Film Muet/Silent Movie (no sound)

1995

FILM MUET/SILENT MOVIE is a reworking of 8mm homemovie footage from the 1940’s in which my father, my brother and I are framed in a family narrative. As we play out our roles, written into the language of our bodies can be seen the cultural constructs of patriarchy and male privilege, as well as the female predicament of entrapment between enticement and rejection.

The ‘story’ is retold three times in differing treatments, using devices of slow motion, repetition. stilling and close-up. With each successive viewing, more and more detail emerges, focusing on my (the girl’s) reactions. My/her face, in closeup, mirrors a myriad of emotions; my/her body, moving in slow motion, speaks its language, bringing the viewer closer and closer to the revelations of a small, but emblematic moment, and its political dimensions.

While I have no conscious memory of the event and what I experienced emotionally at the time, it exists now in a de- and re-constructed reality that speaks to issues of autobiographical narrative and memory, and to the ways in which technologies can mediate experience; how we may re-know and re-present the forces that formed us.