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This chapter considers Fred Zinnemann's film Julia (1977), which is based on Pentimento and An Unfinished Woman, two parts of the autobiographical works of the Jewish American playwright Lillian Hellman. It argues that Lillian's very own nostalgia, her events as they are registered in and deleted from her memory and her writing, expose her to the blessed curse of writing (and the cinema). They add to the complication of the problem of faithfulness both regarding her friend Julia and herself. They reveal how her journey through time stays within the frame of the possible, her possibilities, and they give us the crippling power to judge their friendship. In documenting her life from the start, Lillian subverts her own expectations as well as ours of memory's praxis and dynamic, exactly because with regard to Julia her memory is so fixated, exactly because of her refusal to renew anything. Inventing something new about her friend is wholly outside the range of her possibilities. The economics of invention—which, in this case, is her métier—cannot, and must not, break her spirit. From this angle, Julia is her poetics, a story about the limits and limitations of the author who invents the possible on the basis of the possible, nothing more. No other information whatsoever penetrates, or indeed can penetrate, the idealistic plot she forges.
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