“I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering,
which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining.
We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.”
— Sans Soleil, Chris Marker
2011 | Dynamic video: Processing application, found footage
remembering & forgetting 1 is a dynamic video made with processing that uses found-footage and live recovery of twitter posts that include the words “I remember when”. This video deals with the different media that we have to try fix our memories into any kind of support and the tension with the inevitable fleeting moment, and hence, forgetting. As time passes, the found-footage image becomes more blur and the text from the twits gets bigger to the point where none of them is recognizable; so, as memory, it has to be re-written to become clear again.
remembering & forgetting 2 is a dynamic video made with processing that uses material from a documentary by Chris Marker on the last days of President Salvador Allende in Chile and live recovery of twitter posts that were used to organize a manifestation in Moldova in 2009. This video deals with the different media that we have to try fix our memories into any kind of support and the tension with the inevitable fleeting moment, and hence, forgetting. As time passes, the documentary image becomes more saturated and the text from the twits gets bigger; our memory of past events is distorted by time.
At the beginning of Le Tombeau d’Alexandre, Marker quotes George Steiner: It is not the literal past that rules us, but images of the past.
Furthermore, Marker points out the nature of images as a representation. In his film Sans Soleil, Hayao Yamaneko, a friend of the narrator, has created a machine that manipulates images – basically a synthesizer that he calls The Zone in homage to Tarkovsky – so images become less deceptive. At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images, not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality.