Blur Diary

How do we tell the stories of our families? Of our own becoming? When does a document fail to convey the embodied memories from our past? In these three diary films and cinepoems from Sloan Asakura, Julia Anna Morrison, and Heather Quinn, each filmmaker grapples with home videos, archival footage, and family lore in an attempt to generate an understanding of the histories that have informed their present identities. But each exploration and inquiry ultimately reveals the impossibility of such an endeavor – archives hide as much as they reveal, and memories are both fleeting and malleable. Obsolete technologies cannot resurrect the ghosts we seek to memorialize. Words cannot capture the essences of those we’ve loved – and lost. 

Culled from various home videos from the early aughts, Morrison’s Blur Diary is an unscripted meditation on grief and memory. As she rewatches old videos of her brother, who died when she was a child, Morrison reflects, “It’s not really him, I realize,” but a mediated figure in motion, forever animated by the tapes as they’re rewound and replayed. Yet, with each subsequent viewing, the images onscreen further deteriorate. This outdated technology cannot ultimately revivify her brother, or his memory. Rather, the footage mediates “The memories [that] live in my body.” Morrison’s unrehearsed reflections make Blur Diary all the more emotionally rich and deeply felt. Each time Morrison clears her throat, pauses, or trails off gestures towards the inexpressible. Memory is something we circle over and over but can never again touch.   

–Hannah Bonner, Video Editor