THE GOLDEN CAGE
THE ARCHIVES
The idea of using archival footage sprung from the current situation in which we find ourselves. At the very moment I had planned to return to my mum's for follow up interviews and filming, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the UK with full force. We were placed under lockdown, meaning I could not travel home to visit her.
I imagined the solution to this might be making a 'talking head' style film, but knew this was not the film I wanted to pursue. The quality of the footage from the initial conversation was not consistent enough to build a visual narrative from alone. I did however bring some old family videos home with me from my previous visit as I had planned to transfer them to a hard drive for safe keeping, and considered the use of the footage in the context of my mother's interview.
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I then had the unenviable task of the filmmaking process in trying to transfer archival footage from old DVDs into a workable format. This presented a number of different challenges.
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Many of the home videos in my possession were old, damaged and many of them glitchy. This presented issues in terms of processing them, many of the DVDs struggled to convert, and given my limited access to restoration services, I was forced to remove several DVDs from the process. This meant the content of the footage was limited to a shorter time frame and the events filmed were also incredibly limited.
The second challenge in the conversion process, was in finding consistency in the images. I noticed that my father had recorded some of the films with in-camera settings that in some way distorted the videos. These included colour and effect filters, different frame sizes, and a sporatic use of time codes.
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Though these alterations provided an interesting perspective and opportunity for creativity, I felt that they would potentially inhibit the editing process and the visual consistency of the final film.
Watching the archives was simaultaneously incremental and detrimental to the progress of the film.
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In the process of watching back the home videos I was reminded of a number of events that caused me pain. I was left feeling frustrated by how hidden my fathers behaviour was on camera, he had seemed to have created a "perfect family" archive, in which there were only minor utterances of his anger and control. These films were in such a deep conflict with my own memory and the conversations I had had with my mum, that I began to return to some of the feelings of anxiety and fragility that I had felt as a child, in struggling to navigate significant privilege on the one hand, all the while being unable to explain the terrible fear and dread I felt, on the other.
Watching the archives also gave me a sense of perspective that I hadn't anticipated. Much of the childhood I remember was from later years, when my father's behaviour began to intensify and the trauma I had experienced became quite apparent. In the wake of trauma it is easy to categorise memory in 'blanket statement' terms, and this process has helped me to challenge some of the ways I think about the negative things I experienced, without defining everything as inherently negative
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I had lost a sense of what life was like as a young child. The archives gave me an opportunity to get to know myself in a former state, I was excited to watch myself learn and develop, though still well aware that the footage did not tell much of the story. Memory is transient. Is it a part of the human condition to ruminate on pain and trauma? Can we consider trauma as a mode of learning about social life, rather than as simlpy a pathology of the mind?
This constant negotiation between pain, memory, archive and interview left me at a point of contention over what the film narrative would be, how I could go about telling it, and what I could do to visually represent the complexity of the story.
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This was too much of an extraordinary task.
This process led me to consider how I might portray a very broad message, that still had pertinance and relevance to my story, in simple and unimpsoing terms, without being a mirror-image of the life I had encountered. Taking inspiration from experimental films I have watched during lockdown, I decided to experiment with visual metaphor and consider the ways in which my archival footage could be ustilised to facilitate these metaphors.