Memory has become a major preoccupation in the humanities in recent decades, be it individual and collective memory, cultural and national memory, or traumatic memory and the ethics of its representation. More recently, concepts such as “transcultural memory,” “connective memory,” and “multidirectional memory” have been developed in order to think about the ways in which memory is now structured by the global and digital circulation of events across time and space, as well as across social, geographical, and political borders. Additionally, political upheavals around the world have been accompanied by questions about who or what should be memorialized, and who or what cannot be or is not represented. The evidentiary status of recollection, reproduction, and recording has been interrogated within quests to exert power or call for justice.

Drawing on these complex concerns, Astrid Schmetterling and Lynn Turner focus on distinct films—a series of short meditations on the September 11, 2001, attacks commissioned by Alain Brigand and collectively titled 11’09”01 – September 11 (2002), and Richard Linklater’s Tape (2001). Through the medium of these works they investigate contemporary questions regarding the ethics of recollection and memorialization within visual culture.