Martine Beugnet (University of Edinburgh)
Mourning in the Age of the Digital: Memory, loss and materialist filmmaking
In this paper, I propose to explore the relationship between filmmaking and mourning in the age of the digital. I will argue that certain experimental practices, where direct intervention on the film strip becomes part of a process of remembering and mourning, are exemplary not merely of a mise en abyme, but of a creative reworking and overturn of the ‘obsolescence’ thesis.
The focus of my paper will be the ‘K’ films, a series of short experimental works by Frédérique Devaux. A French filmmaker of Kabyle origins, and a key figure in contemporary experimental cinema, Devaux has developed the K series as an ongoing reflection on cinema and personal and collective memory, focusing on the history of a people whose culture and way of life have been continuously repressed in the name of colonial and national politics. Devaux uses found footage manipulated through optical printing and direct intervention on the film strip (superimposition of images and soundtracks, painting, writing and scratching) to create absorbing, rhythmic and profoundly sensual film works. Mourning is thus embodied in the form (in its repetitive, incantatory quality) as well as in the making (in the painstaking, frame-by-frame process of preservation, alteration, and partial erasure) of the films. Evocative of the Benjaminian concept of ‘dialectical optics’ and the ‘outmoded’ through its characteristic use of found footage and concern with image decay, Devaux’s work also typifies the kind of filmmaking discussed by Laura U Marks in her now classic study of cinema, remembrance and embodiment. Offered as a creative process of mourning, as well as a form of lament, Devaux’s cinema of exile encourages us to re-consider the debate on the ‘death of film’ in material as well political terms.
Nota Bene: A number of the ‘K’ films are available on commercially distributed VHS and DVDs (this will be taken into account in the argument developed above). I therefore propose viewing one or part of one of the films (they are usually 3 to 4 minutes long) as part of the paper.
The focus of my paper will be the ‘K’ films, a series of short experimental works by Frédérique Devaux. A French filmmaker of Kabyle origins, and a key figure in contemporary experimental cinema, Devaux has developed the K series as an ongoing reflection on cinema and personal and collective memory, focusing on the history of a people whose culture and way of life have been continuously repressed in the name of colonial and national politics. Devaux uses found footage manipulated through optical printing and direct intervention on the film strip (superimposition of images and soundtracks, painting, writing and scratching) to create absorbing, rhythmic and profoundly sensual film works. Mourning is thus embodied in the form (in its repetitive, incantatory quality) as well as in the making (in the painstaking, frame-by-frame process of preservation, alteration, and partial erasure) of the films. Evocative of the Benjaminian concept of ‘dialectical optics’ and the ‘outmoded’ through its characteristic use of found footage and concern with image decay, Devaux’s work also typifies the kind of filmmaking discussed by Laura U Marks in her now classic study of cinema, remembrance and embodiment. Offered as a creative process of mourning, as well as a form of lament, Devaux’s cinema of exile encourages us to re-consider the debate on the ‘death of film’ in material as well political terms.
Nota Bene: A number of the ‘K’ films are available on commercially distributed VHS and DVDs (this will be taken into account in the argument developed above). I therefore propose viewing one or part of one of the films (they are usually 3 to 4 minutes long) as part of the paper.
