Archeologia della storia
privata e rielaborazione filmica
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Incontro con Péter Forgács (Bologna, 17 maggio 2004), lezione che conclude
il laboratorio audiovisivo e la rassegna a lui dedicati.
Il testo della conferenza in inglese
I’m trying to introduce how I’m working and what I do as a kind of
introduction of this visual archaeology.
It’s really on the borderline of art and social history, or psychological
history, it’s a kind of, even I can say, anthropological art.
The question why the source material is home movie; I am organizing a
little foundation called “Private photo and film archive” in Budapest
since twenty-one years and this collection is the base of my work and the
target and the source material as well.
It’s a bit like a schizophrenic state of mind to observe home movies as an
anthropologist and also as a recycling artist, but first of all I started
to talk about and I would like to explain more what is the difference
between cinema and home movie.
Any directed, composed documentary, or more, fiction film is planned in a
very certain way and made from public or private money. So there is the
alter world which defines the medium, the film and is essentially aimed
for a wider public; but as for the home movie, the amateur film, it is
aimed to a smaller public which is not even a public it’s the family or
the private surrounding of the film-maker, so immediately we have this
distinction between private history and public history.
Before going a little bit deeper to that, we have to understand what is
the word “amateur”, it comes from “amato”, “love”, the one who makes
things for loving it, or doing it for loving the object, so the amateur is
the one who does it for loving it.
Second thing what we have to distinguish, is the diary character of the
home movie, it’s a diary format; maybe it’s sounds too simple but if I
would write my diary, this evening while going back to Rome, I will write,
we were in a black room which was funny because it was not deep but it was
a kind of long room, and there were approximately 58, no 79, no 86 persons
in the room, and then I stop writing, because unfortunately I cannot count
you, but if I would take a camera and I would make a video I could count
you easily and from that recording I could look at your faces later on.
More to that, I could look at your faces what I cannot describe because I’m
not a good writer or not a good poet, and I say: “oh what a wonderful
smile” or “that jacket”, so the gestures, the faces, the mimic, all those
things which are hard to verbalize or write it down, if one is not a poet,
are documented.
So the limits of the written diary, or let’s say the advantages also,
because without the written diaries we would be much poorer, thinking of
beautiful diaries of important poets or writers or historians or just
persons, but the film, the visual print of the existing moment, is able to
conserve something, have the print of the time.
But we have to concentrate on the pre-television and pre-video era, that
was a completely different period of visual documentation because the
film, one roll of film, a three minute roll of film costed in Hungary,
before the war, 2 and the half pengő, that is equals to about 7 dollars,
and that was expensive, so if somebody would like to record one wedding in
the family he had to decide what to concentrate on that three minutes, in
comparison of a today’s video-cameras which is as long as the whole
marriage even.
And more to that there is another distinction, that if one films for a
longer period, then so many things are documented from the linear time of
his or her own time, that suddenly a collective diary of that person
appears as an interesting concentration of the passing of the times.
While an amateur filmmaker push the button and then records a certain
sequence and then stops it, and then he repeats it let’s say every sunday,
and then after forty years we have a numbers of sundays, 10.000 sundays or
what’s the number, then it’s all stick together to one big roll and then
it is a diary of sundays and that means that certain slices from the
continous time, we have, like in a dream, sequences but they’re stick
together in a very funny or interesting associative line.
If we see a film of this banal sundays, they’re boring, I mean it’s all
about happiness and in my archivist experience I haven’t seen one divorce
on amateur film, but I’ve seen 200 marriages, as if only happy life would
exist. If someone would come from the Mars, and check out this amateur
films, and would like to understand human culture from this banal moments,
then this martian, this alien would think that human life is eternal, and
is always happy.
But this is our human fight against the notion of death, we must suppress
the feeling, the knowledge, the experience of death, because otherwise it
won’t be worth to wake up in the morning, or do things because we will die,
and I’m not lying to you but there will be one day that nobody in this
room will be alive but our prints, our images, our voices will be kept,
somewhere, in albums, tapes and that is something, the wishful thinking of
the amateur filmmaker eternity: banality and eternity.
If we compare for a second with the fiction film, in the fiction film only
the role dies, not the hero, so Humphrey Bogart is killed on the screen
but he didn’t die, we know that he is playing. But if we see a funeral on
an amateur film we know that they are dead, and this distinction is
crucial in the problem - next step - what is memory?
Our memory is very selective, very selective and sometimes contradicts to
our documents, for example if I would take out a photograph of myself,
thirty years ago with my girlfriend, we broke up long time ago, but I show
you the photograph, where you see us that were beautiful young and happy,
I have long red curly hair, and she is blonde and we are full mouth
laughing and I say “yeah it’s, it’s us”, and you look at me and say “but
why are you talking about this way?” And then I say “oh, we were always
unhappy”, then you say “but you’re laughing on the image“, “but I never
liked her” I say, “but here is the document - you say - it’s proved on
this photograph that you were happy”. So I’m re-contextualizing my own
photograph, my own memory, my own history, I’m re-writing my personal
biography, this is the flexibility of human being.
But also we can observe, on home movies, on photographs, this
contradiction which is a part of human, let’s say, reconciliation and the
problems of memory; but with memory we have another very important field
which is the trauma, which can be a personal or historic trauma and this
is suppressed, of course it’s hard to talk about if I’m raped, I would
never talk about those who raped me, and this is victimology but in
victimology you can observe how our memory is working or I forget when I
am in a car accident and I don’t remember at all what happened, just I
remember clearly what was before but I don’t know how I’d crashed; this is
the problems of trauma that is facing the image, the document which is
telling you something what you have forgotten or we have forgotten and
this is the duality of private and public history.
At this point we reach the question of what is the archive and how archive
are working; when the archives had been established in the history of
Europe, what kind of archives were the first archives? What kind of
museums were the first museums? Would we consider museums of the eighteen
century today as a museum? Or what are the new museum trying to sell to us?
In this context I have to refer again to the problems of the trauma
through a nice book which was written by Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
(trad. it. La camera chiara) that is referring to photograph in a kind of
punctum, so the point is: at this point we are fixated; and Roland Barthes
talks about a beautiful photograph that no one have ever seen apart from
himself, which is a photograph of his own mother when she was thirteen;
this is crucial, crucial for us because Roland Barthes is dealing with the
problems of memory “how would I like to remember to my mother?” so his
difficult and complex memory to his own mother, and also the pictures is
under taboo, it’s not for the public; but is also about the complexity of
one second, or part of a second, when his mother was in the garden in the
small bridge walk through; is that photograph representing Roland Barthes
mother? Can we say that? He says yes, but in a moving image it’s not one
second but is vitality, so if the photographer who made the picture of
Roland Barthes mother would have had a film camera, then we would see a
little girl walking; so the photograph is a tombstone, that we can put in
cemetery, on my tomb, but the film is also something what I would consider
life, because it’s animated, it’s moving and it is the animal that is
moving, or animus in junghian way, that is moving and it never dies, so
the amateur film were the film: filmic representation is eternal.
I try to be as short as possible, to really go into the practical showing
of some extarcts of “Free Fall” (Caduta libera – Il vortice) or “Angelos’
film”, but this is a turning point when we think again about Barthes
problem of representation.
Because representation is always re-contextualization, when I said I take
this photograph of my own family album, this imaginary photograph, I
re-contextualize it immediately when I show it to you in this context, and
from this point I shift from the archeologist to the artistic approach.
The reason is purely technical, because the archeologist digs up the
archeological site, in my case the photograph or the film, and tries to
replace it or adjust it with the historical facts, so making an interview
with the family, collecting other documents of the family, putting it in
the right context in his extensive full format.
Let’s take a huge, a larger family collection, that with I started the
Private Hungary series, “The Bartos Family”, Mr. Bartos filmed about 5/6
hours of films, and in the final one hour epic, I used only 50 minutes;
that means that I was selecting to find the best way of re-representing
something, re-contextualizing something, re-editing, re-composing
something, so that’s why I say it’s a technical difference.
It doesn’t mean that I give up the archeologist implications, and
motivation, just that the 5 hours are boring, boring and we don’t learn
from that; and by re-editing, re-composing so many years after the
original footage means that this re-reading, this re-contextualizing
places somewhere else this footage.
As I spoke about the spontaneous film library and as I spoke about the
memory, we can say that first of all making re-making re-composing
something from a found footage collection it means that today we have a
first viewpoint that is the contemporary viewpoint, is art viewpoint; the
second is the time which was recorded by the film-maker, that is a moving
episode, so in the case of Bartos 1929-1959, and also the time of his
personal time, individual, private time, what was his personal view to
record this and do not record that.
Going a little bit further on, when I spoke about trauma I also spoke
about the taboos like not having recorded of course wife beating or
killing cats, but we know this exist just as like in psychoanalysis we
follow our own hidden and suppressed personal archaeology, we feel from a
home movie set the lack of certain things, which show the side, and prints
of taboo.
The first example I will show to you, is this “Free Fall” (trad. lett.
Caduta libera), it’s hungarian jewish family, filming mr. Peto’s footage,
I will show only 10 minutes of the first part, to show you a little
example of the contradiction between banality of the private history and
the banality of the public history.
In this case I was really shocked that this family which was under very
strong and heavy danger from 1938, the beginning of the hungarian jewish
laws, they were filming themselves until 1944, only the happy moment, so
if I would understand and have to learn the story of this family only and
solely from the film footage then I would not understand which years this
have been. So the contradiction was how to represent the danger, their
life is in danger in Hungary, because of the Nazi era, because of the Nazi
influence, and they are showing their most happy life in their amateur
films.
I was really challenged how to solve this serious contradiction, and this
is the point where the anthropologist turns to artistic solutions, and
suddenly when I was trying to edit the material I started to hear the
jewish laws as I was reading a lot the hungarian holocaust history, and
there I understood from a first class history book from Randolph Braham (Randolph
L. Braham, The politics of genocide – The Holocaust in Hungary, New York -
Columbia University Press 1994) an american historian, that the laws were
extremely important, so in the film suddenly you hear the laws but they
are recited, in recitativo, so like angels’ voice, as the law is coming
from far away, from up, and it’s not directly connected to your daily
life, because in the film it is not shown that you are under a threat,
your life is under the threat. This is the point where the public history
and the private history, these two roads are crossing, each one, and
reflects one to the other, contrast them, and shows that even banality
have the power, in certain re-contextualized form, to show the love of
life and the enigmatic danger that is present but suppressed.
PROIEZIONE DI SPEZZONE DI FREE FALL
The next film I would like to show is “Angelos’ film”. “Angelos’ film” is
a great story and also a quite wealthy man’s home movie. That is
interesting because of course for the Nazi jewish laws it didn’t really
count whether one was rich or poor, young or old, talented or idiot, but
it just as a racial law, the only importance was that jew or considered as
a jew.
But in the antisemitic ideal, the jew is the rich, talented and moneymaker,
so I really loved this family footage because it is showing someone who is
designed for a kind of antisemite poster, in Hungary.
The more problematic with Angelos Papanastassiou is that Angelos
Papanastassiou is loyalist, maire of the city Pireo under Metaxas the
dictator, and not a communist partisan under the second world war; so the
question is wheter a non-communist, rich, pro-Metaxas person can be a
patriot; what is the definition of patriot? Can a conservative person be a
patriot, a true patriot, not nationalist, not fascist, but really patriot?
My question was to myself, coming from the radical left in the 1970’s,
whether how one should re-read history through a personal approach, being
just and righteous to the past.
So it was a provocation to my mind and it’s still a provocation for the
greek public, because none of the greek public televisions bought this
film though they saw it in Thessaloniki festival and other festivals,
because it‘s a problem for contemporary greeks, where the majority thinks
that second world war and the bloody civil war that followed the second
world war, which lasted from december 1944 until september 1949, that no
one from the other side could be a patriot against the Nazis, and more to
that, his personality have some unanswered points because he used his film
camera, clandestine camera, secretly in certain situations and openly in
other circumstances, and this pose the question when he filmed: why he
filmed and how he filmed.
Finally, I try to complete a work without being a judge but presenting to
you saying: here is Papanastassiou beside me, we’re sitting together, and
you are my other side and the composer of course, and the daughter of
Papanastassiou here, and we show you something to cross-questioned, we
show you something without being moralistic and we show you something
without letting free our political animal, because it is more important to
understand one than to judge it by playing and simplifying motives.
If it’s true on the greek resistance, the anti-Nazi and the anti-greek
fascist resistance that they could fight because they didn’t had to lose
anything else, just - with the classical marxian word - “only their chains”,
what is the motivation of a rich, wealthy man, who can live in complete
secure, who can live under occupation in complete security, to risk his
own life by recording and documenting the Nazi atrocities; and these are
the questions, which are very important for me, where this terrain of my
job, as an archaeologist and a film-maker, come together in one frame, and
this is the, let’s say, this is the present I brought to you tonight.
PROIEZIONE DI ANGELOS’ FILM
FINE LEZIONE