Creator's Statement
When I received the anonymous text from Ariel and Evelyn, I was pleasantly surprised. It was evocative, delicate, and brief. It spoke to me on several levels, so I assumed that making the video would be easy. Once I’d started thinking about the adaptation, however, it dawned on me that, more than anything, it would be easy to mess it up. On the one hand, the text worked so well on the page, I felt it did not need any audiovisual accompaniment. On the other hand, the words did conjure up vivid images in my mind. Yet, those images did not seem to exist in any film I had access to.
Although “Recreating Memories” is one of the shortest videos I have ever made, it turned out to be among the most challenging ones. When I signed up for the experiment, I had anticipated the process of adapting someone else’s memory to be challenging, but I did not expect the difficulties I would have with adapting a pre-written “script.” I usually conceive my essays based on what the audiovisual material reveals to me. Written or spoken commentary only comes in after the overall structure is firmly established. But on this one I had to reverse my process.
As the text indicated a female point of view in both the memory and the film in question (which I was glad I did not recognize), I decided against including my own voice in the video. In order to find appropriate material, I revisited a couple of autobiographical films, some of which were too sentimental and some too somber to match the delicately melancholy atmosphere of the text. For some time, I tried to make it work with scenes from Andrea Štaka’s feature films. But after a few failed attempts, I came back to a film I had initially considered too on the nose because it already reflected and recreated memories on a meta-level. Yet, Varda’s lighthearted exploration of remembering in Les plages D’agnès (2008) provided me with images that worked very well as slides. Once I had reduced the film to the backbone of a family memoir, everything fell into place. Since Les plages D’agnès associatively mixes documentary footage, staged memories and fictionalized scenes from previous films, deciding which images should be projected as slides (including the signature sound) and which should be framed as mental pictures happened rather intuitively.
Knowing that the original text will eventually be published next to the video, it was easier to eliminate some of my favorite lines from the script. Initially conceived as an interplay of (lo-fi) waves from the film and newly recorded projector sounds, the soundtrack somehow lacked any hint of the longing I felt while reading the text. So I scored the onscreen words with a piece of music that was supposedly written for Les plages D’agnès (the composer is credited on IMDb) but not really used in the film.
At first, I was afraid that using a relatively well-known film might eclipse the author’s voice. But looking at it from a different angle, I found that the familiarity with Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy would elicit additional associations that might enrich the reflection. Thus, I am curious about how this audiovisual essay works for audio-viewers who have not previously been familiar with the two French filmmakers’ works.
Biography
Oswald Iten is a Swiss film scholar and video essayist with a practical background in hand-drawn animation. Currently, he works at the Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences as teacher and a PhD researcher as part of Johannes Binotto’s project “Video Essay: Futures of Audiovisual Research and Teaching”. He is particularly interested in the relationship between sound and image, as well as colors and editing. He also works part-time in a cinema.
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