Közösségi emlékezet és identitás a vizuális média hatóterében
Communal Memory and Identity in the Scope of Visual Media

Summary/Abstract: Before the discovery of writing, the stories spreading from one mouth to another, the mythology created by these, and the attached rituals meant the opportunity to preserve memories. Into the mythology only those memories could build which were essential and crucial not only in the life of just one person or family, but which proved to have a forming power on the destiny of a community. The spreading of writing, however, created the opportunity for the individual to perpetuate her/his memories saved only in her/his mind to the posterity – let it be about her/his experience on an event influencing the entire community, or about a thing that effected only and exclusively her or him as an individual. The option to take down memories, however, forced the remembering person between certain limits. In order to succeed, so that to leave an accurate and authentic print to the Posterity, the person had to be appropriately skilled in writing and making a composition, had to spend the necessary time and effort on this activity. The next revolution of memory-keeping was photography, making the capturing and documentation of the desired moment possible, then the invention of films, movies (motion pictures) and the spreading of the devices capable of making these among common citizens. All of this has brought the "mass-manufacturing" of documents aiming to preserve individual memories. In this scope of action the communal/ public memory is atomized: history is more and more illustrated by a mass of individual memories, in contradiction to the much more homogenous and "wholer" world of mythology or history writing. At the same time it is much less capable of settling. The movements proven to be irrelevant can’t fall through the screen of time, since lots of photographs and motion pictures preserve them.

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