Lately, I’ve been enamored by filmmakers who try to recreate memory with the utmost respect to the nature of its abstraction.
The general nature of memory is such that it doesn’t comply to the Kantian reality of time or compositional space. It defies it. It self imposes aspirations, emotions, dissolves time and space by looping it, constricting it or expanding it. In addition, memory is a composite of senses like temperature, olfactory, pressure, touch, auditory and visual (of which cinema is a fundamental interplay of the latter two – so far). Although, sensation can be linear and collective, memory, by no means, tries to be as such.
The very non-linearity of it makes it an astounding challenge for memory to be filmed.
We are all familiar with narrational exposition and story building. But, this approach comes severely short when it comes to filming memory in its true dynamic state, considering its multi-dimensional morphology.
Below, I have listed some of my most favourite films that attempts to film memory as truly as possible. It almost feels like these filmmakers have evolved from being filmmakers to philosophers, inventing their own schools of thought.
Films:
Window Water Baby Moving by Stan Brakhage.
Little Dog for Roger by Malcolm LeGrice.
Agatha and Her Limitless Readings by Marguerite Duras.
The Nail Clippers by Jean Claude Carriere.
Grandpere’s Pear by Steven Dwoskin.
At The First Breath of Wind by Franco Piovali.
Zorn’s Lemma by Hollis Frampton.
So Can I by Abbas Kiarostami.
Anticipation of the Night by Stan Brakhage.
Report by Bruce Conner.
Seeing in The Rain by Chris Gallagher.
Butterfly by Shuji Teriyama.
As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty by Jonas Mekas.
Diaries, Notes and Sketches by Jonas Mekas.
Solar Breath by Michael Snow.
So is This by Michael Snow.
Death and Transfiguration by Terrance Davies.
These are the films that I can remember.
However, I want to clarify that these films formally are about personal memory, than collective memory (which usually average out to documentations of some sort – like some films by Connor and Charlotte Robertson).
With the form, the films have rapid paced editing with cross, jump, dynamic, and sometimes even L and J cutting. Tonally, montages, here, loop, go back and forth, to try as much as possible to recreate memory through the senses available to cinema (so far).