Consuming images is a daily experience. Before learning how to read words, we learn to read pictures. Details are the keys that help us to contextualize, to compose countless notions of the whole from which we now see just the extract contained in a once chosen framing. But are we ever really able to reconstruct past moments depicted in foreign photograph that are someone´s materialized memories? Can we reach a clear undestanding of what should be remembered when already two people looking at a picture see two different picture just as two people with open eyes see two different worlds? Watching a photograph together means to journey on different paths into the past..Still the viewers eyes can meet – in a wine glass on the left bottom corner.
This short film wants to take a look at the limits of photography in reviving bygone moments to the eyes of the stranger who encodes images on the basis of his own memories and undestanding that are more and more interwoven with those of others. We add new layers of meaning to the pictures we consume and create our own truth about situatons we were initially not part of but have become as the present audience. In this way, the strange viewer enriches the unknown photograph just as it enriches him, a process of silent exchange that involves more than just the sense of sight.
Alina Trebbin is a Master´s candidate of Visual and Media Anthropology at Freie Universitat Berlin who researches among other things on the agency of photography. Meet me in memoriam is a short film she contribute to a student film compilation on haptic cinema and transcultueal montage during a Master´s Super8 workshop in 2010.
Director: Alina Trebbin
Production: Florian Walter, Mark Dolling
Language of dialogues: English
Language of subtitles: Germany
Lauching of movie:
Shortcutz Berlin, 2011
EMERGEANDSEE media arts festival Berlin 2011
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher who died at the young age of 57 in 1961. His work on Phenomenology opened up a new realm in continental philosophy. He managedto get philosophers to think of the body as a required and fundamental element of existence, rather than a simple vessel that carries the mind. He understood the importance of its fleshy boundaries and its ability to perceive the world through a string of immediate moments. Hisphilosophies have gone on to shape and inform many social theories used in Anthropology.
The square formerly known as Moszkva tér (Moscow Square) in Budapest is the setting for this short film. Through the documentation of people’s voices and activities, this film underlines how the city’s busiest transport hub is also a space that Budapest’s most profoundly marginalised groups rely on for their livelihood and survival.
