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screenspirit · 6 months
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Personal Stories and Memory in Jay Rosenblatt’s and Su Fredrich’s Avant-garde Cinema
Avant-Garde offers distinct artistic strategies that can be steered to hold aesthetic representations of the filmmaker’s mindset and objectives set when creating the film. To elaborate, some experimental filmmakers choose their aesthetic strategies concerning how well they highlight experiences they aim to convey through their work, one particular example being their personal stories and memories, which they use as stimuli for Avant-Garde films. Two prominent examples of this idea in Avant-Garde are Jay Rosenblatt’s Phantom Limb (2005), a communication of the filmmaker’s experience and growth surrounding his younger brother’s death and Su Fredrich’s Sink or Swim (1990), which articulates how the filmmaker’s relationship with her father impacted her outlook on her childhood and personal identity. Both these experimental features draw on the filmmakers’ subjective memories of their past events which serve as their works’ narratives, all conveyed through the stylistic devices that highlight their position in Avant-Garde cinema.
One crucial artistic strategy used by both filmmakers which assists in elevating the anecdotes presented narratively is the use of found footage as the imagery. Rosenblatt and Friedrich both rely on shots and sequences that have been previously filmed by someone else and through the use of editing and placement, tell their own story through found footage. This feature of avant-garde cinema conveys how they partake in first-person filmmaking where everything shown is ‘overtly filtered’ by their ‘sensibility and ‘point of view’ [Rascoroli, 2009]. It is this artistic choice of structuring personal films through recycled sequences that serves as a distinct bridge between the Avant-Garde and the documentary, emphasised by Rascaroli who states how ‘their foregrounding of autobiography and their expression of authorial subjectivity position them in between…that of the Avant-Garde…and that of first-person documentary’ [2009].
Therefore, these filmmakers are expressing their autobiographies through a combination of Avant-Garde and documentary style, with found footage being one primal artistic choice. Friedrich’s example of the use of found footage connotes heavily to her memories of her father and childhood, exemplified in one of the earliest sequences shown in the film titled ‘Witness’, in which spectators see shots of a father holding his young daughter in what appears to be a home movie. Rosenblatt mirrors this in his film by showing personal home movies of him and his younger brother from their childhood as an opening to his visual storytelling.
Both these examples fulfil the purpose of building up context and introductions to the filmmakers’ individual and personal narratives and their themes; Rosenblatt’s story of loss visually articulates what he had before his brother’s death and Friedrich introduces ideas of parenthood and childhood using her images of parents interacting with their children. Taking this choice in source of footage into account when observing ideas of memory and personal stories, one can identify the filmmakers’ objectives because ‘home movies have much the same status as family photographs as regards of temporal reference’ and thus, ‘offer an image of the past of individual shown’ [Turim, 1989]. Thus, both filmmakers are using footage they did not capture themselves to present past events that connect to their narratives. This aesthetic action causes the sequences to immediately hold a personal and unique characteristic to them since spectators are observing what should be private moments in a young family’s life that have been captured on film for nostalgia and memorial purposes. As a result, identification of the filmmakers’ memories and stories can be easily distinguished since they are using found footage from the past to build up the narratives.
Found footage as an aesthetic decision articulates the contexts relating to the storytelling and with separate motives about emotional responses and cognitive approaches to their work. Rosenblatt’s example of recycled footage showing his brother before his passing is working to drive emotions of sadness and sympathy from his audience because he is allowing them to witness the memories he has of his brother visually through the shots shown. Additionally, they will later observe Rosenblatt’s experiences following his brother’s death such as the funeral and healing process. As a result of this, they will recall back to the opening sequence of the film and find themselves sharing the feelings of sadness Rosenblatt must be experiencing since the home movies allowed them to see a minor example of what the filmmaker has lost. Friedrich, however, is aiming to produce a separate instance of sympathy towards her personal story using her recycled footage. Her spectators will take in the imagery of the father holding his young daughter and identify its associations with family and child development since relationships and bonds with parental figures are credentials in a child’s early life.
It is these connections the audience has made from observing this example of found footage in the film that will assist in creating emotional responses of pity towards Friedrich when they later see such articulations as her parents’ divorcing and father leaving through voiceovers. The spectators will then think back to the recycled footage of the father and daughter and feel sympathy towards Friedrich as her family has broken up and she may no longer have interactions demonstrated in the home movies. Thus, both examples of found footage in the films are soon laced with specific emotions which assist in building the filmmakers’ personal stories since they are showcasing their past which hold significance to their storytelling.
It is this concern with the past that serves as a critical element to the recycled footage aspect of the Avant-Garde, it provides an opportunity for experimental filmmakers to demonstrate their creativity because they are taking fragments of film that were captured for one reason and editing them into their narrative. Usually, the past is engaged within film through the temporal editing technique of a flashback which helps to ‘merge the two levels [shared and recorded] of remembering the past’ and is used in the Avant-Garde as an ‘element in creating an expressive manipulation of the image and film montage’ [Turim, 1989]. Thus, they are a device that breaks the current narrative time shown which bridges the past with the present.
However, Rosenblatt and Friedrich have instead placed their examples of footage connected from the past in the openings of their films in a chronological structure to provide their spectators with ideas of their past which will benefit how they interpret the events they witness in the upcoming sequences. This mirrors the use of flashbacks as a device because it coheres to the story and elevates character development since spectators observe events in the film subjects’ lives that affect their character. Furthermore, the past and how it is demonstrated holds connections to one’s memory which can be explained as ‘a system of storing and retrieving information’ [Baddeley, 1997]. This means that the filmmakers offer their interpretations of events psychologically held in their memories through the already recorded footage in which the memories are visually stored. This effectively links back to Turim’s claim that the two levels of recalling the past coincide with one another to structure the filmmakers’ personal-based narratives and convey further emphasis on how important the artistic strategy of found footage.
Friedrich emphasises the presence of personal stories heavily and consistently throughout her film, combining her story with those of her mother and father which all share connections and influences. Friedrich’s story is the focus of the narrative, highlighted in a majority of the sequences such as the one titled ‘Journalism’ in which a series of experimental techniques combine to convey the story and its themes. One of these is the voiceover that plays over the images shown; a young girl, who is telling Friedrich’s story throughout the film, shares with the audience how Friedrich was given a diary when she was young in which she wrote down her stories, thoughts and secrets. One can interpret the symbolism of the diary as a manifestation of Friedrich documenting and expressing her personal story, as a diary consists of one’s ‘record of facts and events…own impressions, ideas, sensations, self-analysis and reflection’ [Rascaroli, 2009].
A diary also mirrors the epistolary novels of the 18th century, a genre consisting of novels telling stories through letters and journaling which takes an ‘interest in individuality and the inner self’ and a phase of ‘deep transformation and great expansion’ [Rascaroli, 2009]. The Avant-Garde is a cinematic style that draws inspiration from other mediums of art, particularly ‘relating to the fields of literature’ which it ‘pays homage to and finds inspiration in’ [Rascaroli, 2009]. Therefore, the diary mentioned throughout this sequence of the film links with how Friedrich is presenting the story of her parental relationships and childhood as well as conveying the influence literature as a medium holds on Avant-Garde cinema and how it is incorporated into it.
The childhood aspect is emphasised using the footage of young girls playing in a playground; a further example of filmic techniques used to elevate narrative ideas since the images connect to the voiceover articulating an event in childhood. The voiceover then mentions how Fredrich’s parents divorced and this serves as the pivotal point in the narrative and a painful memory Fredrich documents in her diary, which we are told is erased by her mother as it was written in pencil. Here, Friedrich is drawing ideas of different levels of memory which coincide with Turim’s claim on recorded and shared past. Her mother may be able to erase the physically recorded presentation of Friedrich’s memory of the divorce kept in the diary yet is unable to do so to store it in her daughter’s mind, thus, conveying ideas of memory and personal stories in Fredrich’s narrative with relation to how they are documented and interpreted.
In addition to this, Friedrich develops the memory of her parents’s divorce by combining events she can recall that serve as their personal stories and memories. Friedrich first does this in the sequence titled ‘Ghosts’; a calling which holds connotation to figures of the past haunting individuals connected to them which alludes to the idea of memory and the past throughout the film, where the shots are of a letter addressed to Fredrich’s father being written by her on a typewriter. This links to the previous connection between the Avant-Garde and literature, specifically this film and the form of an epistolary novel since a letter is being used as the source of articulation of events. The use of the letter as a stylistic strategy is effective in that it elevates the personal element to Friedrich’s work, mirroring the symbolism of the diary and allowing further insight into her deepest emotions at this point of her story thus progressing the development of that personal story.
In this letter, the spectators learn more about how the separation is impacting Friedrich’s mother when Fredrich writes about how she watched her mother spend most nights alone and crying while listening to a song called ‘Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel’; an articulation on the loss of a loved one which coincides with the experience both the mother and Friedrich are experiencing yet this particular communication is tied more with the mother. Here, Friedrich has captured one parental figure’s personal story in the film in which the medium of music is how her mother expresses her emotions, with lyrics such as ‘Where I do not have him/That is the grave/The whole world is bitter to me’ [Schubert, 1814] which link to the experience of a breakup. In contrast, her daughter does so in writing and later filmmaking.
The letter ends with a statement made by Friedrich on how difficult it is coping with the ‘conflict between memory and the present’, therefore, Fredrich is emphasising how the positive memories she has of her parents do not match what is taking place in the present time, specifically when watching her mother cry and this must be creating emotions of bitterness and grief within her. The memory of watching her mother go through this while writing it in the letter must bring these emotions forward and in turn connect the feelings and memory as one. Baddeley highlights this when stating ‘anything experienced in a given mood will tend to be recalled when that mood is reinstated’ [1997], thus memories and events in a story are tied with emotions that echo them.
The audience observes this in the later sequence ‘Drinking’ where Friedich communicates how watching her half-sister and father interact reminds her of her memories of her childhood with him as ‘her childhood was being played out in front of her’. This conveying of her mother’s story is connected to Friedrich’s memory of having to witness her mother go through this and this memory is then incorporated into the personal tale shown in her work. Friedrich then adds her father’s personal story during the ‘Envy’ sequence in which the voice-over articulates how her father wrote poems to express his own emotions towards Friedrich and the situation. The poetry as a medium echoes Friedrich’s diary, letter and filmmaking in addition to the mother’s choice of music, thus, elevating personal stories being compressed into different formats of artistic medium with the experimental film being the overarching form since Friedrich has collected all mediums implied in her Avant-Garde work.
Overall, both filmmakers recruit the Avant-garde film model in a tapestry of aesthetic organisation and sentimental essence, the former stemming from pre-filmed footage and the latter ideas around memories of family as part of an individual’s personal story, highlighting the mode’s unique stylistic and storytelling properties. Rosenblatt’s feature recruits its footage, as building off from its subjective contextual messaging, in a somewhat raw and touching manner. He narrates a stage of life any audience member can resonate with, using the experimental aesthetic toolset of a collective archive of diverse found footage he can edit together into one cohesive personal meaning. A sufficient portion of this can additionally be applied to Friedrich’s work, one that encompasses the power of using pre-existing objective footage and other mediums of art to communicate stages of her subjective experience. However, Sink or Swim’s story is slightly more niche in its subject matter and aftermath. Regardless, Friedrich’s creation also resonates on profound levels due to the immersive emotion in vision as combined with the relentless quality in execution.
Bibliography
Nardelli, Matilde. (2010). Laura Rascaroli (2009) The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film. Film-Philosophy. 14. 191–195. 10.3366/film.2010.0058.
Constance Balides, Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History, Screen, Volume 32, Issue 1, Spring 1991, Pages 120–125, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/32.1.120
Schubert, Franz, Gretchen am Spinnrade, Part One, scene 15 of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, 19 October 1814
Baddeley, A.D. (1997) Human Memory: Theory and Practice (Revised Edition). Psychology Press, East Sussex.
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