of his father is forced out into a hefty plaster statue of Zeus, which Charles sculpts. In this estate, everyone wakes up with their hands stained with blood.

EVERYONE FOR HIMSELF AND GOD AGAINST EVERYONE / Jeder fur sich und Gott gegen alle 1974, Werner Herzog

An unthinking, but quite adult man appears on the streets of Nuremberg to make a splash in the regular life of a clearly demarcated space in German. He can't speak properly, he can't eat while sitting at a table, and he's never worn boots, but he can write his name, which he does when he's taken to the police.

The case of Kasper Hauser can perhaps be considered the case of a man who really had no past. It's like he's 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 the new civilized space for him. However, Herzog is hardly interested in the social section of the case with the "natural" man Hauser. The historical curiosity is rather a reason to formulate Herzog's eternal questions. What is a person as a species, in isolation from the centuries of social memory and civilization that have accumulated on him? Who are we? Where? Why does every person, like Casper, yearn to learn how to live in society, but cannot comprehend this science until the end of his life? Know - answer.

PARIS, TEXAS / Paris, Texas 1984, Wim Wenders

In the Texas desert, they find an overgrown silent shibzdik in a red cap. Of the documents, the foundling has only 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 roads, equally endless deserts along the roadsides and identical gas stations turn out to be an ideal environment for losing yourself. Tumbleweed does not need memory. The only way to somehow cling to space, to take root in it, is to endow the surrounding things with an individuality that is not inherent in them initially. This is what the lost Travis does, carrying in his pocket a photo of a purchased desert plot of land (Paris, Texas), where, as he thinks, he was conceived; for a long time choosing from the same rental cars the only one that means something to him. The main anchor in this anonymous space for Travis is a young son, whom, however, he barely remembers.

But amnesia is not a one-sided phenomenon: as soon as you forget about what makes up your life, life forgets about you. And in 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 rebuild his relationship with reality. Together they go in search of their lost wife and mother, who is found in a peep show booth. This peep show seems to be a fairly transparent metaphor: a dressing room with one-sided opaque glass becomes an ideal example of communication with memory. The past is, indeed, a strange thing: you see it, but it does not see you. It belongs to you, but does not own you.

ANGEL HEART / Angel Heart 1987, Alan Parker

The bristly handsome detective Gary Angel receives a completely standard order: you need to find the lost - former singer Johnny Favorite, who disappeared after the war in hospitals. 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 Angel somewhere, but Harry himself either forgot, or really did not know the mysterious foreigner. At least, he denies the possibility of such a meeting until he plunges into a case that smacks more and more of mysticism. Every witness Garry visits dies a horrific death shortly after the visit, and the detective himself has strange dreams about an ominous red window in a cheap New York hotel. Alan Parker in "Heart of an Angel" seems to successfully play the standard film noir - a person wakes up in blood, does not remember anything, but believes that he is innocent and eventually proves it. 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. Angel kills, forgets, then comes to the scene of the crime to turn over 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, Detective Angel, and in the place of the fat customer, the devil himself (Wells would be glad if he lived to see the release of Parker's film). Lucifer, as a real psychotherapist, leads Angel to solve the riddle in a few sessions. The angel survived a spiritual (in the most literal sense) trauma. But stop running from yourself, you need to look into the eyes of the past, come to terms with the future and calmly go down the elevator 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 to do with memory loss. "We had to erase his memory," the unnamed doctor says in a casual way, like he's restarting a computer. The murdered guard Murphy becomes the material for creating an incredible cyborg designed to fight urban crime. The metal armored body connects to the human head. The zeroed brain is taught anew 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 system for identifying targets, voice warning and firing. But the body, even metal, remembers more than the mind. And the electric man dreams of real, not electric sheep. One memory is enough for a dead man to unfreeze and get out of control. The machine, having acquired memory, turns into a person capable of violating instructions and algorithms. The most striking moment of "remembering" 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 comes upon him like a momentary Polaroid.

OVERBOARD / Overboard 1987, Gary Marshall

A wealthy socialite falls overboard on her own multi-million dollar yacht during an overnight storm. From the hospital, the lady falls into the hands of a carpenter with a speaking surname Proffit. She once refused to pay for the work done. The carpenter is not a blunder - he convinces the failed drowned woman that they have been husband and wife for many years with a bunch of idiot children, a wrecked house and a lot of financial problems. Such a past can hardly please anyone. But gradually the former millionaire gets used to her new fate - she learns to cook dinners, accompany her children to school, and bring beer from the refrigerator to her proletarian husband. Moreover, a dubious plan to tame a stubborn rich woman develops into great love. The traditional scenario trick with retrograde amnesia turns into an opportunity to start a new life. The only piquancy is that this possibility is realized against the will of the victim.

“You know,” the heroine says to her imaginary husband every now and then, “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 truly operetta spirit: the monstrous character of the victim is corrected, the deceit is forgiven, the old is forgotten. Ah, if only it were really that simple.

REMEMBER ALL / Total Recall 1989, Paul Verhoeven

Douglas Quaid has dreams about Mars, although he himself has never been there. Waking up, he raves about Mars and in reality. To test his dreams, Quaid turns to Rekall, a company that is ready to send customers anywhere and for minimal money - specialists program the memory for any impression. But something goes wrong during the procedure: false memories affect the memory area of the erased ones, and alarmed, pursued by some thugs, Quaid decides to go to the red planet in order to remember everything now.

Before the memory implantation procedure, Rekall doctors blurt out: "Memories are better than reality." Assess the accuracy of what is said. Firstly, it’s really 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 that concerns the external environment. Quaid, these doubts do not leave even for a second. "My life ... or you dreamed of me." 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 forget? These questions don't get answered even with the end credits. Why? Because a person believes what he wants to believe. He remembers those moments that give him pleasure, and mercilessly erases the unpleasant from 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 scissors. Before the execution in the electric chair, the convict says: "I love my wife and will love her forever." Words come true in full measure. The souls of the composer and his beautiful wife move into new, completely identical bodies - those belonging to Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson. The new incarnation of Strauss is in private detective practice, the new Margaret (now her name is Grace) suffers from retrograde amnesia with terrifying nightmares - every night she dreams of being cut with beautiful sharp scissors.

Branagh's neonoir is a detective inflated with 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 victim of amnesia must remember not his current life, but what happened before. And although death and birth are traumas, after which there should be no more memories, Margaret / Grace's experience proves the opposite. She will not only remember, but also point out her real killer. Rather, she will forget herself “new” than part with the memory of how she was once stabbed.

SHATTERED / Shattered 1991, Wolfgang Petersen

The car takes off from the mountain road and flies for a long time along the 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 the face, the understanding of who he is and where he was going disappears. Doctors diagnose - psychogenic amnesia. All personal memories are gone. Maybe for a week, maybe forever. After a series of plastic surgeries and a rehabilitation course, Dan, that's the name of the hero "Shattered", begins to believe his reflection in the mirror, re-accustoms 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 more. Behind the plot twists of Shattered, an essential question looms: what remains of a person if he replaces his face and past? Character, soul, dreams? The problem matches the old paradox about the knife, in which the blade was first replaced, and then the handle. Can we assume that the knife has remained the same? And what is in it now? Junction point?

After unearthing the truth, Dan is left shattered. Identification is not possible. And who knows what awaits him over the end credits.

Regarding Henry, 1991, Mike Nichols

The hypocritical New York lawyer Henry Turner (who will stick a knife in anyone's back) decides one evening to go out for cigarettes and suddenly becomes a witness, and then a victim of a robbery. The offender shoots him first in the chest, then in the head. And although the lawyer, apparently, has no heart, and the well of the 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 drools, can neither get up nor sit down, and looks at the world with the piercing gaze of a large child. Life has to start over: disassemble the cubes, learn to hold a spoon, walk and read. Blessed and melodramatic (even though the screenplay was written at the very beginning of his career by the main producer of modern Hollywood, JJ Abrams), Nichols' film treats amnesia as a kind of social rehabilitation course. Hard-hearted Henry, after two shots, not only forgets all the features of his hellish profession, he also becomes an exemplary family man (he used to forbid 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, a radical improvement of the hero provokes evolution and the space surrounding him. The wife agrees to recall her daughter from the hated boarding school, and the daughter suddenly discovers a rather nice person in her father who frightened her. Your possibilities are truly great, amnesia!

ARMAVIR, 1991, Vadim Abdrashitov

The Armavir liner crashed. The surviving 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 people close to her.

Panning dozens of lost passengers distraught after the catastrophe, it is not by chance that the camera chooses Aksyuta and Semin as heroes. Two officers who have forgotten themselves - Semin does not remember anything at all except an unsinkable love for his daughter - they 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 start a different life with another person (a neat wino played by Sergei Garmash). “What has fallen is gone. - 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.

Combining the parable convention and the real story of the crash of the Admiral Nakhimov liner in their film, Abdrashitov and Mindadze not only capture the moment of the collapse of the Soviet empire as a social and class system, they create an ideal metaphor for the apocalypse. At the moment when "Armavir" stumbles upon 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 the music captured from the ship and repeat meaningless words until the mourning ends and reality resets itself. "The ship is sinking, and I am alone, and there is no one around, so 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 undocumented, the novelist ends up at the station to tell the commissar about what happened to him, a big fan of his talent, as it turns out. But Anof doesn't remember anything. He does not know how he ended up in the forest, what he was running from, or even why he is clean-shaven today, although he usually wore a bushy beard. And it's about murder. Therefore, starting with compliments, the interrogation becomes tougher, 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 be seen who was killed.

“After half my earthly life, I found myself in a gloomy 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 leaky roof, where Anof was detained until the circumstances were clarified. Forgotten Anof suddenly begins to arrive at the police station in whole bags. A shirt, cut hair, a pistol from which the shot was fired, piles of photographs - it turns out that the writer took pictures of everyone with whom life confronted him - nameless ghosts and shadows suddenly come to life under the inquisitive gaze of the interrogator. “Who is this one? And that one? When did you see him? Tell 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 grown old, but he doesn't remember anything at all. Another Parisian, an anthropologist professor (also Marcello Mastroianni) decided one day, 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 clochard: at least he earned no less than in 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. Once at the house of the priestess of love, the professor briefly comes to his senses to break out in an angry tirade about the book of Carlos Castaneda found on the shelf.

Raul Ruiz's Paris is an ideal parody of the structure of the modern world, where almost every real person has a parallel life - a virtual one. The eccentric locked up by the elves looks like an Internet-addicted hermit. A professor who longs to be a clochard to get rid of the qualities inherent in a professor, and a businesswoman dressing 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 (phraseologism most adequately describes what happened), but the professor and the director cannot live together. The past weighs on them.

LONG KISS Goodnight / The Long Kiss Goodnight 1996, Renny Harlin

“I entered this world as an adult,” provincial teacher Samantha Kane does not particularly lament that her own past is a mystery to her. Central retrograde amnesia is a bad disease, but you can live with it, as Samantha assures. In the end, Samantha raises her daughter, meets a good guy, teaches at school, and, in general, in the village where she was brought, she is the first beauty. Memory catches up with her by accident. On a winter road, the bumper of the car 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 a past life - Samantha used to be a secret assassin in the service of the American government - are returning. Slowly but surely. First, in the kitchen - possession of a knife, then Samantha, without prompting, remembers how to assemble and disassemble a sniper rifle. From the mirror, a cynical brightly made-up blonde looks at the house brunette, who just asks for a cigarette. And to top it all off, very unpleasant people from a past life declare a hunt for Samantha.

The 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 obvious (the script was written by Shane Black, known for his deadly humor), but, in addition to irony, in the story of transformation From the exemplary non-smoking brunette to the deadly smoking blonde, one can discern a rather bitter moral: 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 a perfect film noir setting (the sun never rises here and steam escapes from blackened hatches), stops to start over. Cars stop honking, residents fall silent, and houses, streets and the horizon itself, on the contrary, begin to rumble in incredible animation. Cabins turn into palaces, avenues become alleys, and a kind doctor comes to people who injects a green special solution into their veins to reset the old life and prescribe a new memory in the head (see Chris Marker's "Runway"). A banker can become a beggar, a policeman can become a “godfather”, and a respectable layman can become a maniac who has woken 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 transformer city built in space should provide aliens with knowledge about such mysterious matter as the human soul. It is memory, and not being, according to the pale-faced people, that determines the consciousness of a person and his soul. To remember too much means to have power, to learn how to manage your own and other people's memories means to become 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 malfunction in the brain: the memory is structured in the shortest segments, and the investigation almost every hour has to be started anew. In order not to get lost in their own evidence and information, a person carries a Polaroid and a pen with him. In the case of particularly important evidence of a crime, tattoos are applied to the body. “We all need memory to know who we are,” a person concludes weightily once. Although for himself there is only one objective memory of himself - this is his illness. A fact that is confirmed every few hours.

An unnamed American province with nameless eateries, roads, elementary particles of houses and people is an ideal environment for the development of his disease. The off-shoulder suit fits Leonard (what's his name?) perfectly, and the car, in turn, fits the suit perfectly. Everything is interchangeable, complementary and rearranged. Fragmentary memories recorded on the body and tiny snapshots are pieces of the perfect puzzle, from which any picture can be put together if desired. The killer Leonard is looking for could be anyone. Or maybe it was he who killed his wife, but he simply forgot, did not believe it, went to check, and stood on an eternal detective watch.

Christopher Nolan credits the oblivious hero's delusions with a mathematically precise structure. The film is launched backwards from the final scene to the plot (that is, to the solution). Corpses get up and go, acquaintances turn into strangers, tattoos disappear as if they were made with invisible ink, Polaroids blur into dark spots. A confusing story before our eyes turns into a neat skein of information - an anamnesis, which requires rather than the spectator's empathy, but an objective view of the doctor.

Mulholland Drive / Mulholland Drive, 2001, David Lynch

A brunette who 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 entered the apartment. Introduces herself as Rita after seeing a poster of the movie "Gilda" on the bathroom wall. Rita has a bag full of dollars and a blue Suprematist key with her. The blonde, who seems to be named Betty, decides to help Rita remember who she is.

The world is not what it seems, and we are not what 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 the ends in it converge, and the gaps in reality are always explained. The dream of Rita and Betty is seen by actress Diane Salvin, who ordered the murder of her girlfriend Camilla Rhodes. The order has been fulfilled, and now Diane is either trying to force this fact out of her memory, or to correct what happened in a dream. Anyway, Betty is an exact copy of Diane and meets Camille, that is, Rita, alive and well. In a dream, Diane manipulates her own memories, and Rita, a copy of her friend born from a dream, is doomed to unconsciousness. Diane equates amnesia with comforting helplessness. She must help Rita. Program it with a new memory and cut off bad memories of a bad past. Such manipulation, however, cannot go unnoticed. First of all, for the manipulating himself. This is fully evidenced by the scene in the Silencio theater that reveals the nature of Diane's dream. “There is no orchestra. This is just a recording - and yet we hear the orchestra, ”says the entertainer 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 falls into the millstones of a "witch hunt". The script for the second film was postponed, the studio was flooded - investigators from the commission are knocking on the door. Drunk with grief, Peter gets behind the wheel and on the way home falls along with the car from the nearest bridge. He hits his head, swims a couple of kilometers downstream, opens his eyes in the morning, and nothing. What is his name, what does he work for, how did he end up here? Peter doesn't answer any of those questions. The inhabitants of the town to which he sailed will answer for him - in St. Petersburg they will identify the guy who went missing during the Second World War. Dad will appear (the owner of the local cinema Majestic), the bride (they went to kiss with her at the lighthouse) and friendly neighbors. To live a fictional life to the end will not give only the arrival of the FBI.

In his sentimental melodrama, Frank Darabont is clearly guided by Chaplin's "The Great Dictator". Amnesia in his picture is also associated with the phenomenon of a double, and joyful people also sincerely welcome the ignorant false hero, reverently played by a popular comedian. Even the final speech delivered by Peter Appleton at a meeting of the commission of inquiry into un-American activities, in a sense, parodies the speech of Chaplin's hairdresser. Appleton, like the hairdresser, urges listeners to come to their senses. But if Chaplin's hero took with penetration, Jim Carrey does not want to be unfounded. From his pocket, he pulls out a powerful piece of evidence - the constitution of the United States of America. “Remember, we were promised freedom of opinion?” asks Carrie, and the venerable elders really remember something like that.

BORN IDENTIFICATION / The Bourne Identity, 2002, Paul Greengrass

From the body of a stranger rescued on the waters, like Jonah, a capsule with a laser message is removed - a tiny device projects the number of a secret cell in a Swiss bank onto the wall. No more information. What's your name, where did you sail from? The saved person can answer these questions in several European languages: “I don’t know.” He also weaves sea knots and knows the techniques of jiu-jitsu. However, opening a secret box in a bank also yields little: a fair amount of money is found in a fireproof bandura, about ten passports with different surnames, and most importantly, a barrel.

In Bourne, it seems, the story of how Dr. Watson unraveled the professional affiliation of Sherlock Holmes is rather wittily rewritten. “Knows how to shoot, is interested in chemistry, knows everything about the underworld, 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 (according to one of his passports, and might as well be Michael Caine or Foma Kinyaev), also assumes the worst. He's an undercover spy, a CIE-paid assassin. His task was to get lost among strangers, to live a fake life, and he got lost. Looking for his former self, Bourne stumbles upon a void. Recognizes a name that says nothing to him - David Webb. One day his real life ended. But not with memory loss, but with admission to the secret service. Interestingly, if Otto von Stirlitz once hit his head and identified himself by his party card in his breast pocket, who would he end the war with?

A MAN WITHOUT A PAST / Mies Vailla Menneisyytta, 2002, Aki Kaurismäki

“It’s better for you: life goes forward, not backward” - any catastrophe can become a suitable starting point, and if you are not a completely lost person, you will surely be able to extract even the best from the worst. The idea, in general, is not that terribly new, but pretty. Moreover, Kaurismäki, in his Man Without a Past, confirms it with such optimistic zeal that one believes it.

Beaten by gopniks, and then ended up in the dustbin of life, the welder begins to build his new existence with the solidity of the wrecked Robinson Crusoe. He washes the floor in the trailer he got, puts a jukebox in it, plants potatoes nearby in a wasteland, tames a dog named Hannibal. Then there will be a musical group, love, even friends will appear, which never existed. One of the final scenes, where the old-fashioned welder eats sushi with chopsticks and drinks sake, is a final test of human adaptability. In the indispensable for Aki Kaurismäki, the timelessness of scenery and costumes does not seem like amnesia, nor is it a shock akin to the apocalypse. On the contrary, trauma binds M (in the credits of the main character is designated by a single letter) to life much stronger than the preceding forty years of earthly existence.

WITHOUT MEMORY / Novo 2002, Jean-Pierre Limozin

"It's okay - it's in the past." "Sorry, I forgot." Graham, a small office worker, either an electrician, or a janitor, 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, the brain loses its footing in reality. Names and facts fly out of my head. He does not remember what he did fifteen minutes ago. In order not to get 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; there are some other facts that you just need to know. Suspiciously, Graham does not seem to feel discomfort from his illness. Firstly, he himself is pleased - every day something new. And secondly, girls love Graham for his pretty physiognomy, good-natured character and eternal freshness of feelings. One young lady writes her name on his chest with an indelible marker: “When it disappears, you will forget me.” And on Saturdays, Graham's boss arranges such sexual harassment for Graham that even the all-seeing eye of the security camera turns red (her lovers prudently seal it with tape). But the next morning, Graham, unlike the same cell, does not remember anything about what happened. He knows little about anything at all, this simple European guy Graham. He always has everything without a routine, like the first time.

“You can’t trust a man without a memory,” one of the heroines declares, 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 is impossible. Graham, with his memoirs of life carefully recorded in a book (here one would like to see criticism of the civilization of electronic diaries and social networks, but the film is clearly not up to it) really turns out to be a fiction man. Anyone can manipulate him, inventing more and more details of his life and love, assembling 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.

Paycheck / Paycheck 2003, John Woo

Engineer Jennings has a great talent: in a couple of months he is able to do what the whole institute would take years to do. In addition, he is ready to completely delete these months from 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 a round sum of the next fee.

Three years of work is like one big blackout, and memory is like a pile of garbage. Having received a package of unfamiliar personal belongings, Jennings is forced to start unraveling himself. Moreover, it is not clear what should be relied on more: on milestones left to oneself or on sudden flashes of one's own or someone else's memory. Things do not fail, because they exist in reality. And the memory… It seems that ephemeral memory is materialized: it is a dream that should become a reality, a prediction that has come true, which you willy-nilly follow. The seen future (namely, the foresight machine was invented by Jennings in the forgotten three years of his life) turns into the past and becomes obligatory for implementation. And the one who does not remember the past can manipulate tomorrow and change it.

LONG SUNDAY ENGAGEMENT / Un Long Dimanche de Fiancailles, 2004, Jean-Pierre Genet

1919 The First World War is over, but the brave crippled Matilda refuses to believe the funeral, according to which her beloved Manek was left to die behind the front line for causing deliberate harm to himself (in other words, "crossbow"). Matilda thought that Manek was alive, and now she believes in the incredible. This is her approach to life. Matilda makes an unprecedented detective out of an ordinary front-line case, which she herself, having hired a private detective, unravels. Collecting a chain of evidence and evidence, Matilda is moving 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 maybe banal) coincidences. A miraculous rescue, a lost memory, confused army dog tags - reality recedes before fate.

The shell-shocked fiancé's amnesia becomes the plot anchor of the "Engagement" - how else to explain why the living Manek never got in touch with his beloved. Compensation for the forgotten is due to the extraordinary memory of Matilda. She seems to remember what happened for her fiancé. Meeting with Manek's co-workers, the bride reconstructs the events of the day he was supposed to be killed, and in doing so, brings him back to life. The details turn out to be the perfect means to restore memory: a red mitten, the letters "MMM" ("Manek is Matilda's husband"), carved on the trunk of a tree uprooted 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 Mathilde memory by the very form of the "Long Engagement", which is also a feat of remembering. His film is a love letter to a Paris that doesn't exist - hats and feathers, thin female waists, architecturally complex male mustaches, dusty pavements and lacy windows into which golden open air flows. Memory is moved by love, and love exists only as a memory of that single moment of perfect, incomprehensible love.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind / Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2004, Michel Gondry

"The pages are torn out - I don't remember doing that." Double amnesia is ridiculous. Not only did the pages from the diary go away, but also forgot about it.

A shabby but still dreamy young man, Joel learns that after another spat, the eccentric girl Clementine 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 next day she went to work without any ulterior motive. Joel came to her to make peace, and she didn't even pay attention to him. Then he, in a thirst for revenge, turned to the same company, did a couple of tests, came home early, drank sleeping pills and prepared for erasure.

Most of the film is just the most detailed way of showing the process of erasing memory. This is not the instant flash from Men in Black. Here you need to carefully and at the same time with diligence. As if with a pencil eraser you wipe some

But here the slogan of the film comes into force: “You can erase love from memory. Throwing it out of the heart is another story.” Love, indeed, turns out to be a rather quirky matter. A devastated Joel with a crippled diary is drawn to the winter beach where he once met Clementine. He does not remember this, but his legs somehow go by themselves. Clementine meets him again in the train - apparently, also from the beach. "Their hearts radiate with innocence" is the traditional translation of the line from Alexander Pope's poem that titles the film. 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.

If you gaze into the 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, there is no affinity, no friendship, no enmity between religion and real science: they are at different poles.

Great is the one who gave direction.

“Love your neighbor” means first of all: “Leave your neighbor alone!” “And it is precisely this detail of virtue that is the most difficult.

Where the crowd drinks, all springs are poisoned. - "Thus spake Zarathustra"

Our duty is a right that others have over us.

Heroism is the good will to absolute self-destruction.

The domination of virtue can only be achieved by the same means by which domination is generally achieved, and at least not through virtue. - "Will to Power"

To give each his own would mean: to desire justice and achieve chaos.

It is expensive to be immortal: for this you die more than once alive.

There is a degree of inveterate deceit, which is called "clear conscience."

Life is a source of joy; but in whom the spoiled stomach, the father of sorrow, speaks, all springs are poisoned.

The earth, he said, has a shell; and this sheath is afflicted with diseases. One of these diseases is called, for example: "human".

My method of retribution is to send something clever after stupidity as soon as possible: in this way, perhaps, you can still catch up with it.

Our suicides discredit suicide - not vice versa.

Not your sin - your self-satisfaction cries out to heaven; the nothingness of your sins cries out to heaven!

The same thing happens to a person as to a tree. The more he aspires upward, towards the light, the deeper his roots go into the earth, downward, into darkness and depth - to evil.

He who fights monsters should take care not to become a monster himself.

“Happiness is found by us,” the last people say, and blink.

Man is a dirty stream. "Thus spake Zarathustra"

Man is something that must be transcended. - "Thus spake Zarathustra"

Humanity is not developing in the direction of a better, higher, stronger - in the sense that people think today. Progress is just a modern, that is, false, idea. The European of our day is incomparably lower in value than the European of the Renaissance...

I don't trust taxonomists and stay away from them. The will to the system is a lack of honesty.

The most erroneous conclusions of people are the following: a thing exists, therefore it has a right to it. - "Human, too human"

There are two ways to save you from suffering: quick death and lasting love.

He who knows himself is his own executioner.

Death is close enough to not be afraid of life.

Long and great sufferings bring up a tyrant in a person.

I hate people who can't forgive.

The danger of the wise is that he is most susceptible to the temptation to fall in love with the unreasonable.

The desire for greatness gives out with his head: whoever has greatness, he 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 languor mate, mysticism arises.

What the believer most hates is not the free mind, but the new mind with a new faith.

The cruelty of an insensitive person is the opposite of pity; the cruelty of the sensitive is a higher potency of compassion.

A person forgets his guilt when he confesses it to another, but this latter usually does not forget it.

The whole world believes in it; but what does the whole world not believe!

A free mind requires foundations, while others require only faith.

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)