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Collective Memory, Collective Trauma

This is Civilization

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New Directions for Archaeological Cinema
Marks remarks that recollection images in hybrid films “must confront the public and the private with each other,” like fossils embodying “traces of events whose representation has been buried” (253). I was not conscious of it at the time, but This Is Civilization evokes these recollection images, unearthing half-forgotten histories from the memories of the people we interviewed. We asked five interns and staff members—from Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Kuwait, and Lebanon respectively—to select photos from the archive that unrooted personal memories from their unconscious. Our first interviewee, Yousif, tells of the Syriac Catholic monastery that his deceased grandfather Behnam was named after, which was destroyed by ISIS two years ago. One day, while scanning images in the archive, Yousif comes across a slide of the front edifice of Mar Behnam labelled “church on the outskirts of Erbil.” Held’s archive, concerned only with an “official history” packaged for reports to the U.S. Foreign Service, does not recognize Yousif’s family history, but it can can cut across layers of past and present representation to tell a story. Even reduced to rubble, the monastery functions as a “strangely active fossil,” a node connecting strands of official and private histories (253).

Of course, This Is Civilization is clearly a problematic fit with Marks’s concept of intercultural cinema: while it shifts cultural experience between and within its autonomous segments, it does not engage the formal qualities of haptic visuality which, for Marks, create unofficial histories. Instead, in the absence of contemporary images to serve as memory vehicles for Yousif or the other interviewees, the film falsifies the visual archive through the medium of digital animation. Using the analog aesthetic of a slide projector, This Is Civilization interweaves Held’s deteriorating photographs with subtly animated paintings fabulating each narrator’s memories as they speak. Here, a new form of digital production acts as a prosthesis to the subject’s body, transgressing the borders between public and private memory, and between digital and analog cinematic forms.

Drawing on Marks’s politicized inscription of alternate orders of sensory experience into cinema, I suggest that the tension between marginalized and hegemonic histories is equally dramatized in the ways that animation problematizes the documentary image’s rhetorical and indexical guarantees. Movement from one medium to another, and the literal movement of animated images, suggests the intensified dislocation of signifiers from their referents, a context that has significant implications for the ways in which documentary truth-claims are established. The recent acceptance of hybrid forms that integrate animated imagery into documentary contexts signals a deepening awareness that the truth claims of non-fiction forms are no longer located in the “reality effects” of the photographic trace (Elsaesser and Hagener 76). Rather, they reside in a developing understanding that the realities that surround us and the social memories that construct our past are not always visualizable, that their meanings are unclear, and that documentary evidence is not always possible, revealing or clarifying. Animated documentary’s disjunctive, generically-hybridized nature points to the concept that history and memory are not continuous, but are rather a process of breaks, mutations and transformations.