Squares

Work-in-progress of a research project exploring how cinema can influence collective and individual memories through films shot within the same urban context.

One representative location – a central public area in a big city – is dissected into 85 scenes extracted from 18 selected cult feature movies produced between 1943 and 2003. Through these 60 years, what kind of images and sounds are recognized, memorized… mesmerized? Chronologically and progressively interlaced, exactly 1.940 fragmented cuts correlate with the spatial resolution – both of the public square(s) and of the screen(s).

The perceptions of a public square are as diverse as perceptions of images containing other types of squares, called pixels. These small entities encompass buildings and streets, silhouettes of people and their faces, camera or car movements, colors and shapes depicting time. The soundscape includes echoes of voices, songs, background music, urban noise.

None of the audiovisual impressions is clear enough, but places always embody their accumulated pasts. Ghosts stay and communicate with each other. Repetitive patterns of situations, viewpoints, and notable comedians emphasize glitchy flashbacks. Pierre Nora’s concept of a “lieu de mémoire” (space of memory) can therefore be applied to any type of space, such as public squares. Thus, the visual ambiguity of abstraction and deliberate indistinctness leads us to other places.

Finally, the decomposed frames question our attitude towards copyrights and access to film heritage, involving digitalization processes and leading to a lower quality, shortage of memory in computers or servers, as well as discontinuous historical discourses.