Our film, Half Forgotten: Four Essays on Memory or Something Along Those Lines, focuses on the act and function of remembering, in particular how a memory, or even lack of, can warrant a different feeling or emotion now as compared to the time the artifact was created. We were inspired by the prompt “I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.” (Sans Soleil 1983). This prompt formed the foundation of our film as we explored the idea that remembering events and feelings from our childhood are built on only fragments in our minds, as opposed to well rounded memories. It is difficult to isolate real memories from ones we have unknowingly altered for our own benefit. To think upon memories is very different from looking upon old photographs and home videos, as they depict the event or emotion captured as it was seen by the person on the other side of the lens, not particularly the person subject to the image. This idea invoked the understanding that tangible memories might not be as authentic as we once hoped, that without trying, we as individuals might have slightly altered our emotion or even movements once we recognised the presence of a camera. We wanted to explore this further in our film by narrating our own sequences with regard to how we personally remember them juxtaposed to the memory flashed across the screen.
We acknowledge that the process of looking upon memories is a very individual experience, as no two people remember something in the exact same way. With this thought heavily in mind, we kept the development of each of our memory sequences very exclusive to the individual creating it. This was to maintain independence in each of our parts of the film and to ensure that no one would influence or shape another person’s memory. Although we kept to our own whilst creating our autonomous films, once they came together we found that despite our separate upbringings, similar patterns of thought were conjured. We felt as though they became connected in the sense that we all looked upon our own memories as if we were merely a spectator as opposed to being the person in the photograph. Recognising that four different films depicting their own stylistic and visual patterns needed to become a coherent film, we used both sound and titles to create an on-flow of memories that would create a comprehensible sequence that we hope will reside with the audience.