designs of survival

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.  

“What one is and what one becomes,” begins Asakura’s cinepoem designs of survival, “feels always to be the question.” Asakura overlays a black and white photograph of a young girl clutching a dog with archival footage of nature scenes and birds of prey from 1938. The moving images of various animals efface the girl’s visage in the portrait, a formal choice that connotes some kind of violence or threat. “There are days in your childhood where you may be safe,” Asakura intones as the footage cuts to emaciated birds nesting in dirt. Even if later shots showcase the birds fluffy and full-feathered, the juxtaposition of what is said with what is initially seen unsettles any initial sense of safety. Throughout Asakura’s film, the girl’s portrait is repeatedly concealed by moving images. The photograph ultimately becomes a troubled site of uncertainty and elliptical inquiry.   

–Hannah Bonner, Video Editor