MOCA FILMMAKER INTERVIEW WITH CHARLIE EGLESTON
Museo Online de Cine Autobiografico (MOCA)
Note: Original questions are translated from Spanish, all answers were provided in English.
QUESTION: Why bring this camera to “the table”? What is the story behind this artifact from your personal archive? What is its attachment to your daily or past life story?
ANSWER: The image is of my father’s camera. It is the camera that he used to document my childhood, and it is the camera I learned to shoot with. It represents my affection for my father’s creative and artistic influence and my affinity and fixation with the photographic image in my own artistic practice. It is emblematic of familial love, creative spirit, and the patriarchal purposing and articulation of the images that captured my childhood, images that later enabled me to question my own role as a father and the photographic documentation of my young family. The majority of the images in the slide archive from my childhood were created with this camera, and many of the subsequent family slideshows that my parents put on for family members or guests serve as a cornerstone to my childhood memories associated with the images that were created with it. The first formal training I had with photography was through a photography class in high school. We learned basic rules of composition and camera operation, but we also learned how to process film negatives and make photographic prints. My father let me use his camera for the course, and he showed me how to use it. As a young adult, when I began to focus my artistic practice on filmmaking I turned to the archive of my childhood images as a treasure trove of inspiration, both creative and critical, and that enabled a process of self-discovery for me. In essence, this is the camera that started it all.
QUESTION: The place where you are from has its own name “Sowesto”, the area you were born into and spent most of your youth and where you have lived surrounded by a particular and rich art culture in Canada. With these two pieces shown at the museum (See/Saw and Family Portrait #2) we reach that space within the world of experimental home movie. Particularly on See/Saw we capture those memories within circles that grow and meager creating a beautiful rhythm. What is circumscribed as home for you? How are landscape and people integrated on that idea?
ANSWER: ‘Sowesto’ is an abbreviated form of Southwestern Ontario. Geographically, the area is defined as the lower tip of the Canadian Province of Ontario. It is characterized by freshwater lakes, farmland, manufacturing, post-secondary institutions and many mid-sized cities. During the 1960’s the city in Southwestern Ontario I live in, London, was one of the most active art scenes in Canada. Artists such as Greg Curnoe and Jack Chambers promoted a concept of regionalism that argued that artists did not have to live in large city centres like Toronto or New York to have a valued and respected art practice. They incorporated the unique culture of the area and their own lived personal lives into their artwork. Jack Chambers’ experimental film work, especially his seminal masterpiece ‘The Hart of London’ (1970), was an early influence on my own work and it continues to be to this day. These artists invented the term ‘Sowesto’ to distinguish it as a culturally distinct region within North America and the world.
Many other artists from this era and subsequent generations of artists have directly influenced my art practice and cultural outlook. This defines my geographical and historical ‘home’, but really the concept of ‘home’ for me is more appropriately defined by family and friends. Space and time are simply containers that are defined by what they are filled with. In all my film work, there is a strong formal current that exists as a vessel to carry whatever it is filled with. In ‘SEE/SAW’, the formal current is structured by the iris fade, but what gives the form meaning is the content. The personal images of my family enable the formal approach to communicate my desire to see and to remember, however fleeting it may be. In ‘Family Portrait #2’, the high contrast imagery and the dislocation of time define the vessel, but again, the familial content enables meaning. In this case, dichotomies surface through the contrasts of light and dark to represent birth and death, shifts and freezes in time correspond to how our perception of time changes in relationship to birth and death. My understanding of landscape and the histories attached to it is very similar to how I view the formal elements of my films; it is a vessel that is populated and given meaning by the people and things that inhabit it.
QUESTION: In several of your films you emphasized the importance of them being shown on the original medium (16 mm film projection) as it happens with these two pieces. Working with analog film could be consider today as a marginalized space of film creation, especially when we are talking about windows of exhibition. Rolling towards a digital world and with the particular context we find ourselves diving into now with less screens available to our reach (outside home), what to expect about the future of this medium and its way of exhibition? Do we need to think about new spaces to share this works?
ANSWER: This is something that has been changing for me in recent years. When I began working with and finishing films on analogue film, I really felt it was important to screen the film prints as intended, on film. When a film is finished on film I view analogue film exhibition as the final stage in the filmmaking process, and the projectionist as a collaborator. I have sat through many analogue film screenings where the projection has been horrible and has ruined the reception of the films, so it is intrinsic to the completion of the filmmaking process. A skilled projectionist with proper projection equipment can enhance the reception of the film. I still strongly believe in this and would prefer my photochemical films to be screened this way. I could also romantically reflect on the perception of time and the materiality of the photochemical medium here, but really for me, it is about the art and craft of the projected image. We continue to move farther and farther away from considering projection as part of the filmmaking process. It is a new reality, and filmmakers need to be aware of the scalability of their films for a variety of exhibition platforms. So, with this being said, of course I also value the virtues of the digital image and the potential for exhibition through the internet. There are wonderful examples, such as MOCA, where artists and their works are being presented in a very thoughtful professional manner, and which enables context and curatorial vision. With so many film festivals moving their programming online during the current state of the world, the MOCA project really has predicted the future in a way, and I hope that festivals and programmers consider their own online festivals beyond being just a streaming window.
QUESTION: You mentioned that Hunter-Gatherer (2003) was the film that really started your fascination with the "home-mode" of image making and personal cinema. The title shows a little bit of the nature of an artist that works on archive. Could you explain that process and the sparks that created the certainty of its value (personal and artistically)?
ANSWER: ‘Hunter-Gatherer’ is the work I found my artistic voice through, and it embodies many thematic and formal concerns that would inform my practice for the following decade or so. The process of making it would also define my filmmaking process up to my present work. At the time I made ‘Hunter-Gatherer’ I had become the custodian of my family’s slide archive, the images of my childhood. I had also been doing a lot of research for a paper where I was able to develop a critical understanding of home movie making, picture taking, and the creative possibilities of the ‘archive’. There is a sequence in the film that actually shows my father taking a picture (with the camera discussed previously), then sorting through the archive of slide images on a light table. This, in a way, reflects my process in making the film. Through my recollections of family slideshows during my childhood I began to understand that memories I had of certain events in my life had been formed through the performative nature of the slideshows and the collective narrativization of the images. The film embodies my futile attempt to reconstruct memory through the process of re-photography and rather than creating a clear recollection of moments from my childhood the form of the film embraces the latent and fluid-like quality of memory. It was also one of my first films to be extensively hand-processed...
QUESTION: What is your relationship with the materials once they become the analog film, after you have shot them? How is the process of developing for you, are all the saturation effects from the chemical part of the development? and how would you describe the way you molded these materials?
ANSWER: For me, the very act of taking a picture or film indicates the passing of a moment and the birth of its remembrance. I become indebted to that photograph or to that strip of film as a reference point and as an aid to my memory of the moment it captures. Oftentimes, I remember the images in place of the memories they signify. In this way, the photograph or film becomes the actual thing remembered in place of the event, subject, or topic whereupon the image originated. And, as in human death, the organic nature of photochemical media designates the death of the image it carries. The photograph or film will fade and break down through a process of decay. So, with analogue film there is a more direct correlation to my own material being; it is difficult to try to explain the digital image in a similar fashion and its ontological nature is intrinsically different when speaking of image formation. When I hand-process my own footage I can enhance contrast and alter the look of the film in many ways. I can also process it ‘clean’ so that it looks like it came from a film lab, or ‘dirty’ to enhance surface artifacts and other inconsistencies. With most of my films, I also do my own negative cutting which requires an A/B roll configuration, where you cut in every other shot on roll A then alternate in an opposite pattern on roll B. The entire process is very tactile and requires careful hand craft; it is a slow art form where I find the process more aligned with sculpture.
QUESTION: In Family Portrait #2 we are carry throughout the movie by the idea of birth and life, but you call us back with a phone call with the news of your father relocating that same concept. It is conspicuous that on amateur and home movies we find the "highlights" and garnished of common life. How important it is to reveal the uncertain of life or hardness of it too? How have you worked with that on particular?
ANSWER: The vast majority of home movies designate common, usually positive, life events that are indicative of a highly patterned ‘Kodak culture’ in the home mode of amateur image making. In the ‘home mode’, the tendency to create a highly contrived, staged, and edited version of family life finds form in photo albums and home movies that are extremely selective in terms of what we choose to record or neglect in the full range of our life experiences. During the time I created these works my practice was intently focused on expanding the range of home image production to include the often-neglected experiences we record in our lives. Experiences such as the death and loss of a loved one, expanded views of childbirth, and a more abstract representation of time surface in these works to counterbalance the typical home movie. Looking back to the period when I created these works, I can see I had fallen into many of the same patriarchal traps as the typical ‘father creating the images of his family’. Yet these works display a self-awareness that is undermining or critically addressing this aspect in different ways, and as is the case with both films, they are anything but typical home movies. In ‘Family Portrait #2’ the significance of using a family portrait to accompany the sounds of childbirth extends awareness to the inherent qualities of ‘birthing’ that reside in other processes of becoming, such as the creation of images I use to represent my family. As the film approaches the climax, the intensity of the experience of childbirth is reflected in the sound of the crying baby and the increasing instability of the family portrait; the wonder of bringing a new life into the world is also fraught with new anxieties. There is a vulnerability reflected in the image of my family as it flutters and slips, and resists stasis, until finally all is still...then, the news of a death.
QUESTION: Both movies don't let us reach the "whole picture". See/Saw are glances of images or memories created by the camera lens and Family Portrait #2 we enter situations such us giving birth by a sea of stimuli that creates the ambiance of that moment. How is the void necessary? Is there any similarity with how our memory works?
ANSWER: To answer your question in a straightforward way, yes. Most of my films from this period are dealing with the representation of memory, recollection, and forgetting in different capacities, and this characteristic of my work is indicative of my process. As you can imagine, each film starts with an overabundance of footage that has been collected over time, and as I begin to edit the process of selection is very much dictated by intuition, chance, and recollection. I tend to start with a very complex conception of the film, that gradually becomes more and more simplified as I get closer to finishing it. I aim to achieve the essence of the experience that I am trying to convey; whether that be the inevitability of death in the wonder of childbirth, or the memory and fleeting nature of lived experiences. ‘SEE/SAW’ actually started as a series of long takes that started and ended with an iris fade, the length of which was dictated by the full wind of my Bolex. When I started to edit the film, the long takes were not conveying what I was feeling when I looked at the images. The precious moments from my children’s lives are something I was trying to hold onto and try to make more permanent, despite my feelings of futility. When I began to focus on the formal aspect of the iris fade as the structuring element of the film it really connected with this sense of futility and impermanence. The connection to seeing and having seen, remembering and forgetting, dark and light, all began to surface and convey what I was truly feeling when viewing the original footage. When considering our memories, we often visualize what we can remember most clearly, yet the vast majority of our lived experiences are forgotten. I think in my work I have tried to communicate this instability of remembering in the face of forgetting through aesthetic choices that present images that are difficult to hold on to. In ‘SEE/SAW’ this trait is evident through the pacing of the film and the literal analogy of the iris fade to seeing and not seeing, remembering and forgetting; in ‘Family Portrait #2’ the correlation is not as direct or concrete, as meaning in the film is heavily influenced by the soundtrack. An ultrasound recording of one of my children’s heartbeats before they were born, the sounds of childbirth, and the phone message of a loved one’s death help to contextualize the images and give them meaning however dislocated from the sounds and ambivalent they might be.
QUESTION: On this past exhibitions it has been very common being a parent/giving birth as a path to discover. Francisca Duran, the exhibition before said that it simply changes time ¿What have you discover working that through film? Also there is a long tradition of experimental artists that have shot moments that are unique in life, where does the camera stand in those moments?
ANSWER: While I was working on ‘Family Portrait #2’, the knowledge of other filmmakers' approach to childbirth with a camera troubled me, especially in situations where the camera becomes a mediator between the maker and the immersive experience of childbirth. There is something paternal in the desire to control the experience by viewing it through a recording device that I was thinking critically about. In Stan Brakhage’s ‘Window Water Baby Moving’ (1959), it is impossible to dismiss the intermediary role of the camera as he records the birth of one of his children. His experience of childbirth is one viewed through the lens of the camera, and even though it is a remarkably beautiful portrait of childbirth I cannot help but feel as though he has removed himself from the unmediated experience of the event by his positioning of the camera between his eye (or “I” as he refers) and the life springing forth before him. In some cases, I find it necessary to put down the camera, and I strongly believe it is possible to communicate an experience without necessarily using a recording method that mediates the experience while it is occurring. I have documented the births of all three of my children, but unlike Brakhage I have consciously avoided a camera stance that inhibits my immersion and total involvement in the experience. Of the births I have recorded with a camera, the camera was placed, with permission from my wife, on a tripod in the back of the delivery room out of the way and out of mind. In ‘Family Portrait #2’, only a sound recording gives a referential cue to the actual experience of childbirth. The use of other images to describe childbirth feeds into my belief that all of my family’s experiences are palpable within each other. A moving portrait taken on a sunny afternoon can elicit the experience of childbirth because those experiences reside in each other through the lives of the people involved.
QUESTION: How to work with the obsolescence of memorabilia? How do we give it a second birth to materials not seen as such or already forgotten?
ANSWER: I think the easiest way to consider these questions is to think about them in regards to how we can work creatively with an archive. Most objects that comprise an archive will face obsolescence in one form or another; whether it be through technological redundancy or through the object’s usefulness and purpose. For example, an archive of family photographs can be repurposed by subsequent generations of family members to help form an understanding of their history. And that history is constantly evolving through the process of interpretation by each individual who engages with the archive. When I became the custodian of my childhood slide images, it was the spark that enabled me to revisit my past, re-evaluate it, and re-articulate it. I was able to add my own creative interpretation to the stories the images held by building on memories that had become the narration of my childhood. We all perform and re-enact our history in different ways, whether it be through watching home movies, looking through old photographs, or choosing what we post to social media. For me, my memories associated with the images from my childhood are defined by the projected slideshows I mentioned in the first question. These ‘performances’ influenced my artistic development deeply, inspiring me creatively and provoking me critically. They introduced me to the creative potential of photography and filmmaking, and the power of the projected image. They showed me the value in lived experience and family through the love and compassion the images were captured and presented with. And they provided me the opportunity to learn about myself and to develop as an artist.
Museo Online de Cine Autobiografico (MOCA)
Note: Original questions are translated from Spanish, all answers were provided in English.
QUESTION: Why bring this camera to “the table”? What is the story behind this artifact from your personal archive? What is its attachment to your daily or past life story?
ANSWER: The image is of my father’s camera. It is the camera that he used to document my childhood, and it is the camera I learned to shoot with. It represents my affection for my father’s creative and artistic influence and my affinity and fixation with the photographic image in my own artistic practice. It is emblematic of familial love, creative spirit, and the patriarchal purposing and articulation of the images that captured my childhood, images that later enabled me to question my own role as a father and the photographic documentation of my young family. The majority of the images in the slide archive from my childhood were created with this camera, and many of the subsequent family slideshows that my parents put on for family members or guests serve as a cornerstone to my childhood memories associated with the images that were created with it. The first formal training I had with photography was through a photography class in high school. We learned basic rules of composition and camera operation, but we also learned how to process film negatives and make photographic prints. My father let me use his camera for the course, and he showed me how to use it. As a young adult, when I began to focus my artistic practice on filmmaking I turned to the archive of my childhood images as a treasure trove of inspiration, both creative and critical, and that enabled a process of self-discovery for me. In essence, this is the camera that started it all.
QUESTION: The place where you are from has its own name “Sowesto”, the area you were born into and spent most of your youth and where you have lived surrounded by a particular and rich art culture in Canada. With these two pieces shown at the museum (See/Saw and Family Portrait #2) we reach that space within the world of experimental home movie. Particularly on See/Saw we capture those memories within circles that grow and meager creating a beautiful rhythm. What is circumscribed as home for you? How are landscape and people integrated on that idea?
ANSWER: ‘Sowesto’ is an abbreviated form of Southwestern Ontario. Geographically, the area is defined as the lower tip of the Canadian Province of Ontario. It is characterized by freshwater lakes, farmland, manufacturing, post-secondary institutions and many mid-sized cities. During the 1960’s the city in Southwestern Ontario I live in, London, was one of the most active art scenes in Canada. Artists such as Greg Curnoe and Jack Chambers promoted a concept of regionalism that argued that artists did not have to live in large city centres like Toronto or New York to have a valued and respected art practice. They incorporated the unique culture of the area and their own lived personal lives into their artwork. Jack Chambers’ experimental film work, especially his seminal masterpiece ‘The Hart of London’ (1970), was an early influence on my own work and it continues to be to this day. These artists invented the term ‘Sowesto’ to distinguish it as a culturally distinct region within North America and the world.
Many other artists from this era and subsequent generations of artists have directly influenced my art practice and cultural outlook. This defines my geographical and historical ‘home’, but really the concept of ‘home’ for me is more appropriately defined by family and friends. Space and time are simply containers that are defined by what they are filled with. In all my film work, there is a strong formal current that exists as a vessel to carry whatever it is filled with. In ‘SEE/SAW’, the formal current is structured by the iris fade, but what gives the form meaning is the content. The personal images of my family enable the formal approach to communicate my desire to see and to remember, however fleeting it may be. In ‘Family Portrait #2’, the high contrast imagery and the dislocation of time define the vessel, but again, the familial content enables meaning. In this case, dichotomies surface through the contrasts of light and dark to represent birth and death, shifts and freezes in time correspond to how our perception of time changes in relationship to birth and death. My understanding of landscape and the histories attached to it is very similar to how I view the formal elements of my films; it is a vessel that is populated and given meaning by the people and things that inhabit it.
QUESTION: In several of your films you emphasized the importance of them being shown on the original medium (16 mm film projection) as it happens with these two pieces. Working with analog film could be consider today as a marginalized space of film creation, especially when we are talking about windows of exhibition. Rolling towards a digital world and with the particular context we find ourselves diving into now with less screens available to our reach (outside home), what to expect about the future of this medium and its way of exhibition? Do we need to think about new spaces to share this works?
ANSWER: This is something that has been changing for me in recent years. When I began working with and finishing films on analogue film, I really felt it was important to screen the film prints as intended, on film. When a film is finished on film I view analogue film exhibition as the final stage in the filmmaking process, and the projectionist as a collaborator. I have sat through many analogue film screenings where the projection has been horrible and has ruined the reception of the films, so it is intrinsic to the completion of the filmmaking process. A skilled projectionist with proper projection equipment can enhance the reception of the film. I still strongly believe in this and would prefer my photochemical films to be screened this way. I could also romantically reflect on the perception of time and the materiality of the photochemical medium here, but really for me, it is about the art and craft of the projected image. We continue to move farther and farther away from considering projection as part of the filmmaking process. It is a new reality, and filmmakers need to be aware of the scalability of their films for a variety of exhibition platforms. So, with this being said, of course I also value the virtues of the digital image and the potential for exhibition through the internet. There are wonderful examples, such as MOCA, where artists and their works are being presented in a very thoughtful professional manner, and which enables context and curatorial vision. With so many film festivals moving their programming online during the current state of the world, the MOCA project really has predicted the future in a way, and I hope that festivals and programmers consider their own online festivals beyond being just a streaming window.
QUESTION: You mentioned that Hunter-Gatherer (2003) was the film that really started your fascination with the "home-mode" of image making and personal cinema. The title shows a little bit of the nature of an artist that works on archive. Could you explain that process and the sparks that created the certainty of its value (personal and artistically)?
ANSWER: ‘Hunter-Gatherer’ is the work I found my artistic voice through, and it embodies many thematic and formal concerns that would inform my practice for the following decade or so. The process of making it would also define my filmmaking process up to my present work. At the time I made ‘Hunter-Gatherer’ I had become the custodian of my family’s slide archive, the images of my childhood. I had also been doing a lot of research for a paper where I was able to develop a critical understanding of home movie making, picture taking, and the creative possibilities of the ‘archive’. There is a sequence in the film that actually shows my father taking a picture (with the camera discussed previously), then sorting through the archive of slide images on a light table. This, in a way, reflects my process in making the film. Through my recollections of family slideshows during my childhood I began to understand that memories I had of certain events in my life had been formed through the performative nature of the slideshows and the collective narrativization of the images. The film embodies my futile attempt to reconstruct memory through the process of re-photography and rather than creating a clear recollection of moments from my childhood the form of the film embraces the latent and fluid-like quality of memory. It was also one of my first films to be extensively hand-processed...
QUESTION: What is your relationship with the materials once they become the analog film, after you have shot them? How is the process of developing for you, are all the saturation effects from the chemical part of the development? and how would you describe the way you molded these materials?
ANSWER: For me, the very act of taking a picture or film indicates the passing of a moment and the birth of its remembrance. I become indebted to that photograph or to that strip of film as a reference point and as an aid to my memory of the moment it captures. Oftentimes, I remember the images in place of the memories they signify. In this way, the photograph or film becomes the actual thing remembered in place of the event, subject, or topic whereupon the image originated. And, as in human death, the organic nature of photochemical media designates the death of the image it carries. The photograph or film will fade and break down through a process of decay. So, with analogue film there is a more direct correlation to my own material being; it is difficult to try to explain the digital image in a similar fashion and its ontological nature is intrinsically different when speaking of image formation. When I hand-process my own footage I can enhance contrast and alter the look of the film in many ways. I can also process it ‘clean’ so that it looks like it came from a film lab, or ‘dirty’ to enhance surface artifacts and other inconsistencies. With most of my films, I also do my own negative cutting which requires an A/B roll configuration, where you cut in every other shot on roll A then alternate in an opposite pattern on roll B. The entire process is very tactile and requires careful hand craft; it is a slow art form where I find the process more aligned with sculpture.
QUESTION: In Family Portrait #2 we are carry throughout the movie by the idea of birth and life, but you call us back with a phone call with the news of your father relocating that same concept. It is conspicuous that on amateur and home movies we find the "highlights" and garnished of common life. How important it is to reveal the uncertain of life or hardness of it too? How have you worked with that on particular?
ANSWER: The vast majority of home movies designate common, usually positive, life events that are indicative of a highly patterned ‘Kodak culture’ in the home mode of amateur image making. In the ‘home mode’, the tendency to create a highly contrived, staged, and edited version of family life finds form in photo albums and home movies that are extremely selective in terms of what we choose to record or neglect in the full range of our life experiences. During the time I created these works my practice was intently focused on expanding the range of home image production to include the often-neglected experiences we record in our lives. Experiences such as the death and loss of a loved one, expanded views of childbirth, and a more abstract representation of time surface in these works to counterbalance the typical home movie. Looking back to the period when I created these works, I can see I had fallen into many of the same patriarchal traps as the typical ‘father creating the images of his family’. Yet these works display a self-awareness that is undermining or critically addressing this aspect in different ways, and as is the case with both films, they are anything but typical home movies. In ‘Family Portrait #2’ the significance of using a family portrait to accompany the sounds of childbirth extends awareness to the inherent qualities of ‘birthing’ that reside in other processes of becoming, such as the creation of images I use to represent my family. As the film approaches the climax, the intensity of the experience of childbirth is reflected in the sound of the crying baby and the increasing instability of the family portrait; the wonder of bringing a new life into the world is also fraught with new anxieties. There is a vulnerability reflected in the image of my family as it flutters and slips, and resists stasis, until finally all is still...then, the news of a death.
QUESTION: Both movies don't let us reach the "whole picture". See/Saw are glances of images or memories created by the camera lens and Family Portrait #2 we enter situations such us giving birth by a sea of stimuli that creates the ambiance of that moment. How is the void necessary? Is there any similarity with how our memory works?
ANSWER: To answer your question in a straightforward way, yes. Most of my films from this period are dealing with the representation of memory, recollection, and forgetting in different capacities, and this characteristic of my work is indicative of my process. As you can imagine, each film starts with an overabundance of footage that has been collected over time, and as I begin to edit the process of selection is very much dictated by intuition, chance, and recollection. I tend to start with a very complex conception of the film, that gradually becomes more and more simplified as I get closer to finishing it. I aim to achieve the essence of the experience that I am trying to convey; whether that be the inevitability of death in the wonder of childbirth, or the memory and fleeting nature of lived experiences. ‘SEE/SAW’ actually started as a series of long takes that started and ended with an iris fade, the length of which was dictated by the full wind of my Bolex. When I started to edit the film, the long takes were not conveying what I was feeling when I looked at the images. The precious moments from my children’s lives are something I was trying to hold onto and try to make more permanent, despite my feelings of futility. When I began to focus on the formal aspect of the iris fade as the structuring element of the film it really connected with this sense of futility and impermanence. The connection to seeing and having seen, remembering and forgetting, dark and light, all began to surface and convey what I was truly feeling when viewing the original footage. When considering our memories, we often visualize what we can remember most clearly, yet the vast majority of our lived experiences are forgotten. I think in my work I have tried to communicate this instability of remembering in the face of forgetting through aesthetic choices that present images that are difficult to hold on to. In ‘SEE/SAW’ this trait is evident through the pacing of the film and the literal analogy of the iris fade to seeing and not seeing, remembering and forgetting; in ‘Family Portrait #2’ the correlation is not as direct or concrete, as meaning in the film is heavily influenced by the soundtrack. An ultrasound recording of one of my children’s heartbeats before they were born, the sounds of childbirth, and the phone message of a loved one’s death help to contextualize the images and give them meaning however dislocated from the sounds and ambivalent they might be.
QUESTION: On this past exhibitions it has been very common being a parent/giving birth as a path to discover. Francisca Duran, the exhibition before said that it simply changes time ¿What have you discover working that through film? Also there is a long tradition of experimental artists that have shot moments that are unique in life, where does the camera stand in those moments?
ANSWER: While I was working on ‘Family Portrait #2’, the knowledge of other filmmakers' approach to childbirth with a camera troubled me, especially in situations where the camera becomes a mediator between the maker and the immersive experience of childbirth. There is something paternal in the desire to control the experience by viewing it through a recording device that I was thinking critically about. In Stan Brakhage’s ‘Window Water Baby Moving’ (1959), it is impossible to dismiss the intermediary role of the camera as he records the birth of one of his children. His experience of childbirth is one viewed through the lens of the camera, and even though it is a remarkably beautiful portrait of childbirth I cannot help but feel as though he has removed himself from the unmediated experience of the event by his positioning of the camera between his eye (or “I” as he refers) and the life springing forth before him. In some cases, I find it necessary to put down the camera, and I strongly believe it is possible to communicate an experience without necessarily using a recording method that mediates the experience while it is occurring. I have documented the births of all three of my children, but unlike Brakhage I have consciously avoided a camera stance that inhibits my immersion and total involvement in the experience. Of the births I have recorded with a camera, the camera was placed, with permission from my wife, on a tripod in the back of the delivery room out of the way and out of mind. In ‘Family Portrait #2’, only a sound recording gives a referential cue to the actual experience of childbirth. The use of other images to describe childbirth feeds into my belief that all of my family’s experiences are palpable within each other. A moving portrait taken on a sunny afternoon can elicit the experience of childbirth because those experiences reside in each other through the lives of the people involved.
QUESTION: How to work with the obsolescence of memorabilia? How do we give it a second birth to materials not seen as such or already forgotten?
ANSWER: I think the easiest way to consider these questions is to think about them in regards to how we can work creatively with an archive. Most objects that comprise an archive will face obsolescence in one form or another; whether it be through technological redundancy or through the object’s usefulness and purpose. For example, an archive of family photographs can be repurposed by subsequent generations of family members to help form an understanding of their history. And that history is constantly evolving through the process of interpretation by each individual who engages with the archive. When I became the custodian of my childhood slide images, it was the spark that enabled me to revisit my past, re-evaluate it, and re-articulate it. I was able to add my own creative interpretation to the stories the images held by building on memories that had become the narration of my childhood. We all perform and re-enact our history in different ways, whether it be through watching home movies, looking through old photographs, or choosing what we post to social media. For me, my memories associated with the images from my childhood are defined by the projected slideshows I mentioned in the first question. These ‘performances’ influenced my artistic development deeply, inspiring me creatively and provoking me critically. They introduced me to the creative potential of photography and filmmaking, and the power of the projected image. They showed me the value in lived experience and family through the love and compassion the images were captured and presented with. And they provided me the opportunity to learn about myself and to develop as an artist.
