Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c4f8m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T16:22:35.591Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - Family Memories, Family Secrets

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2013

Daniela Berghahn
Affiliation:
Royal Holloway, University of London
Get access

Summary

Based on the premise that families are held together by their shared remembering and their complicit forgetting, this chapter investigates the dialectical relationship between those past events that families wish to preserve and those moments that are forgotten and shrouded in silence and which, nevertheless, have a habit of coming out. While the first part of the chapter attends to what I shall call ‘postmemory documentaries’, in which second-generation diasporic filmmakers excavate and reconstruct the migratory histories of their parents, the second part examines fiction films about family secrets and identifies the ‘coming out’ of queer sons and daughters as the most prevalent one. The rationale for including documentaries in a book devoted to the representation of the family in fiction films is that they make the transmission of memories between the generations their chief concern, interweaving footage from old home movies, faded family photos and testimonial interviews with family members. They bring to the fore how generational belonging shapes the diaspora experience in markedly different ways. By interrogating acts of memory and performing their construction, these documentaries make explicit structures that also underpin feature films about diasporic families, but that are seldom narrativised. Moreover, the avowedly personal nature of these documentaries testifies to the autobiographical impetus that, as illustrated in Chapter 1, is deeply entrenched in much of diasporic cinema.

Type
Chapter
Information
Far-Flung Families in Film
The Diasporic Family in Contemporary European Cinema
, pp. 85 - 119
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×