Intermedial essay films: “Memories-in-between”

Abstract

This papers singles out a particular group of essay films marked by their uses of video technologies (analogue video, digital video, and internet-based video platforms) to process and retrieve film-based imagery (images made with 8mm, Super-8mm, 16mm) that shapes the landscapes of their filmmakers’ memory. Due to its hybrid, in-between configuration of fiction film, documentary, and experimental film, the essay film has gained increasing popularity during the last two decades to filmmakers and artists who aspired to call into questions the boundaries of the multiple dimensions concerned with memory: boundaries between the personal and the public, between retrieval and loss, and between documentation and access. In particular, some filmmakers and artists have taken a materialist approach to the essay film by investigating how the memory trace inscribed in film is transformed and reconfigured as it passes through the filters and textures of post-filmic media. Accordingly, the filmmakers’ works are replete with images in which the traces of celluloid dynamically interact with the properties of video, images that result in the complex configuration of the two media as testifying to the construction of their memory and subjectivity as open and dialectical. In this sense, this paper defines this type of essay films “intermedial essay films.” Drawing on the films of Chris Marker (Level 5 (1996)), Jean-Luc Godard (Histoire(s) du Cinema (1986-96)), and Harun Farocki (Schnittstelle (Section/Interface) (1996)) as the precursors of intermedial essay films, and taking the films of Hito Steyerl (November (2004) and In Free Fall (2010)) and Lynne Sachs (States of Unbelonging (2005) and The Last Happy Day (2009)) as two case studies, I argue for two ways in which intermedial essay films offer rich interfaces between old media, new media, and memories. First, the films register the intertwined processes of recollection and loss as a constitutive element of the archival memory as their images often add up to the hybrid images marked by the collision and exchange between filmic properties and video-based ones. Second, the juxtaposition between the two media is intended to combine the filmmakers’ registration of the shifts in their perspective and subjectivity with their reflection on the changing material-ontological transition of the cinema from celluloid to new media, and thereby to configure the filmmakers’ memory as the “memory-in-between.”