This video creates a sense of nostalgia and history through its mise-en-scene, the text and the notion of time.
Still images employed to construct this slideshow reflect how my memory perceives the end of my friendship with Anna. These photographs are a representation of my memory of both Anna and my trip to Hong Kong. They are fragmented and displayed in both black and white and coloured sections. The coloured photographs represent photographs for what they are, superficial and a glossed view of our trip and our friendship as they were taken with the knowledge of a camera being present. They represent to me what photographs of her mother meant to Rachel, the replicant, in Bladerunner as proof of the real. Rachel based both her past and her identity on photographs because she had neither past nor conceivable future (Cameron 104).
In other words, the coloured photos represent an affirmation of my past as proof which distinguishes pure memory from memories represented in images. This was an idea put forward by Henri Bergson who suggested: “To picture is not to remember” (quoted in Cameron 111). This exemplifies that as a result of the friendship breakdown, I chose not to remember not only the negative but also the positive which results in my forgetting of these events portrayed by the colour photos.
This is compared to the black and white photos which are more vivid memories of what I have of my friendship with Anna being the breakdown of our friendship. These images are closer to the present and are repeatedly shown towards the climax of the soundtrack to emphasise the breakdown of the friendship. The soundtrack is “True”, composed by Tom Twyker, Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil and operates as a mood setter and corresponds to the speed of slideshow, indicating to the audience the climax of the video which happens two minutes into the clip. Therefore, it can be argued that time image exists for itself, following the rhythm of the soundtrack which eventually reached a climax where the same photos were repeatedly shown with 0.2 second intervals to exemplify the blurring of memory of both the deterioration of our friendship and the trip towards the end. The repeated four black and white photos are all framed in long shot and when put together, show the distance from the camera as they progress, symbolising the internal distance that we had with each other at the time. They also show a sense of history and time passing as indicated by the text.
There are gaps between each photograph to show the fragmentation nature of my memory. These gaps also represent memory blockage of the friendship breakdown. This can be explained biologically as “...human brains tend to select, reconfigure, and reorder memories upon recall, people also consciously manipulate their memory deposits over time...” (Van Djick 37). This is due to the unpleasant experience of the entire debacle and is reflected in the slideshow. The only form of explanation provided is the text which was first used as a source of information for the viewer to understand the context and later used to set an overall tone of nostalgia and history with the notion of time passing. The format that I chose to present the text in is a pull focus format which both reflects the nature of my imperfect memory and the reconstruction of these images as representation after the passing of time.
Reference List
Cameron, Allan. “Navigating Memory: Temporal Anchoring and the Modular Subject.” Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 79-112.
Van Dijck, Jose. “Memory Matters in the Digital Age.” Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.
