Curating the Moving Image (2011) | The P&P Blog

Memory, écriture of-with archival footage.

We piece together a memory that is recollected only after encountering a fragment that reminds us of it in the external world. (Katherine Elkins)

Memory, écriture of-with the archival footage is the pilot episode of the workshop Écriture with the archival footage. Four international professional and amateur filmmakers have been individually subjected to archival amateur and documentary films they had never seen before and asked to remember-imagine the youth of their parents. How much of their imagination based on oral history and of their parents’ authentic past define these remixed works? Or are the images, eager to enter the realm of the present, pushing and writing the creators’ imaginations and memories? Where do individual and collective memory cross? Memory, écriture of-with the archival footage raises questions over which light will be cast by the presentational sequence of its remixed works and to the combination of these with their original audiovisual materials.

The processes of reconstruction of memory has been made possible thanks to the digital on line film archives. The workshop of écriture with archival footage will continue thanks to your contribution: write a visual Mnemosyne following the example of Aby Warburg, exclaim the visual concepts of colour and patterns, shout your political dissent and experiment with sound and moving images!

Program:

Il Sogno (The dream), Story/Editing by Francesca Morselli, 2.10 min, 2011.
A young woman has just learned of her pregnancy. She’s flooded by profound emotions as the perception of a new life is changing for her body and femininity. She imagines sea lanscapes that evoke a sense of freedom and escape from her social and psychological ties.
In the background lies the shadow of a rapidly changing society: women are gaining conscience of their body and their new role in society, and these changes reflect in the thoughts and dreams of the protagonist.

Francesca Morselli is a film editor and curator and a recently graduated student of Archive discipline. She is based in Amsterdam.

Zakupy (Shopping),Story/Editing by Alek Rzeszowski, 1.35 min, 2011.
Shopping for food behind the iron curtain was a complex affair. Thank goodness for the Party!

Alek Rzeszowski is a filmmaker and Polish emigre living abroad.

My parents could have been like this but…, Story/Editing by Anna Dabrowska, 6.20 min, 2011.
Poland during the 70′-80′. My parents could have been like this but I do not know. I imagine and remember them at the same time.

Anna Dabrowska is a student of archive science, a short film programmer and she seeks to be an amateur filmmaker.

This very Sunlight, Story/Editing by Milosz Hermanowicz, 6.40 min, 2011.
We take a trip back in time. We meet ancestors and the people they knew. We experience History. Is such a trip even possible?

Milosz Hermanowicz is a Warsaw-based independent film editor. www.miloszhermanowicz.com

Documentation:

Memory as the theatre of the archive footage started on the 9th of February 2011. All I knew at that moment was that I wanted to remix the beautiful found footage films of the on-line Enthusiast Archive. I was attracted by the imperfection and the warm colours of its digitized films which moreover where portraying contemporaries of my parents. I wanted to play with this readymade, meaningful and “analog” material as I could play with my video camera in my hands, with one enormous difference: I did not have to face the outside reality.

My parents could have been like this but… is an ambiguous potrayal of my parents, which could be representatives of the Polish generations of the 70′s and 80′s, but it is also an intimate reminiscence of them and of my tormented and childish idea about them. The ephemerality of their youth and of these same images. Or is the remix just another strategy to escape in the idyllic and naive past where capitalist consumption was unknown and where I, as an adolescent, always wanted to live-feel? It is probably both. One thing is certain: I used the images to write as if they were a camera-stylo but they also used me to revive themselves.

Then I remembered the Open Images Festival project, which I invented just two months ago and … click! This blog was going to be the place to realize the envisioned projects. Virtuality became reality. Suddenly I had in my mind the kind of program I was going to develop, and even with other people! I started to contact some of my friends who do editing and make films, illustrating my draft idea to them: remixing the archival footage of Enthusiastarchive.net, Openimges.eu and Archive.org to tell the past of our ancestors. Some of them where ready to start straight away, others took more time to decide.
Time became waiting, hoping, suspense, trust: excitement! Meanwhile I was deepening my knowledge about the theme of memory: Benjamin, Warburg, Assmann, Erll, Godard are among those who inspired me at first. Then Katherine Elkins:

“Remembrance or strong memory relies on an understanding of memory that is largely archival: we store the entire past, perfectly preserved, as in an archive. This new model, however, is distinctly nonarchival. We do not store the entire past, and what we do store is dispersed in multiple regions of the brain. Remembering is always an act of recollecting fragments scattered across these different regions.We must reassemble these fragments into a coherent, seamless memory. Often, of course, key elements are missing. In these instances, the gaps are filled in through a process of invention and subtle revision. The memories created to fill these gaps are continually revised through a process of evaluation based on recognition. We might think we are comparing our “memory” with some “original” stored away in a central archive. But we are really evaluating the invented memory retrospectively. If we “recognize” it, we accept it as “true.” If we do not, we revise the memory slightly and reevaluate once more.(…) Between an initial impression of an event and its subsequent recollection lies a stretch of forgetfulness. The final difference between a modern art of memory and a classical one appears in the reformulation of the self. The old, classical art of memory unifies or centers the self, enclosing the past in an internal space within the subject. This new art of memory decenters the self, drawing the person who remembers towards memories of others in the outside world.”

The readings led me to the final concept of écriture of-with the archival footage as a mutual process where the rediscovered images resuscitate personal memories but also re-write and re-contextualize themselves perpetually in the creator’s imagination. Il Sogno, Zakupy and My parents, are three remixed works influenced by the stories and images of the amateur films on which they are based, but they tell us also so much about the authors themselves. This is why I affirm the importance to show the re-contextualized works close to their inspirational and constituent sources. It is enlightening to notice how Il Sogno and Zakupy are incidentally based on the same feminine character but that in the end tell two different stories, even in a distinct genre. The workshop generated plural meanings about one given topic. Individual memories became collective when they needed to communicate to a group of people, when they had to exist outside the domestic walls. This very Sunlight is an overview of my discourse here: memories live as images enclosed in our bodies and it is our decision how to use them.
It has been a beautiful life experience of some weeks which could continue with other experiments as mentioned above: can we use the archives of these images as they were an alphabet? As the initiator of this workshop, I hope to have given my friends just another chance to be creative, to reminisce their memories, maybe to discover how to work with found footage, maybe to free themselves from them and finally to share a laugh with their families.

THIS BLOG EXISTS THANKS TO JOHN HALTIWANGER.