The Wound of Time
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.
Quinn’s The Wound of Time opens with the sound of a VHS tape entering a VCR, sonically drawing our attention to the film’s construction. As the VHS clicks into place, the screen flicks to blue, immediately followed by the title of Quinn’s film. Scenes of children’s birthday parties and Christmas gatherings fill The Wound of Time’s opening before Quinn begins to narrate a moment from years ago when their step-father’s garage “had to be gutted.” Within this storage space hangs Quinn’s dead mother’s old clothes, hairbrushes, pictures, and other “souvenirs of our family.” Various tracking shots, from a car cruising down a road or walking behind a relative, underscore the film’s search for a “trace of the past, echoing through time.” Quinn calls The Wound of Time an essay and this designation is apt. I think of Phillip Lopate’s description: “An essay is…enacting the struggle for truth in full view.” Quinn’s words, coupled with myriad home videos, deftly enacts that struggle with narrative propulsion and eloquence.
–Hannah Bonner, Video Editor
