Here’s a childhood memory, thrown out into the tip.
It was damaged,
you can see its scars.
The person who recorded it or who ended up having it, wanted to get rid of it.
It had lost all value.
The film had come out, it was cut and scratched.
I gave it some care.
I saved what I could ...
It was a friend who gave me this one.
When he was moving, he found it in an abandoned box,
forgotten in the cellar with some old letters.
- Have you been doing this for a while? - ...Yeah…
-Can you explain why you do it?
How did it start?
-Hold on …
That’s the first one,
my first nonmemory.
When I came across these lost memories, I was plunged
into a mix of odd emotions, a sort of nostalgia.
I thought to myself, I should save them,
they mustn't be lost.
It’s in Super 8 … The beginnings of
mainstream video!
Before then family film that we find were often shooted
by professionals with big, heavy, fixed cameras,
that were anchored in the ground. With 8mm,
it's the people who film themselves.
We see through their eyes, what catches their attention,
what's important at that moment,
we get inside their skin, a part of their skull.
There's something intimate about this amateurism.
Something that we have gradually lost because of smartphones.
People, overexposed to visual imagery on a daily basis,
have become professionalized, by mimicry,
they've lost a little of that magic, the magic of grown-up kids
discovering a new toy, learning, experimenting with it…
And paradoxically, we film things that are not that interesting.
In 25 years, an image of an instagrammable beach,
where you spent a day one summer with 200 strangers
will have less value than
an image of your father washing the dishes,
or of someone sharing your life taking a call, or sleeping, smiling...
Look at this elderly couple.
Here they are sitting at a table. Doing nothing. Saying nothing.
They simply exist in this captured time.
A kind of animated photo, a moment of nothing,
of waiting, of peace,
so far from all that stimulation,
that agitation of our present life.
Today, no one is doing nothing!
-Earlier on, you were telling me how it started,
how you started, but you didn’t really say why?
What do you get from it?
- Anemoia !
It’s ...
the emotional attachment to a time we never lived,
a cousin of nostalgia.
But … where nostalgia is warm, content and sepia,
my anemoia is cyan,
and can raises a sweet sadness.
It's not the melancholia of my own childhood,
that comes from a place that I know and that I can float on.
These are waves coming from all sides, from other times,
other places, dragging me away from who I am.
There! Look! This family in their Sunday best.
Back then, people walked around dressed up on a Sunday,
even at the beach. And all over the world,
from Hong Kong to the United States... It seems funny today…
And…
I love the snow on the screen : the white noise before the film,
the messiness of the film, the scratches, the artifacts,
like wrinkles, like the worn hands of our grandmothers,
evidence of past time, of lived time. Testimony of the journey
these memories have made to get to us.
I get quiet attached to these characters, to an uncle
who is not mine, to a grandfather, or a grand-daughter.
-Ok, but you still don’t keep all the memories you’ve found?
How do you choose them?
How do you sort them?
-Well… I don’t really sort them.
There’s no real method or order
I am not a archivist, I don't work for others,
or with historians.
I’m not the national archive,
what I do is more selfish
I’m a collector.
I select things that move me, I keep the beautiful...
Some of these nonmemories really make me want to dance
to run, to shout out for joy at the world.
Others are like little stories that we tell to a child
at bed-time:
it's less the content than the sweetness that counts.
Some of them make me feel slightly uneasy, because they’re so intimate
that I feel like I’m stealing from or disturbing them.
All of them leave me with a shiver I can't explain.
They awake a troubled pain in me, a dull anguish,
an aftertaste of salt, of loneliness, of death.
I console them. I console myself.
I bring them back to life and dream them until these feelings fade.