Andrew Vallance

Film is not a mirror, and neither is memory, they are both (re)constructions. The Unreliable Real: Film and the Insecurity of Memory seeks to understand the relationship between memory and film through examining how film makes material the need to memorialise experience. Also, utilising my own work as a programmer and curator, I am ascertaining how memory is mobilised as a strategy for audiences used to fractured viewing.

Memory’s process is usually described in terms of images, a philosophical turn which seems to have its origins with Aristotle (‘there is something in us like a picture or impression’). This inclination suggests that film is potentially a compliant vehicle for memory’s articulation, and that a film’s presence in some ways reflects memory, moving as it does between tenses. Bergson, film’s first philosopher, believed film provided a means to view the past, and to make it present once again (‘Memory is, like the cinema, composed of a series of images. Immobile, it is in a neutral state; in movement, it is life itself’).

The mnemonic effect of many films suggests an alignment of thought and of pre-existing cultural manifestations. Generic conventions align representation with habituated knowledge; different practices have become designated conduits for memory. With awareness and invention however, film can potentially produce something unexpected. Frampton's (nostalgia) and Resnais' Muriel, amongst others, present something of the complexity of memory, and offer an alternative perspective to films such as Memento. The Unreliable Real considers how such works are able to capture memory’s profound and illusive nature.

For me the very act of making work is always a kind of search. By tracing, interpreting and reinventing the past, utilising archive and contemporary imagery, I investigate the threads that link individuals across time and how these divergent trajectories intersect and blur definitions of time.