Virtual Existence: Interrogating Rituals of Filmic Nostalgia and Remembrance
Memory is a curious phenomenon. Within its grasp are names, dates, directions, and instructions; peculiarly specific recounts, and likewise, confusingly murky ones; faces that are definite and those that are blurry, save some minor detail. Memory is our way of perpetuating moments beyond their worldly ends, yet its aforementioned grasp is precarious. We depend on our memory and our faith in its accuracy, therefore, we fear to forget. This anxiety is the impetus behind diaries, photographs, home movies, and other acts of preservation. Yet despite memory’s birth in actuality, it is far from absolute. Subject to the predilections of our conscious and unconscious thoughts, memory grows and transforms, and so with it does our understanding of the past. Even so, memory is also far from imaginary. As Giles Deleuze posits, memory belongs to the “virtual,” existing outside the reductive limits of real and unreal. My short film ruminates on the present existence of my great grandparents through an experimental simulation of my memories. Specifically, I delve into their virtual existence, interrogating rituals of filmic nostalgia and remembrance. Through my film, I argue that when faced with the death of a loved one, our conception of them becomes a site onto which we map ourselves. Myriad unrealized existences are produced in memory, many of which project ourselves into the forefront and play a vital role in our construction of self. To reach this conclusion, I kept the following questions in mind: what is our responsibility, as audience bearing witness to the vestiges of another’s being, in acts of remembrance? And moreover, as living persons, what may govern the parameters of our remembering and our creative liberty? As it relates to media, how do texts of remembrance influence the way in which we remember and transmit memory? And further, how do these texts transform memory?
Theory and Style
Answering such questions first necessitated a survey of my great grandparents’ present existence—their virtual existence in my mind. When I was a child, my great grandmother Mimi was my best friend. I spent countless hours at her side, building forts under the dining room table, riding in the back of her Jaguar, and sleeping soundly in the racecar bed at the foot of her own. She loved leopard print and the color gold, and wore a rainbow of velour tracksuits. Mimi suffered a fatal brain aneurysm when I was seven years old. I remember not crying and not wondering why, but feeling a numbness that I could not make sense of. In the ensuing years, her passing haunted me in ways that never reached me in the actual moment. My great grandfather Kent was a reserved man who loved Mimi dearly. He was a banker by profession and as frugal as he was kind. He always sported a newsboy cap, and I vividly remember the shape of his clip-on sunglasses. Kent passed February before last, and with his death, I experienced a similar pause of grief. When he died, I, despite my desperate wanting to, could not cry. The same numbness stayed with me for some time. Although I have apprehended my great grandparents’ passings, their absence still feels incredibly unresolved. In the wake of their deaths, amongst the traces of their life together, I found that, in actuality, I knew very little about them. Their compulsive privacy left me with a limited, tampered conception of their histories, of which I made sense with mental visualizations and gap-filling fantasies. Posthumous existence lacks self-definition in that it is sculpted by its audience. Memory has perfected my great grandparents’ existence, now an unattainable vision that I aim to animate in my film.
My great grandparents exist in a state that is neither real nor unreal, determined nor free, possible nor impossible. The collective works of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Marcel Proust describe this subjective existence as the “virtual” (Pearson 1112, 1113). Like my own complex relation to my great grandparent’s deaths, the virtual lacks resolution, existing on “the cusp of the imagination” while being neither fact nor fiction (King 161). For both Bergson and Deleuze, the past and present are in “virtual coexistence,” meaning that each moment of the present simultaneously produces a new moment of the past. Keith Ansell Pearson writes in The Reality of the Virtual: Bergson and Deleuze, that:
“with two given states of the same person—the earlier that we remember, the present that we experience—the impression of aging from one to the other has the effect of pushing the earlier moment into a remote, improbable past…” (1127).
With this understanding, my experience of my great grandparents’ present absence—in abandoned objects, newly unoccupied spaces, and pictures and video—produces an ever-evolving, increasingly “improbable” past. I propose, however, that this evolving past is constantly rewritten in memory. The result is a partially obscured image of my great grandparents, a rendering perfected by the omission and fabrication of detail (Pearson 1118). Thus, in some sense, the virtual embodies an existential purgatory, originating in the vestiges of the past and transforming them into something new that inevitably implicates present consciousness.
I would like to expand upon the idea of my perfected recollection, specifically that of my great grandmother. In memory, I have canonized Mimi alongside the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland, or Marlene Dietrich; I would be remiss to not identify the blatant queer sensibility that underlies this project. In Virtual Memory: Time-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality, Homay King writes:
“the virtual is… the site of becoming or being-in-process. Lévy offers the following related formula: ‘The virtual… is a fecund and powerful mode of being that expands the process of creation.’ Massumi defines the virtual as ‘that which is maximally abstract yet real, whose reality is that of potential… the in-itself of transformation’” (Lévy and Massumi in King, 12).
My great-grandmother was most certainly glamorous in real life, but what the virtual affords is the realization of all the possibilities of femininity without any of the hindrances; it affords a certain “Camp” aesthetic. As Susan Sontag writes in Notes on ‘Camp,’ “Camp” is “the spirit of extravagance” and a “vision of the world in terms of style,” but it is also “failed seriousness” reliant on separation from its subject (in this case, Mimi’s passing) (3, 7, 9). Sontag perhaps says it best when she describes the result of “Camp” as follows:
“Something is good not because it is achieved, but because another kind of truth about the human situation, another experience of what it is to be human—in short, another valid sensibility—is being revealed” (10).
My great grandmother has become a sort of gay icon for myself, and in my film, I aim to transpose and complicate my glamorous recollection of her. The result of this “Camp” rendition is more localized than what Sontag describes, instead revealing “another kind of truth” about my situation and “another valid experience” of myself.
The primary means by which I achieve this goal is the fusion of found material with acted reconstruction, a technique that crescendos toward ultimate glamor at the film’s end. My use of found materials is theoretically informed by Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, where he writes that what a photograph “reproduces to infinity… could never be repeated existentially” (3). He goes on to suggest that a photograph, in housing its referent, aims to be as clear as a sign (Barthes, 6). A photograph, however, can never achieve this aspiration, as the subject’s knowledge of the photograph forces them to pose, to make “another body,” to become an object (Barthes, 10). I would argue that Barthes’ examination parallels Deleuze’s conception of virtual memory, where the subject becomes a malleable idea. Like a photo, memory always tries to accurately capture its subject, but in never being its subject, it always fails to do so (Barthes, 12). My use of found materials then functions to undermine their illusory objectivity, presenting them rather as snapshots that inspire virtual becomings.
Furthermore, Laura Marks’s theory of haptic visuality informs the ways in which I combine found material with acted reconstruction. Haptic visuality is a relationship between screen and viewer that results in a physiological response. In “Loving a Disappearing Image” from Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Marks asks what the consequences are for “images of death” when “the locus of identification and subjectivity is shifted from the human figure [—both pictured and viewing—] to an image dispersed across the surface of the screen” (91). In Marks’s exploration, she studies this dispersal in physically decaying film, paying particular interest to the audiences’ haptic viewership and subsequent loss of self. Working on a digital platform, I metaphorize this decay and dispersal through in-frame juxtapositions, superimpositions, and unfocused footage. These techniques are not meant to incite a loss of self, as is the case in Marks’s text, but rather a loss of certainty and permanence.
In the application of in-frame juxtaposition, I drew inspiration from the Nyles Lannon Music Video Series by Tarnation director Jonathan Caouette. In these videos, Caouette splits the screen into two component parts, a composition that necessitates one image always chase the other. Like memory, however, Caouette’s images never quite reach what they chase. I employ a similar technique, but my division of the screen takes on a more geometric appearance, using shapes that evoke a certain nostalgia for the past. My inspirations include 60s mod aesthetics and the clean lines of mid-century design.
In terms of superimposition, I was inspired by Janice Tanaka’s Memories from the Dept. of Amnesia as well as Agnès Varda and JR’s Faces Places. In Memories, Tanaka layers photos and their component negatives, along with text and non-diegetic sound, to create a dissected subject simultaneously viewed from multiple perspectives. I liken the effect to early-20th-century cubism. Moreover, in Faces Places, the artists preserve histories in photographs, but elicit entirely new histories by literally pasting them onto the landscape. I view my personal process as a combination of these two approaches. Like Tanaka, I evoke multiple perspectives by overlaying acted reconstruction with its component memory (normally represented with found material). Like Varda and JR, however, my layers—which also consist of found sound, non-diegetic music, and filmic collage—are meant to write a new disorienting history. While these layers initially connect in tone or subject, by the end, their discordance represents a breakdown of coherent cinematic remembering, best represented in my use of unfocused footage.
Catherine Opie’s 700 Nimes Road 2010–11, a portfolio of fifty photographs taken in Elizabeth Taylor’s home in the months leading up to and after her death, inspired this last visual motif. I encountered Opie’s striking exhibit at the Tate Modern in London. Her fuzzy images, which feature a radical juxtaposition of wealth and aging, paint a haptic visual of Taylor without ever picturing the icon herself. Together, these techniques are meant to capture my great grandparents’ virtual existence—all the possibilities within my memory.
Methodology
When it came to realizing my project, I approached the process with two minds. On one hand, I value a well-researched and meticulously thought out project plan. I enjoy films that challenge convention, force their audience to question what they take as given, and moreover unveil those perplexing aspects of our lives that we often overlook. These qualities, however, are not the product of mere contrarianism; they are the result of a film that is in conversation with its context, medium, and the scholarship that surrounds it. On another hand, however, I also cherish the beauty that can arise in organic and spontaneous moments behind or in front of the camera. The alluring flicker of light caught during a test shot; the uncontrived smile just after the cut of a scene; the meticulous sequence that fails as planned, but in its attempt, creates something unexpected and gorgeous. I believe that a project with meaningful aspirations is constantly engaged with its theoretical underpinnings, even in those instances that are not predetermined. A film’s best moments can be produced in the absence of control; therefore, I planned my project in a fashion that allowed for experimentation and the pursuit of in-the-moment inspiration. I accomplished filming early on and allocated considerable time for post-production. Throughout both stages, I found that my project changed significantly, growing from a pure retrospective on my great-grandparents into an exploration of self.
I treated the month of September as time to develop the theoretical basis for my project; in specific, I sought a term to describe my great-grandparents’ puzzling existence in memory. As I discussed in the prior section, the concept of the virtual soon became the best means of conceptualizing this existence, but from that point forward, I focused on how to capture something that is neither “real nor unreal.” Enlightened by Barthes’ Camera Lucida, I found that my planned use of found materials already embodied the virtual in the sense that a photograph or video, in housing its referent, could never be as objective as its medium proclaims (3,6). To synthesize and expand upon this concept in my filmed footage, I decided to shoot the acted reconstruction of my great grandparents in a style that mirrored home video. I determined that achieving this aesthetic would require the use of a handheld or active camera that was not hidden, but rather recognized by its subjects, and by proxy, the viewer. From a theoretical standpoint, I wanted the reconstruction to grasp at the same reality as Barthes’s photographs, but in being a contrived amalgamation of memories, artifacts, and fantasy, also internalize its inability to reach that reality. To make this awareness readily apparent, I planned to have the camera's presence be noticeable, which would mirror my own presence and position me as a witness to my perfected memories. This collision of memory and its beholder would then force the viewer to recognize their mediating role in remembrance, and as it relates to the larger scope of this project, directorial mediation in filmic acts of remembrance.
With a strong sense of the theory guiding my project and a conception of what I wanted my footage to accomplish, I moved into October where I finished the preparations for filming as well as the filming itself. At the start of the month, my main task was storyboarding and building a shot list. I knew that I would be chasing the aforementioned home video aesthetic and that I would also employ in-frame juxtaposition, superimposition, and unfocused imagery. In-frame juxtaposition and superimposition would be accomplished in post-production, but to avoid an overly cluttered visual field, I planned to shoot from multiple angles, different measures of closeness, and different points of focus; in some cases, I had to plan sequences around the uncontrollable framing of found materials. The goal of these motifs was to impart feelings of presence and absence through their dispersal of my constructed images, a technique directly informed by Marks's work in Touch (91). The last motif of unfocused imagery was accomplished partially in post, but primarily by manually adjusting the camera’s focus. The only instances where I adjust focus in post are to smooth over the transition to the rather impressionistic ending of my film, or to add a slight vintage feel that again asserts mediation in its artificially nostalgic aesthetic. Throughout filming, I wanted control over the manipulation of images in the final product, yet I had to keep in mind that this control would always be limited by the nature of the materials I was working with—a point that seemed to parallel the very theory that informs this project.
When I actually started filming, my evolving relationship to the project forced some deviations from the way in which I originally planned to capture certain scenes or sequences. In these unforeseen instances, I did my best to understand what was informing my new direction within the context of the theory underpinning my project. This continual evaluation helped me better conceive of my stylistic choices, but more importantly, comprehend the ways in which my project was revealing aspects of self. For example, when I began the first shoot for the acted reconstruction, I realized that my initial plan did not adequately consider the mental framing of my memories. I began production with the driving sequence, which is shot mainly from the backseat of my great grandparents’ Jaguar. I always envisioned the sequence from the backseat, so when I placed a GoPro on the rear windshield, I was disappointed in its inability to capture the effect I desired. I then opted to have my cameraman sit in the backseat and hold the camera by hand. When I considered this decision in light of my research on the virtual, I realized that this vantage point mirrors my childhood perspective from the backseat, looking slightly up and forward. This subjective perspective continues the assertion of my own presence in the end of the acted reconstruction, but does so in a more subtle manner than the earlier ‘posing’ scenes.
The ‘posing’ scenes, shot after the driving sequence, depict my great grandparents’ in a fashion that resonates with Bergson’s understanding of representation:
“…in order to pass from matter to perception or from the objective to the subjective, it is not necessary to add anything but, on the contrary, only that something be subtracted. In other words, consciousness functions not by throwing more light on an object but by obscuring some of its aspects” (Pearson 1118).
What we do see in the acted reconstruction are details of a larger whole—elements of an existence beyond the confines of the screen. To reiterate, Pearson proposes that the always expanding disconnect between the present and that which came before it produces an increasingly “remote, improbable past” (1127). In the acted reconstruction, my actual memories of my great grandparents are manipulated and stylized; the selected and omitted details create a curated image, but one that has the feeling of reality without ever reaching it. My great grandparents often appear as if they are waiting for a photo to be taken; they look right into the camera, and I made a point to hold shots for just over what feels natural, evoking a sense of their performance. This home video aesthetic, which nurtures a personal relationship between the camera and its subjects, reveals aspects of self in my great grandparents’ response to my presence.
The acted reconstruction also intentionally flows between a feeling of voyeurism and intimacy. In specific, the packing scene, which feels initially quite private, changes in tone with the introduction of intense, portrait-like close-ups of my great grandmother. These close-ups were initially tests for exposure, but when I introduced them to the film’s timeline, I saw an opportunity to further engage with Barthes’s theory as well the theory of virtuality. This shift critiques traditional methods of filmic remembering that veil subjective reconstruction with an experience of unencumbered, objective viewing. This perceptual objectivity can never be real, so I instead embrace subjectivity in my own recollection. My overall methodology, as it related to the actual filming process relied on the interrelation of careful planning and prompted serendipity, which together, helped me resist conventional rituals of remembrance and achieve the feeling of existential suspension that I desired.
I reserved the end of October and all of November for my editing process as I anticipated trial and error. The majority of this time was actually used to construct the collage sequence that takes up the first half of my film. This sequence takes place at my great grandparents’ home, and like Varda and JR’s Faces Places, pastes images of my memories onto the present. The collage also introduces elements completely exterior to my own experience, like photos of my great grandparents taken well before my birth. Much of the experimentation in this section was with the mid-century style of the shapes, which are meant to comment on my nostalgic recollection for a past I can only partially know. This motif again connects to the virtual production of an improbable past in memory. The boundaries between visuals are also rather stark in this beginning sequence, which varies from the second half of the film and its use of the aforementioned motifs of in-frame juxtaposition, superimposition, and unfocused imagery. These differing illustrations of my virtual memory present a dyad that exists between the real and unreal: the collage that looks constructed, but is in part real, and the acted reconstruction that looks authentic, but is in large part unreal.
Reflection
Through the course of the semester, my project underwent significant change, eventually turning into a film I could not have conceived of just a few months earlier. As I have stated, at the end of the summer, I felt a strong urge to finally face unresolved feelings about my great grandparents’ deaths. These feelings, however, were both my own and those of my mother and grandmother, pictured at the beginning of my film. My family had to deal with the confusing simultaneity of my great grandparents’ presence and absence in the aftermath of their deaths. My great grandparents’ home felt as if they were still there; Kent had left Mimi’s belonging’s untouched after her death in 2005 and now his, too, were just as he left them. The house in which I had spent countless hours of my childhood looked the same, yet felt profoundly different. My family came across so many of their belongings—photographs, clothes, souvenirs—that were imbued with meaning; others, however, I had never seen before. Like the artifacts I knew of, these unplaceable items were signifiers of my great grandparents’ life together, yet they signified parts of that life I knew nothing about. They were open to interpretation, or rather, presented myriad possibilities. Imagining how these artifacts fit into my great grandparents’ lives was a curious experience, that in the process, showed me a great deal about my self—my own inclinations, sensibilities, and values. Although I still have questions about my great grandparents that I will likely never be able to answer, I am now content with that ambiguity—in fact, I think there is something undoubtedly beautiful about the liberties it gives my remembrance of Mimi and Kent.
Initially, I viewed my project as a sort of attempt to capture my great grandparents’ presence in absence, painting a picture of their lives with the now-abandoned space they had occupied most. As I soon found out, however, it was difficult to connect my own memories to the vestiges of their existence. As I came to discover, my memories only represented a small snapshot of my great grandparents’ lives, and at times, even conflicted with actuality. I have unconsciously embellished my memories to dispel the discomfort of not-knowing, but in the process, perfected and aestheticized my great grandparents. My memories are a fusion of reality, visualizations, and make-believe, but their shared aspirations for glamour are how I have always seen Mimi and Kent. Recognizing that my recollection was neither real nor unreal, but virtual, was the breakthrough moment for my project; Bergson, Deleuze, and Proust’s virtual theory allowed me to delve into Mimi and Kent’s present existence in a way I had never been able to before. What I uncovered about their lives and my own necessitated a change in the direction of my project. My film’s evolution into a semi-constructed retrospective was a way to respond to these discoveries and self-consciously animate my conception of Mimi and Kent.
My grandmother Daria (who I have called Gigi since a young age) was Mimi and Kent’s only child, and after their passings, had the weight of their lives thrust upon her. She moved back to California a few years before Mimi’s death and she cared for Kent during his last years of life. After Kent’s passing, she was tasked with selling her parent’s home of almost fifty years; with that came the burden of sorting through their most intimate belongings, many of which highlighted a painful absence. Gigi is one of the strongest people that I know, but losing her parents took an emotional and physical toll. The transition from childhood to adulthood is most certainly marked by the strange phenomenon of worrying about your elders, feeling as though you now need to take care of those people who have always taken care of you. I know Gigi felt this way about Mimi and Kent, and that my mother Monique feels this way about Gigi. I know that I feel this way about them both. Although my film means a great deal to me, it also means a great deal to my mother and grandmother, a consideration that was both inspiring and daunting. In Mimi and Kent’s absence, I often had to turn to them for explanations; in many ways, my film captures a collective recollection, given that my mother and grandmother’s memories have informed my own. Elements of self are inevitably projected into my film’s reconstruction, but as I found through my process, they are not limited to just myself.
This aspect of my project became especially apparent as I sorted through my great grandparents’ belongings, primarily those found in the closet that appears at the end of the first sequence. Some of these items, like a handbag or a dress, I could find in photos; they had a loose context, like a cruise in 1955 for example. For others, however, I had to turn to Gigi or my mom. Some of the items were present in their memories, or if not, they could assume their significance. Their recollections became a new form of invaluable found material. When items or photos were especially old, it was interesting to have a complete absence of knowledge amongst the three of us; what we imagined together was a collective vision, but one that was admittedly, at best, adjacent to truth. Many of my great grandparents’ belongings appear in my film as costuming or props, and while some find clarification in the found photos at the beginning of my film, others animate the idealizations of my memories. For example, not one of us could remember my great-grandmother wearing the magenta gown at the end of the acted reconstruction; despite this, I still saw the dress as being emblematic of Mimi’s grace, beauty, and strength—her unhindered virtual existence. As materials were uncovered, I faced new conundrums, conflicts, and inspirations, all of which contributed to a project that was, at times, frustratingly unclear. The easy part of my project was looking at these belongings and imagining the possibilities of existence within the virtual; the difficult part was taking those possibilities, and from them, distilling a coherent illustration that best conveyed my great grandparents’ virtual existence within my mind.
My research into Mimi and Kent’s lives was something that could have only happened in their absence as both of them were fiercely private, even from family. I remember as a child, I had to complete an interview with a family member as a homework assignment; all of my questions for Kent about his and Mimi’s life together were met with a playful, “none of your business.” It seemed as though Kent had somehow ensured that it would stay none of my business as well. What I was able to garner in the past months about their lives still seems incredibly superficial, and my questions remain largely unanswered. I found that my struggles highlight the folly of traditional filmic remembering, which portrays the past as objective and comprehensible, giving the viewer an omnipresent but detached vantage point. The truth is, the past, especially that of a single person, is subjective and constantly rewritten in our personal and collective memories. Again, with each moment of the present, a new moment of the past is written—a past that implicates present consciousness. Becoming comfortable with ambiguity was necessary for this project and worked toward its academic goal of interrogating rituals of filmic nostalgia and remembrance. With that said, I understand our desire—our need—for clarity. Although I had decided to focus on Mimi and Kent’s virtual existence early on, I think it is in my nature to always seek confirmation and resolution, which I would posit are both antithetical to the virtual. This fruitless desire is mirrored in my film, where one can see both the illusion of actuality and the acceptance of uncertainty. My film deals directly with remembrance, but it frames it as a result of forgetfulness, modification, and imagination.
As a whole, I would say that I avoided any catastrophic setbacks during the production and post processes, but small complications most certainly wearied me. Sorting through found footage proved to be more time consuming and less beneficial than I had originally expected. I was disappointed, confused, and saddened by lapses in my memory. I was very young in a great deal of the footage and could not place what I was seeing within my own recollection—much of the footage felt out of place in my film. My difficulty finding videos that coincided with my memories possibly speaks to the very nature of my affected recollection, and moreover, the idea of the virtual. After completing the introduction sequence, I decided that pulling found sound from these videos would be their best application, as contrasting the youthful image of my great grandparents with their aged voices created a cohesive yet disparate rendering, breaking down the dialectic of old and young. Moreover, those sections of audio that I do use audibly depict my great grandparents talking to or about me. In the film, however, this audio presents as if they are talking about their own images. At the end in particular, my great grandmother, over an image of her reconstructed self, says “so sweet… that does look like a card… so content.” I feel as though this combination of materials adds over tonal meaning to my project in its reference to both my younger self and my current self imbedded in these depictions of Mimi and Kent. I added this choice of found sound in the last days of post-production and have thus chosen to address it here during my reflection. It was not planned, but personally, I find that it synthesizes the project, critiquing the overly lucid tendencies of traditional filmic remembering while, perhaps more importantly, revealing a forgotten element of my remembering.
Turning to the questions I posed at the beginning of this project, I do want to offer my personal conclusion and less so a definite answer. In response, I turn to one of my most important lessons from my media studies education: awareness is imperative. What I mean by this, at least in this context, is that in terms of our remembering, the only responsibility we hold is to ourselves. Memory is incredibly personal, and as this process showed me, shaped by our understanding of self. We see pictures and videos of loved ones, we hold their belongings, we sift through our own recollection. What we find in these acts of remembrance—these artifacts of another’s lived existence—is ourselves, what we understand to be our most intimate and essential constructions of self, but also what we aspire to be. Sometimes, in reality, those aspirations are out of reach, but not so in the virtual. Being aware of the fact that our memories are far from truth should not corrupt our relation to them, but rather allow us to recognize our memories as virtual possibilities. All That Glitters Is Gold is the interstice between real and unreal. It is my homage to my great grandparents, to Mimi and Kent. It is my aspiration for a life as rich and meaningful as I hold theirs to have been. It is their virtual existence as I lovingly remember it.
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