Layering memories: Frank Chiche’s Je vous ai compris (2012)

Introduction

In recent years, movies using rotoscoping have been nominated at the Cannes Film Festival, won international awards, and generated dithyrambic critiques in the press. ¹ Originally created as a cinematic technique that allowed for the transcription of credible movements in animated films – most famously the American series Out of the Inkwell produced between 1921 and 1926 – it is significant that in its current use, the technique tends to support narratives of memory, identity construction, and othering. The multifarious memories of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) are represented through this technique in Frank Chiche’s 2012 film Je vous ai compris. In an astonishingly hybrid genre, Chiche tells the story of several individuals during the war and shows the evolution of his characters’ competing allegiances. Although it premiered in a cinema during the 2013 Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d’Angoulême – a fitting choice for a film that marries animation, rotoscoping, and bande dessinée – the film was made for TV and broadcasted on the Franco-German channel Arte in 2013. By then, Arte and France Télévisions had been producing and broadcasting programmes about the Algerian War and its consequences for over a year, as 2012 marked the 50th anniversary of Algeria’s independence, a celebration that was heavily relayed by the French media. On French TV sets, historians, artists, and witnesses commemorated, analysed, and discussed various – and often contradictory – perspectives on the conflict. In public spaces, exhibitions on the war and its participants made the conflict highly visible, a stark contrast to the quasi inexistant memorial discourses circulating merely 20 years before (Lewis, 2018). In many ways Chiche’s production reflects a trend in commemorating different aspects of the Algerian War of Liberation.

The plot of the Je vous ai compris is divided into three linear subplots, which merge at the end of the film, following a classical narrative structure. In the first subplot, Malika, the daughter of widower Hakim is torn between her father’s allegiance to France through the Kirschner family – a rich French pied-noir family – and her own political leaning that will lead her to activism within the National Liberation Front (FLN). ² The second subplot follows Thomas, the son of the Kirschner family. As a young journalist, he joins the Organization of American States (OAS), a pro-French Algeria paramilitary group and witnesses firsthand the violence of their ideology. Finally, the third subplot centres on the Zeitoun Family, a Jewish pied-noir family from Bab el Oued, a suburb of Algiers. The son, Jacquot is a soldier in the French army who suffers psychologically from the untenable violence of the war, while his sister Sarah experiences the war from ‘the other side’ as she builds and sets bombs for the FLN. By the end of the movie, tragedy has taken its toll and the war has left indelible marks in the human and physical landscapes of Algeria. Malika and Jacquot Zeitoun are dead, Thomas is haunted by what he has witnessed and Sarah Zeitoun and her father leave Algeria for France.

The distinctive form of Je vous ai compris sets it apart, as it is the first movie on the Algerian War of Independence that integrates several popular genres. Cinema, bande dessinée and animation are superposed with video and radio excerpts of political speeches, so that different visual forms are brought to the foreground at different times. I argue that this layering process generates a hybrid cultural artefact which on one hand mimics the elusive intricacies of memory construction (both within individuals and among communities) and on the other hand requires viewers to acknowledge the aesthetic, narrative, and subjective dimensions of historical remembrance. Through creative layering, ³ Chiche presents the memory of the Algerian War as a sculpture, which is constantly being formed by the bodies, times, and places that – successively and simultaneously – inhabit it. Unlike tapestry, which evokes the horizontal and vertical dimension of threads, sculpture suggests a three-dimensional depth that defies the binary dimension of weaving ⁴ and introduces an effective mode of visualising memory as a progressive, collaborative process where different memorial textures are aggregated to form a cohesive whole. Memorial layers can be added, new thicknesses and relief can appear as the sculpture is being created, but the sculpture can never be perceived entirely unless its viewer changes position, or the sculpture is viewed by a community. Consequently, the audience watching Je vous ai compris is constantly negotiating its hermeneutic conditions against the diegetic discourses relayed through the screen.

Franco-Algerian memory

Debates about the causes, the violence and the sociopolitical consequences of the war still animate discussions on both sides of the Mediterranean, almost 60 years after Algeria’s independence (Hiddleston, 2003; Howell, 2015; Hubbell, 2015). The Algerian War is a memorial knot for France, holding together key political events – including the birth of the Fifth Republic – important figures in the conflict, past, and present immigration politics, as well as echoes of the collaboration and resistance of the Second World War. ⁵ It was only in 1999, some 67 years after the conflict ended that France officially recognised it as a war. The institutional memorial apparatus that had been in place to remember and commemorate the First and Second World Wars had therefore not been active before that date. As a result, the circulation of memorial discourses surrounding the Algerian War were either artistic (literature, cinema, performances) or remained in the private spheres of society. ⁶ Today, both Algerian and French politicians regularly comment on the conflict and its consequences, whether ethical or sociopolitical. In 2018, for instance, French President Emmanuel Macron officially recognised that the French communist mathematician Maurice Audin had been assassinated by the French army during the conflict, highlighting France’s illegal and immoral past. That same year, the French government also adopted new legal measures to level Harkis’ compensations with those of other French soldiers that had participated in the war. Since the 2000s, French presidents from across the political spectrum have tried to leave their mark in the memorial discourses surrounding the Algerian War, but many have done so through apologetic discourses towards Algeria in attempts to rehabilitate France’s colonial past.

In Algeria, memories of the war are present in both the private and the public sphere but most discourses were shaped by the official memory narratives of unity laid out by the FLN (Branche, 2011: 437). Many artists and journalists advocated for the multiplicity of memorial discourses and their productions often strived to show a more nuanced understanding of the conflict. These voices remained marginal, however, and were often buried under the myth of the Moudjahid (Crowley, 2017: 15). Recently, the hirak – the popular uprising that has led to the destitution of President Bouteflika – has been galvanised by signs and speeches that referenced the Algerian War, among them the famous slogan ‘Un seul héros, le peuple’ photographed by Marc Riboud in 1962 on the walls of Algiers’ casbah. In many ways, the Algerian War underlies the political and cultural foundations of contemporary Algeria and contemporary France. Since the beginning of the conflict in 1954, artists and activists have tried to understand and explain the political, racial, and cultural complexities of the conflict. Contrary to other films on the war, including the much revered La Bataille d’Alger (1967), La Trahison (2005), or more popular creations like Hors la loi (Bouchareb, 2010) or Loin des hommes (2014), Chiche denies his audience identification through the uncanny form he proposes. As a consequence, the audience’s gaze is always assessing, questioning, and negotiating its difficult relations to the narrative. Through this formal distanciation viewers can begin to sculpt their own memory on the war and its participants.

In Chiche’s work history is memory, an understanding of the past that parallels the view of many contemporary historians whose research tends to reconcile the previously competing spheres of memory and history. In fact, Astrid Erll (2012) explains that this polar opposition has been counter-productive:

I would suggest dissolving the useless opposition of history vs. memory in favor of a notion of different modes of remembering in culture. This approach proceeds from the basic insight that the past is not given, but must instead continually be re-constructed and re-presented. Thus, our memories (individual and collective) of past events can vary to a great degree. This holds true not only for what is remembered (facts, data), but also for how it is remembered, that is, for the quality and meaning the past assumes. (p. 7)

Erll’s suggestion conceptualises what many historians have practiced, ⁷ but also describes the work of artists who have represented the war and its aftermath from various perspectives. Je vous ai compris constitutes a brilliant memorial artefact because it is the product of an episteme where public remembering and forgetting matter and where memories can be contested, hierarchised, and used for defining both the individual and its larger communities. In this context, representations of the Franco-Algerian past have become as varied as the many political, social, and cultural groups that coexisted both in Algeria and in France. As early as 1994, historian David Lindenberg used the concept of ‘memory wars’ to describe the many controversies that surrounded French memories, explaining that ‘notre relation à la mémoire semble aujourd’hui susciter des polémiques d’une particulière violence’ (p. 78). He traces the causes of that metaphoric war as far back as the French Revolution and shows how more recent events such as the Algerian War have also generated heated debates among historians and political institutions, bringing memory to the level of a civil religion (Bensoussan, 1994). Eric Savarese’s (2007) analysis Algérie, La guerre des mémoires highlights the peculiarity of these memory wars and explains how pied-noirs, harkis, OAS members, Fellaghas, and FLN sympathisers all tried to obtain forms of recognition from the French state (Loytomaki, 2014).

In Je vous ai compris tensions between groups but also within them organise the main narrative and its subplots. Both the Fellaghas and the French Army display humane as well as revolting behaviours and the coup of April 1961 is both discussed by its sympathisers and its detractors, who themselves change opinions as the events unfold. The meeting’s historical importance is confirmed by a soundtrack of Challe’s speech accompanied by close-ups of hand-drawn newspaper articles, which appear and disappear with each click of Thomas Zeitoun’s camera. The interactions between the layers of drawn images and historical recordings highlight the back and forth between fictional personal trajectories and authentic historical artefacts. They suggest a visual representation of mnemonic processes where memories are selected and organised according to specific contexts. As a consequence, the central event of the film (the coup, which aimed at controlling the French army to maintain L’Algérie française) becomes a seemingly empty historical locus to be filled with fictional elements of the ever-changing characters’ subplots and fragments of official discourses. The audience members are left to reach their own conclusions about that paramount historical event, as Chiche’s does not provide a ready-to-use historical narrative, but rather one to be constructed through reflection and collective participation.

Layering memories

The movie opens with an original score created by late Algerian artist Rachid Taha, who sings in dialectal Arabic, while traditional instruments mix with contemporary electro-pop music. These sounds, representative of the Metropole and Algerian audioscapes, signify the hybridisation of Western and Algerian discourses from the start. As the movie evolves, classic French songs are played during scenes representing the Algerian joie de vivre (Dalida’s Bambino and Gilbert Becaud’s Age tendre et tête de bois), and a suspenseful oriental track accompanies the heroes as they pursue their various missions. The very last song of the movie, the classic and monumental Edith Piaf song Je ne regrette rien starts as Monsieur Zeitoun says goodbye to Algeria, but it is not Edith Piaf’s voice that urges Sarah not to forget what has happened as they are fleeing, it is the Arabic accented voice of Rachid Taha who has brought Arabic instrumentation to the original score. When Monsieur Zeitoun – the father of both a French army soldier and an FLN supporter – tells his daughter ‘Darling, forgetting is the worst thing that could happen to us [. . .] we need to make sure this war will not become that of your children, and of the children they will have’, Zeitoun suggests the song’s hybridity must be applied to memorial narratives. However, this devoir de mémoire will not be imposed by governments and institutions ⁸ but rather it will be a creative multi-layered enterprise. Partly fictional trajectories, partly historical testimonies, the Algerian and French voices imbricated in Chiche’s work create a new transnational anthem for the memory of the Algerian War of Independence, one that is not about having understood (j’ai compris) but about understanding as a process. The phrase ‘Je vous ai compris!’ is therefore central to interpreting Chiche’s constant play with both the form and content of common representations of the Algerian War. It refers to 4th June 1958, when French president De Gaulle assertively announced to an excited crowd in the Forum of Algiers: ‘Je vous ai compris!’ (I have understood you). While most of the pied-noir ⁹ community rejoiced after De Gaulle’s speech, construing his phrase as a proof of De Gaulle’s desire to keep Algeria French, many later interpreted this same statement as a key moment in De Gaulle’s shifting interests vis-à-vis the pied-noirs, prompting French comedian Pierre Desproges to parody this phrase with his own homophonous ‘Je vous hais, compris?’ (I hate you, understood?). Chiche’s re-appropriation of the title seems to indicate that someone has understood (compris) something, but in the sensitive context of the Algerian War of Liberation nothing seems simple enough to be fully understood by the actors of the conflict, or by the audience. The title of the film is ironic, as the combination of Chiche’s formal and memorial feuilletage complexifies the war, rather than explains it, suggesting instead the contentious nature of memory.

Unable to travel to Algeria and film there – a very costly enterprise – Chiche decided to use animation techniques to recreate rural and urban landscapes. This strategy would allow him to create a graphic film, the cinematic equivalent of the bande dessinée. After the film premiere in Angoulême, Chiche expressed a sense of gratitude for the financial constraints that had been placed upon him and forced him to think creatively about his project. ¹⁰ Although what seems like brilliant artistry was originally caused by budget limitations, Chiche’s innovative technique reinforces the interconnectedness of characters and highlights the instability of the plot’s historical context. But layering also strengthens the uncanny dimension of Je vous ai compris and enables the audience to consider the particular conditions of the characters. Traditionally, rotoscoping requires a form of layering where the original image – the first layer which is drawn over – disappears. In Chiche’s creation, this process is inverted because, instead of painting on the film, Chiche paints directly on the actors. A layer of paint is first added on the actors’ skin and clothes to accentuate traits or movements. Once the actors have played their scenes (usually in front of a green screen), the recording is superposed with a 2D, 3D, or drawn backgrounds. The rotoscope work of delineating objects or actors is transferred to the actors themselves yielding a result that mimics both traditional and animation films without really belonging to either of these genres. Chiche’s play with rotoscoping acts as metalepsis, that is to say ‘transgressions of the boundaries of the diegesis’ (Miller, 2007: 130) allowing characters to always be present as bearers of discourses, but also as obvious reminders of form. In this perspective, Chiche’s work produces a sense of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, preventing the audience from identifying completely with the memorial discourses at play and constantly negotiating the liminal spaces opened by the film. The lips, eyes, eyebrows of each face appear in an almost aggressive fashion as the painted make-up breaks through the screen. While the boastful colours might seem violent at first, they in fact deepen the audience perception of the character’s feelings, highlighting emotions over reasoning. Actors thus function as a white canvas onto which layers of fiction are deposited. Chiche explained his technique in an interview to ActuaBD in 2013:

We have tried to find a trick that would allow us to clearly state our graphic project while staying within the limits of our budget. We told ourselves: ‘What happens if we paint the comedians directly on set, before shooting: we could paint on their clothes, their faces, the pieces or elements of the set they will be touching’.

Although characters and backgrounds fit well together, they do not ever completely blend, highlighting the metaleptic artifice of the film. Because the backgrounds are generally drawn or created in 2D or 3D, one shot superposes at least two cinematic techniques: the cartoonish background and the made-up actors. As a result, viewers can ‘see’ several characters within one representation. For instance, when the character of Hakim appears, the audience perceives Chiche’s fictional creation but sees the actor and stand-up comedian Mohamed Fellag through the heavy make-up. Hakim does not efface Fellag but rather unveils him so that different narratives and experiences (the character’s and the comedian’s) can appear simultaneously. While most films give viewers the opportunity to see the characters, and the actors who portrays them on screen, in Je vous ai compris! rotoscoping invites the audience to settle in the artifice because everything is obviously artificial. The first time a character comes on screen is representative of the rotoscope’s distanciation effect and the artificiality it generates. The background remains stable when suddenly an actor appears as if placed against the background by the hand of an invisible puppeteer. Placed at different depths in the frame, the two elements barely interact and create an unsettling image where elements seem disconnected: the stillness of the Algerian landscapes contrasts with the liveliness of the heavily made-up actor. In this scene, Chiche’s use of layered genres serves to blur relationships – both between reality and fiction and between a supposedly authentic history and the subjective memories of characters and audience members.

Palimpsestic characters

In my reading of Chiche’s work, layering is therefore both a cinematic technique and a political stance that enables him to represent the often contested memories of the Algerian War, but also to highlight the significance of personal trajectories within the context of an international crisis where political tensions were exacerbated. While Chiche’s use of multiple generic layers enables him to challenge the traditional (mis)conceptions of popular genres such as bande dessinées and animation films, ¹¹ the layering also becomes the mode on which characters develop and interact. Because the connection between characters is either familial or contextual, all plots are intertwined and depend on one another. The characters’ evolutions throughout the movie are a constant reminder of their layered identities and compliment the wide range of political positions that underpin the historical frame of Chiche’s storyline. Each character’s choices and actions colour other characters’ destinies through their relationships. While these relationships complicate the plot of what originally presented as a linear film, they also allow for a multiplication of identities and a more comprehensive, though more complex, image of Algerian society in the 1960s.

The first scene of the movie where Jacquot’s division checks an old indigène’s identification papers seems to highlight a simplistic division between allies and enemies. Yet, Chiche fights these Manichean representations of the conflict where race and citizenship seem to define people’s loyalties by showing that – in the very short timeframe of the film – most characters will struggle to adhere to one single opinion on the conflict. This view is in stark contrast with the memorialisation of the Algerian War of Liberation since both the Algerian and French states have tried to maintain a polished discourse of the past in which their political and ethical legitimacies were rarely questioned. These attempts have failed but have been crucial in solidifying public discourses and cementing the Algerian and French nations (Shepard, 2008; Thénault, 2012). Moreover, France’s desire to forget and obscure memory never succeeded in changing public opinion. This irony is highlighted in William Cohen’s (2002) analysis of official memory, he writes, ‘If the State has tried to suppress memory of the conflict, Frenchmen have not remained ignorant, nor indifferent’ (p. 229). Chiche’s film is therefore not about presenting a conflict that his viewers do not know, but rather about highlighting the improbability of linear narratives, and the limitations of official memorial discourses. Through his take on allegiances, but also through his decision to include a wide variety of population in his cast of characters, Chiche encourages his audience to reconstitute the process of memory building. His characters are young (20s) and old (70s); they are Muslim, Jews, Christians; they are pieds-noirs, Berbers, indigènes; they are soldiers in the army, OAS sympathisers, FLN members, harkis; they are military men, journalists, photographers, foremen. Their diversity stirs the individual and collective identities of society and questions the way we think of ourselves politically: What are our identities? Which of our identities defines us in the eyes of others? How does war dictate which identity layers have significance? How are these layers constantly subjected to reordering? As Paul Connerton (2014) suggests, ‘we will experience our present differently in accordance with the different pasts to which we are able to connect that present’ (p. 2). Chiche makes visible the connection between identity, selfhood, and memory by offering not only a genre that oscillates between entertainment, history, and fiction, but also by presenting Algeria’s diversity through its various ethnicities, religions, and social classes.

The tragic character Malika constitutes one of the most fascinating examples of visual and discursive sculpture in the film, one whose many facets can never be seen all at once. Her fate and ultimate death offer a poetic parable for the Algerian War of Independence, which was simultaneously the death of French Algeria and the birth of a nation. The first time she appears in the film, she is sitting on a bench between the opulent-looking Kirschner’s house and the tiny neo-moorish dwellings where she lives with her father Hakim. The drawn and still backgrounds hint at the aspects of Algeria that are culturally or historically fixed but she does not fit in any of them. Instead, she is stuck in between, unable to inhabit either of these seemingly stable positions. Her father’s loyalty to the Kirschner (for whom he works) and her boyfriend Ali’s dedication to the FLN push her to define her allegiance. Until the very end of the movie, she oscillates between her own fidelity to the men she loves – and the binary poles they stand for – and the cause for which she fights. Her choice to work alongside Ali and take part in a bombing on the Algiers forum is complicated by her need to clear her father’s name, after he has been menaced by the same FLN she supports. When Malika sees the young Thomas Kirschner on the forum, she is reminded of her father and his decision that they flee together for the Metropole. Through Thomas’ eyes, she loses her connection to Ali, becomes Hakim’s daughter again and cannot but decide to run away from the violence she was about to commit. In this scene, Chiche demonstrates the intensity of the war, the rapidity with which people could change their minds, and the collision between political ideals and intimate relations, forcing viewers to look at the memory sculpture from different perspectives in a very short time. More importantly, he modifies the texture and appearance of the sculpture so rapidly that it never seems to have a meaning onto which viewers can hold for very long. Chiche moves beyond a binary understanding of the conflict when he shows that neither the French side (associated with Malika’s father) nor the Algerian side (represented by her boyfriend) will let Malika act humanely. Her final decision to work for the FLN in hopes of excusing her father’s collaboration with the French is a corrupted choice that will both scar her body when she is raped by members of the OAS and metaphorically scar the memory of the OAS and FLN – neither of which are innocent in Malika’s fate. In many ways, the fictional story of Malika’s rape and death echoes the historical fate of colonial Algeria and its ultimate demise. However, Chiche is careful to intertwine her story with that of Jacquot so that Malika’s trajectory cannot be construed through victimhood but must also account for her agency as a killer.

Jacquot’s evolution throughout the movie differs from Malika’s. While her layered identities were a result of French colonial history and the consequent constraints on Algerian agency, Jacquot’s are a product of his direct experiences with war violence. In the first minutes of the film, he shows great respect for the Muslim community and even mocks his pied-noir friend for not mastering darija, the Arabic dialect of Algeria. When in the next scene, he sees his friend Serge executed by Fellaghas and has to kill one of them in order to save a member of his unit, we witness the birth of an uncontrollable monster that shatters the skull of his enemy with the butt of his rifle – his hatred magnified by his painted, bloody-red lips. This is a point of no-return for him and he later admits to his supervisor that he keeps thinking about killing because he enjoys this violent act. Just like Malika – his feminine Arabic counterpart in the movie – Jacquot’s political leaning distances him from his father and sister who support the FLN. But his narrative also suggests interweaving through the brief emergence of his political rationality. Zeitoun’s political positions are not always clear-cut and tend to be contradictory to his actions but they seem to follow one commandment: the end of the war. Caught between the violence of war and that of his fellow soldiers, Zeitoun chooses not to conform to existing violence mechanisms, but rather to develop his own. His frustrations culminate in a disciplinary meeting when he insolently stares at his officer with an ill-intended smile. Seconds before his death at the hands of Malika, the complexity of his character is highlighted when he mumbles with his last breath the words of Shema Israel affirming, for the first time, his pied-noir Jewish heritage as well as his loyalty to his family’s beliefs. Through his over-the-top visual representation of Jacquot, Chiche reveals both the many layers of identities one man can embody and the many different opinions he can hold within the course of a week. What seemed like easy ethical binaries become entangled in layers of identity discourses that preclude considering memory as a unified whole. Rather, memory becomes rhizomic, and multiple, caught between individuals and communities, truth and fiction, even when historical footage appears on screen.

Chiche’s use of archival video in the hand-drawn frame of a television set suggests the easiness of image re-appropriation and détournement. When archival footage is embedded in animation, realism is contained in the artificial, and simultaneously, history is subordinated to personal creation of the artist and the subjective reception of the audience. In the cinematic frame, the juxtaposition of animation, inverted rotoscoping, and archival footage dulls realism to better manufacture the uncanny. In an article that assesses the tensions between documentary and animation genres, Karen Beckman notes that constant changes in cinematic styles ‘highlight collective refusals to examine how disparate spaces, spaces that could not be represented through the gaze of a single lens, must be seen together, not in denial of history, but because of it’. This reading of form is particularly pertinent for Je vous ai compris as it considers the historicity of animation, rotoscoping, and archival footage. In the film, these techniques suggest different degrees of historical realism and therefore different constraints in memorial construction, constantly adding competing material to the memory sculpture the film generates. In Je vous ai compris, viewers can easily tell that De Gaulle’s televised address is an archival image of his 23 April speech, and it can be taken for granted as a historical artefact of the Algerian War, but it is embedded in a drawn television set. History here seems contained by fiction.

Chiche’s decision to superpose and juxtapose different media and discourses re-inscribes memory in the sphere of representations, where individuals have the opportunity to create their own mode of remembering the past. Each layer (rotoscoping, animation, historical footage) embodies not an opinion, but a mode of representing the past. As the film develops, its fictional aspect intertwines with official historical events, and the superposition of genres grows less troubling as the audience perceives that each genre carries both objective and subjective elements. Historically, official documents such as archives were thought to carry the only evidence upon which national memories could be built (as seen in the archival images of De Gaulle). However, polymorphous and polysemic memory narratives such as Je vous ai compris are reframing societal and scholarly discussions on the past and its representations. In purposely unsettling the film’s historical validity, Chiche challenges his audience’s understanding of what might constitute a French and Algerian consensual historical truth.

Conclusion

Je vous ai compris is not a blockbuster. The film is rather discreet, but it has been steadily praised by cinema critics and historians for its fascinating form and its subtle take on a heated topic. There is no guarantee that the film will inform or transform every viewer’s perspective on the Algerian War, but Chiche’s feuilletage is peculiar enough that it unsettles formal preconceptions of both cinema and graphic novels. The memorial implications of such an original form might be more evident to scholars of Franco-Algerian memory than they might be for other audiences, as the film could be construed to merely tell the story of several inhabitants of Algiers and its surroundings in the early 1960s. Chiche’s formal strategy is therefore both impressively keen and perilous, as the layering of discourses fails to clearly establish a hierarchy. Although this strategy gives the film extraordinary value, it could be ethically problematic at a time when fake news and fake historical discourses can circulate quickly and obscure any reading of the past. In this perspective, the use of multiple layers for both form and content could be understood as a – potentially dangerous – refusal to subordinate fiction to history, instead of a tactically ingenious move to represent their codependence. In spite of these risks, the unfinished memorial sculpture that Chiche designs in his films serves as a reminder that memory is best portrayed in its most genuine, unstable, layered forms because this technique demands that viewers constantly attempt to discern the multiplicity of faces hidden under makeup and rotoscope.