I feel that in many ways images comprise me, in talking to a friend about making a top 10 films list I jested: “this is who I am” - in all honesty a bit of this is true. The best essay I have read recently has been Susan Howe’s Sorting Facts in which she observes a facet of cinematic memory that I find to be particularly poignant
Some of my earliest memories are film memories confused with facts.
A simple sentiment but a true one nonetheless, with my personally most powerful example being a scene in Paris, Texas in which a young boy and his father share lunch in the bed of a truck parked under a freeway overpass. I must have seen this scene at some point during my childhood and the image had subconsciously stuck with me to the point where, in all of memory’s haze, it was indistinguishable from the image of a lived event. When I unknowingly revisited this scene a few years ago it felt as though two ends of myself had finally met, as if part of me had briefly slid through a fissure in time.
For various reasons, I have as of late entered into a (now recurring) phase in which I feel as if I have fallen out of cadence with the motion of the world - i.e. time marches on, but I am not keeping even with the pace. This is not necessarily a bad feeling, but it is certainly confusing, and unlike the lead character in Powell and Pressburger’s synonymously titled masterpiece: I (do not) Know Where I’m Going! (1945)
For better or for worse I have been losing myself entirely in films (a recent Matrix Trilogy obsession had me in another world for about a week) and most recently in editing this. Digging through old hard drives and iPhoto libraries, revisiting bits of films - Tip: don’t watch the last scene of Bridges of Madison County in a cafe unless public emotional collapse is something you invite. If my sense of time was off before, I’m sure staying up until 6 am obsessively editing for a few nights in a row did nothing to remedy this.
A short while ago, I was concerned with creating abstract images in a way that seamlessly melded various images together into a culmination of disorienting nascent motion. I wanted to do this in such a way that it would be impossible for the viewer to get a spatial bearing on the image, with only its unfolding comprehensible.
With this journal film however, I felt a need not to allow images to blend together, but to form layers. For images & sequences to never fully congeal nor violently clash with one another in montage. Rather, what I would like is for them to bump up against each other, to rest in proximity. In dealing with cinematic memory I feel that it is necessary not only to present “appropriated” material in dialogue with my own footage, but to convey this relationship in a manner similar to the way that these images resound and reverberate within myself.
Here; time, memory, departure & return are what I have tried to elucidate, through the decompartmentalization of the images that account for much of who I am at this moment in time. I put much more work into this journal iteration, as this is an undoubtedly more cohesive personal essay. If the last one was a drawing this one is in fact a journal entry.
○ Isaac Goes https://vimeo.com/isaacgoes