Excavating Cultural Memory
In order to make her argument, Marks relies on an old standby of Althusserian apparatus theory, showing how dominant narrative forms align with “official history” and how memories not encoded through auditory or visual means can slip away from dominant discourse. But how does cinema appeal to senses it can not technically represent, such as smell and touch? Are there strategies to visually represent “recollection images” while still resisting dominant regimes of knowledge production? If cinematic archaeology is a matter of destroying unitary myths from the inside, then can digital animation play a role in deterritorializing the image?
The first seedlings of these questions had sprouted half-formed over the summer of 2016, when I entered production of This Is Civilization, a 9-minute documentary thematizing similar problematics of counter-hegemonic memory and cultural displacement. Originally, the film was supposed to highlight the contents of an archive of more than 20,000 Kodachrome slides donated to the Middle East Institute, a D.C. think tank, by a former U.S. diplomat. As one of only five U.S. Regional Geographic Attaches posted around the world, Colbert Held was responsible for documents and reporting on topography, cultures, languages, and political developments across the entire Middle East from 1957 to 1975. Yet as the interns digitizing the archive—many of them identifying as diasporic—began recounting anecdotes and fragmentary memories elicited by its images, the project transformed.