Leaving their mark

Together Roy Dupuis and director Francis Leclerc (Une jeune fille à la fenêtre) discovered a way of making themselves unforgettable to Téléfilm Canada. Their technique? Present three different versions of the same screenplay and get turned down every time. After that, you rework your project for more than a year and come back to petition the government officials a fourth time. Result: you get the necessary funding to produce a film and, above all, you can be sure that you won’t be forgotten in a hurry. In the case of the Dupuis-Leclerc duo, it’s all for the best. There’s nothing worse than being forgotten when you’re making a film called Affective Memory. “Actually, I would like to thank the Téléfilm people. Rewriting the screenplay was beneficial because without it the film wouldn’t be the one we are currently making,” admits the director, who in the same breath declares that the choice of Roy Dupuis in the lead role was obvious from the beginning. “Being at Home with Claude left an enormous mark on me. It was the first videotape I ever bought.”

True to his reputation, Roy Dupuis is not very talkative when the time comes for him to share his feelings. All the same he ends up admitting that the director’s “writing style” and the “story” prompted him to accept Leclerc’s offer. “It’s the kind of screenplay you have to read in your head, because it’s full of images, it’s very cinematic,” he says.

In Mémoires affectives, Dupuis plays a man who, after several months in a deep coma, awakes with serious memory problems. Throughout his convalescence, memories which don’t belong to him come back to haunt him. For this film the director has tried to remove all reference to films where memory plays an important role. No way is he going to dish up another Memento or Mulholland Drive, or worse, a new Total Recall. He describes his production as more of an “arthouse film with commercial potential”.  “It attempts to look more like an American indie film than a sub-titled Polish one,” he jokes. The Quebec release is expected to be this autumn.

FOOTNOTE :

For those of us who haven’t studied psychology, here’s a bluffer’s guide to affective memory (as distinct from sensory and intellectual memory), courtesy of the  Encyclopœdia Britannica :

“…. the concept of "affective memory" described by the French psychologist Théodule Ribot in the 1890s. Although there has been confusion and misunderstanding about it, and its very existence has been questioned, the concept of affective memory is of prime importance for the understanding of how spontaneous and emotional experiences occur ….

Affective memory is the reliving of a past experience - with the accompanying positive or negative response - triggered by an analogous experience in the present. Something that has brought pain is anticipated with displeasure the second time. This displeasure, which is felt immediately, rather than remembered, is like a residue of previous appraisals. Affective memory may be linked directly to the memory of a traumatic experience, as the same situation or a similar one recurs, or to an experience that bears little apparent relation to the original, if the memory has been repressed. Of course, affective memories may stem from pleasant experiences as well as unpleasant ones. The concept of affective memory has found a place in several schools of psychology, including the Freudian and the Pavlovian, though different explanations have been offered.”

It also plays an important part in the Stanislavsky ‘Method’ of acting :

“The lesson of the Method seemed to be that a character could best be built from the inside out, using, among other techniques, affective memory, which would allow the actor consciously to draw upon genuine emotions from the past.”