Haunted by last season's video letters: amateur films performing spectrality

Lisa Stuckey

This is an assemblage using the film 'Four Siblings' as a basis to reflect on the notion of the artist as analyst in connection with amateurish practices. These are positioned as performative, as they co-create the family system. The video letters, shot on 8 mm and Super 8 films, were sent from my grandmother, who had emigrated to the United States after the Austrian State Treaty in 1955, to my great-grandmother, in Vienna, where the films were developed and watched. During that time three-quarters of all amateur film-makers were men. In the course of 'Four Siblings' the beautiful images are contrasted with issues of violence, rivalry, and ambivalence. 'Haunted by last season’s video letters: amateur films performing spectrality' is an attempt poetically to map non-linear memory. Spectrality, in its simultaneous presence and absence, is introduced to film media as soon as an archive is set up.

Haunted by last season’s video letters

amateur films performing spectrality

by Lisa Stuckey

REFERENCES

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Binotto, Johannes. 2014. ‘There Are No Subbasements: Zur Oberflächlichkeit von Film, Erinnerung und Unbewusstem’, in Ute Holl and Matthias Wittmann (eds), Memoryscapes: Filmformen der Erinnerung (Zürich: Diaphanes), pp. 181–98

Blanco, María del Pilar, and Esther Peeren. 2013. ‘Introduction: Conceptualizing Spectralities’, in María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (eds), The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (London: Bloomsbury Publishing), pp. 1–28

Braidotti, Rosi. 2011. Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti (New York: Columbia University Press)

———. 2013. The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press)

Carson, Juli. 2007. ‘Exile of the Imaginary: Politics/Aesthetics/Love’, in Juli Carson (ed.), Exil des Imaginären: Politik, Ästhetik, Liebe / Exile of the Imaginary: Politics, Aesthetics, Love, exhibition catalogue (Vienna: Generali Foundation; Cologne: Walther König), pp. 105–21

Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge)

———. 1995. ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, trans. by Eric Prenowitz, Diacritics, 25.2: 9–

Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Stiegler. 2013. ‘Spectrographies’, trans. by Jennifer Bajorek, in María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (eds), The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (London: Bloomsbury Publishing), pp. 37–51

Elsaesser, Thomas. 2016. ‘Die Geschichte, das Obsolete und der found-footage-Film’, in Eva Hohenberger and Katrin Mundt (eds), Ortsbestimmungen: Das Dokumentarische zwischen Kino und Kunst (Berlin: Vorwerk 8), pp. 135–55

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START PAGE

INTRODUCTION – HAUNTOLOGY OR OF BEING HAUNTED BY VIDEO LETTERS

FILM & SYNOPSIS Four Siblings

A BIOGRAPHIC ENGAGEMENT WITH A LIVING ARCHIVE

THE UNCONSCIOUS ON THE FILMIC SURFACE

AMATEURISM AS AGENTIALITY

REFERENCES / APPENDIX

APPENDIX

⇒ Mail correspondence between C. and me: ‘M. and I have certainly analysed more than S. and A., but therefore we are also more uncomfortable.’

⇒ Mail-correspondence between S. and me: ‘Finally, a curiosity (possibly for technical reasons): at first I believed that we had all been synchronised by different speakers, until I slowly began to recognise my own voice, but actually only because I could remember my statements.’

M.: At that time Austria was a bit of a yawn, really, the prospects were grey. One wanted to get the hell out.

C.: The fact that I exhibited this ‘Ursuline’ existence so badly had to do with the fact that I had an incredible conflict with school. I felt I was not in the right place. And I was not noble. To me, my father as a retired military was not representable. I felt extremely guilty in front of him so that I actually despised him for a long time. But I couldn’t talk to him about that, neither to my mother. I was also teased because of him; they said, ‘so, what’s your father’s’ name’? Marshall was his name. Well, what was he? Was he a Marshal? And to be American at St. Ursula was not easy either, as they were happy when I didn’t speak.
The British English was the elegant, the elitist English, and everything else was, For God’s sake, oh my god. Therefore, I particularly oversubscribed it, with scarf, pearl necklace, and plucked eyebrows. That was a kind of overcompensation.

⇒ Mail correspondence between S. and me: ‘The big difference of C.’s opinion to mine (as a teenager and later) in this respect was that I was tremendously proud of our father and thought of him as a “war hero”, who had survived World War 2 (even if he, as I found out later, suffered from a syndrome called “survivor's guilt”).’

A / C / M / S

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