The Art of Memory

The Art of Memory
 
Ars memoriae, "the art of memory": a mnemonic device that, dating back to Antiquity, uses the memory of well-known physical locations to help store and retrieve information in the human brain. Is remembering an art? Have today’s audiovisual arts effectively replaced the mental images central to this ancient memorization practice? Do film and video actually help to build memory, or rather to question and deconstruct it? The five filmmakers in this small, eclectic collection are nothing if not varied in terms of their profile, approach and gaze. Yet all have creatively harnessed the power of film to reflect on personal and collective memory, and more broadly, on family and identity.
 
It’s clear that, from among the vast selection of short-, medium- and feature-length titles available on VUCAVU, any number of other films could have lent themselves to this theme — a premise far too sweeping and ambitious to be covered by any one curatorial mandate. Indeed, “Memory” is one of the platform’s search categories. In this sense, our theme is essentially a nod to (or perhaps an invitation to remember) five Canadian film classics. Above all, we hope it serves as the starting point for further exploration of the outstanding independent works on VUCAVU.

“I created my own memory,” says Midi Onodera in the first few moments of her vivid experimental work The Displaced View (1988, CFMDC). Her film explores the places and experiences that marked the lives of her mother and grandmother along with countless other Canadians of Japanese origin, victims of enforced relocation and internment during World War II. Part polyphonic biography, part autobiography, The Displaced View examines the cultural and emotional ties between three generations of women in the same family. In so doing, it offers a fluid, multifaceted reconstruction of individual and collective memory as a necessary alternative to the official version of Canadian history, rigid and racist. Rich in both its formal approach and its chosen themes, the film mingles documentary materials with various experimental film techniques in an intergenerational, cross-cultural quest for identity that confronts past trauma, cultural and linguistic loss and silenced or forgotten history. Essentially a love letter to the women who came before her, Onodera’s film is a cinematic tribute, empathetic and political, that embraces living memory while lamenting that, which has been forever lost.
 
Métis filmmaker Michelle Smith explores similar themes in her short film Buried Traces (Traces Souterraines, 2008, GIV). Like Onodera, she interweaves different media — film and video, documentary and fiction, photographs and archival footage, and audio clips from conversations and Michif language courses — into a powerful work on Métis assimilation, the extinction of language and culture and the colonial legacy of hidden identity that persists to this day. And like Onodera, her personal quest runs into difficulty: lost traces, the absence of records, an edited history. “I find no mention of ‘Métis’ during my search for historic footage of Métis communities at the Manitoba Provincial Archives,” she notes. In footage from the 1930s filmed by Oblates missionaries, “[t]he archives reference Cree and Ojibwa peoples. The Métis who lived here were not named.” Given this erosion of culture and memory, the survival of Métis identity entails reinvention and a self-perception as outside of official history: “How much of our stories unfold between the frames?” Smith’s film/poem likewise unfolds between the frames, pointing to a creative and artistic space where cultural survival and the struggle to safeguard memory remain possible.

It’s her own history, family and personal, that Quebec filmmaker Claudie Lévesque evokes in My Family in 17 Takes (Ma famille en 17 bobines, 2011, F3M) In it, Lévesque pieces together a family chronicle from 17 home movie reels. If her process flushes out the memories entrapped on celluloid, so too does it unearth other, more secret recollections, buried far from the family archives. The youngest of 17 children, she invites her parents and siblings to share their memories of Gaétan, the oldest brother who died in a tractor accident. As his memory takes shape through the polyphonic voice-over, the filmmaker, in a sparse few sentences discreetly inserted onscreen, evokes parallel childhood memories, painfully repressed. Missing from the reels, unaccounted for in the interviews, a somewhat unclear (“I can’t remember how old I was”) yet indelible mark stains the author’s memory, pervading the family narrative. As family members share their beliefs about the hereafter, one brother, a non-believer, delivers his own version of life after death, metaphorically tracing a line to memory: “We live on — that’s my interpretation — in the memories of others. And what you leave behind, it’s a good life principle to leave good memories behind. Otherwise, that might be your karma, your purgatory, if you will.”
 
Vietnam-born Quebec filmmaker Khoa Lê examines identity, hybridization and memory in his feature-length film Bà Nôi (Grandma) (2013, F3M). A trip to his native land provides the opportunity to reconnect with his grandmother — someone at once familial and estranged — as well as embark on a richly sensory, memory-infused journey into his roots. Like Onodera, Lê treats identity as multivariate and perpetually shifting. The realm of the imagination is pivotal to his quest, more impressionist than intellectual. Through a hybrid approach intercutting direct cinema with fictional sequences, he creates an oneiric mosaic of images, sounds and sensations that mingle recollections of the past with present-day experience and country of birth with adopted country. As in Lévesque’s film, the family atmosphere is crowded with ghosts: Lê’s deceased grandfather, embodied as a fictional traveller and thus fusing with the filmmaker’s own persona; and an aunt, who, though fleetingly evoked — she drowned at sea in the boat originally slated to take young Lê and his family to Canada — nonetheless haunts the film. Informed by dreams and wanderings, Bà Nôi is both a family documentary and a self-portrait woven from the unsaid, blurred memories and hazy impressions.

 Our brief overview of memory wouldn’t be complete without at least one work by Guy Maddin, the iconoclast filmmaker who has made amnesia his leitmotif. Known for an aesthetic that draws heavily on the look and feel of pre-sound films from the 1920s, Maddin has made alienation, the loss of memory and identity typically English Canadian themes. His “silent” films recreate works that have been lost or never existed (except in the imaginations of Maddin or the audience). A partial-sound homage to the silent film era, A Trip to the Orphanage (2004, WFG) is like a confused dream, both strangely reminiscent of and vaguely portending his next feature, The Saddest Music in the World (2006), for which it is the extension of a sequence. On a wintry street, through diaphanous curtains and a veil of snowflakes, we see a man in a bathrobe approach a doll-faced woman (Maria de Medeiros, the amnesiac from The Saddest Music) as an opera singer performs an air of melancholy beauty. When the song ends, the woman kisses the man on the cheek; disoriented or perhaps dreaming, he mistakes her for his mother. There is no narrative explanation here, merely a moment of surreality, redolent with the troubled emotions of two solitary beings briefly united. The filmmaker’s singular poetry resides in this combination of pastiche and tangible feeling. For Maddin, too, memory — and its absence — is about fantasy: through cinema, forgotten memories can be rediscovered or recreated, but in an altered form, degraded by time, their reinvention subject to the whimsy of dreams.