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The texts from which these films would emanate were never understood as scripts. That first step, in which I tried to put a memory onto paper, was simply a research process towards the construction of a memory. In this sense, I was never looking to make a literal adaptation of the memories that I wrote down. So, without a script, dialogues or a clear storyline, how could I materialize these memories on video?
When I brought these memories back into my conscience, there was never a clear angle from which the scene took place. My memory´s eye was able to move across the imaginary locations without the need to be anchored to any particular point in space. So, how to choose the frames and the type of shots I would employ in this film? In other words: Isn´t the act of deciding what to show and what to hide the fundamental operation of memory? Which events do we decide are important to our narrative and which elements are disposable? This is mainly a question of remembering and forgetting.
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Without the frame, understood as an operation that selects, emphasizes and hides elements, how can we form a sense of narrative?
PERFORMING A MEMORY
Very few dialogues remained in my memories. Sometimes I remembered the overall theme of a conversation, some small snippets of actual words, sometimes I just remembered that there was a conversation but I couldn´t say at all what was it about or any specific word that was said. In this way, I knew I couldn´t write dialogues for my characters. At the same time, I had a 7-year-old who had never acted in his life and who was obviously uncomfortable in front of the camera.
My idea was to make this father and son re-live the same conditions under which the original event took place so that, through their real reaction to the situation, a memory could arise. Where there were gaps in my memory, I would use this simulacrum as a tool to remember, to recover these things that had disappeared from my memory.
I kept my actors completely ignorant about what was going to happen in the film. I told them that we would travel together and build the scenes in the moment. My idea was to make this father and son re-live the same conditions in which the original event took place so that, through their real reaction to the situation, a memory could arise. Where there were gaps in my memory, I would use this simulacrum as a tool to remember, to recover these things that disappeared from my memory.
The scenes seem to be suspended in time, devoid of the pressure of narrative or entropy. And yet, they are always confined by the boundaries of the frame, of this reality that, as pure and as mundane as it may seem, is only a construction, a still life, a representation of life.
What are the characters doing in this wasteland? What are their goals and motivations? What do the characters want? All of these answers had been erased from my memory and, in this sense, it would be best to leave them unanswered in the film. I just gave them the information that I remembered and I asked Ulises (the father) to build the scene from these small fragments of lost time.
The result of this method are a series of scenes that depart greatly from what a traditional mise-en-scène looks like. My characters drift all of the time within their actions and words, they show no clear direction, no motivation, no over-arching conflict, they speak but their words have no weight. At the same time, a lot of questions remain open: what happened first? What are the characters doing in this place? What is the intention of this scene? They have a life-like quality that departs from fiction and yet it is only as life-like as a memory can be.
At the same time, looking back at the footage, I would find that the scenes occupied an ambiguous position in terms of “how true they were”. Did things happen this way? I´m not sure but they might as well have happened like this. The boundaries between reality and fiction, memory and imagination seemed to blur.
In that sense, what would the difference between memory and imagination be?
