The Zurich Film Festival is presenting out of competition two eagerly anticipated films: Luca Guadagnino’s "Call Me by Your Name” and Denis Villeneuve’s "Blade Runner 2049”. Those familiar with both projects will know how different these films are and yet they both play with the concept of memory, which is probably the most defining and difficult to reproduce trait of a human being. One interesting aspect of memories is that they are interlinked with the respective feelings. The mind image of a memory might be blurry and inaccurate but we know how we felt at that moment. Shared memories and knowledge form the so-called collective memory. It is the collective memory that produces the most powerful nostalgia, which is a highly manipulative type of feeling that can be transferred to generations to come.

Guadagnino’s film is based on the eponymous book by André Aciman, which in turn centres on the memories of a very defining summer for the protagonist Elio Perlman. Elio is the narrator in the book, and in the film the story unfolds in front of his curious eyes. The medium film has many tools to tickle the audience’s senses and awaken its reminiscences, for "Call me By Your Name” is a very sensual story set in the past, in an atmosphere of utmost beauty and innocence. In the summer of 1983, 17-year-old Elio is spending the summer months with his parents in a lush villa ‘somewhere in northern Italy’. The setting, the natural lighting and the announcement of an Italian summer already connect the audience’s brain with their own images of carefree Mediterranean experiences as well as the numerous cinematic reproductions of the ‘Italian feeling’. Being a Guadagnino film, the ultimate aesthetic approach is a requirement. 

Elio’s father, a professor of archaeology, invites every summer a young scholar to work with him. In that particular summer, it is the American student Oliver, who assists the professor with filing and copying papers. Oliver is tall and virile, blond with piercing blue eyes and he arrives wearing high-top Chucks and a sky blue shirt. Just picture it: Oliver is tanned Armie Hammer, bathed in Italian sunlight. Elio, played by a terrific Timothée Chalamet, seems unimpressed. First, the audience has to take in everything about that splendid summer. Elio’s family and friends spend their time reading in the quiet of the gardens full of fruit trees, discussing politics and arts, swimming in the pool, riding the bikes through sleepy small Italian towns and sometimes they simply give themselves up to pure boredom. Elio, who is a smart and sensitive young man of many talents, transcribes classical music from his portable cassette player. The cassette player is the most modern device you will find in the house. Only in this safe Garden of Eden can such a sensual, erotic and intimate affair begin between Elio and Oliver. They indulge gradually and entirely in the purest pleasure in a pre-Facebook, pre-Internet-porn era. 

While the film is a beautiful depiction of a love story, it also plays with the audience’s nostalgia for the ‘innocent’ times. In fact, it is that particular summer in that particular place that sets the atmosphere for this innocent exploration of feelings. As Elio’s father points out to him, his parents are ‘not like other parents’. They are loving and liberal and offer a safe heaven for Elio and his friends. Oliver confirms the professor’s words. His parents are not allowed to know about the affair, for they would send him to a correction facility. Thus, what we feel is more a yearning for a world, where people are free to choose how and with whom they want to live. Great memories lead to the times when we have felt particularly safe and free. The early 80s were a time of relative political stability but the epoch was already paving the way for the digital era, which has brought out sometimes the best and mostly the worst in us. In fact, it was precisely in 1982 that a new film about a very bleak future hit the American cinemas: Ridley Scott’s "Blade Runner”. 

Ridley Scott’s sci-fi movie, based on a Philip K. Dick book, was too visionary for the audiences back then and gained popularity and a cult following much later, influencing other filmmakers and making Philip K. Dick a household name. Set in a dystopian Los Angeles in 2019, the film depicts a future in which synthetic humans known as replicants are engineered by the powerful Tyrell Corporation to work on off-world colonies. LA cop Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) gets the assignment to hunt down a couple of fugitive replicants. During his investigations, he meets Rachael, a replicant who causes him to question his mission. Denis Villeneuve’s "Blade Runner 2049” is set in 2049’s dystopian Los Angeles and is a sequel to the original film. The old replicant hunters, called blade runners, have been replaced by new blade runners who are replicants themselves. Ryan Gosling plays K, whose assignment is to hunt down replicants of older series. 

  

The story makes use of the concept of memory on multiple levels. First of all, as it is a sequel, the fans of the first film will make the connections to the previous events, which are for example encapsulated as memories of the original blade runner, Rick Deckard. Second, the replicants are bioengineered human-like beings. Because they are created, not born, their memories are not their own but infused into their brains. Having these pre-fabricated memories and feelings gives them the human touch more than their perfect human appearance. Third, there is the question of the strengths and weaknesses of digital memory. During a so-called ‘blackout’, all digital data has been destroyed. One of the employees at the new powerful Wallace Corporation, which has bought Tyrell, muses that paper has proven to be the most durable material. Not only can digital memory be easily destroyed, but also manipulated. The questions that arise in a world, where artificial humans have digital girlfriends and nature as we know it has entirely vanished, are: What is real and which model will outdate the other? Will a world without human beings become the new reality? And what will happen, when the collective memories are in the hands of a few mega-corporations? These are actually not questions concerning our future, but very much our present. 

The differences between Earth in the 1980s and our planet in 2049 are frightening and not implausible. In a world of cheap production and labour, where the destruction of nature has led to the Anthropocene epoch, there will come a time, when we can only dream about that moment in which Elio’s dense lashes are bathed in bright sunlight while he is eating an apricot straight from the tree and looking at young people playing beach volley, and we are sitting in a dark small apartment under constant rain, with only a digital friend for company. It might not come to that, though. In a Q&A with the audience after a screening of his film at the Zurich Film Festival, Guadagnino lauded the beautiful performance of Timothée Chalamet as Elio, adding that it is a timeless performance that will be equally appreciated in 20 years, in case the Kim Jong-uns and Trumps of this world will let us live that long.