Journey to the South

Journey to the South (50 minutes) is a documentary essay film.

My research questions are:
• How may an essay film meaningfully mediate collective memory of a traumatic event?
• How may hybrid strategies deployed in an experimental essay film engage with the cinematic representation of memory, place and subjectivities?
• How does the use of multiple voice-overs add complexity of meaning to the essay film’s discourse.

The film is an essay in memory and place, located in Castellar, a small medieval mountain village near the French Riviera. In the cinematic mediation of a collective memory the essay film may usefully cross tenses between the past and present to create the layered narrative-structure of a poem rather than a linear narrative. It may also portray, self-reflexively, “meditations on, the world […] at once confessional, and investigative of both the world and the enunciating self” (Rascaroli, 2009). In many villages today collective memories in a village threatened with dispersal may create an “idyllic re-inscription” of the lost way of life. (Bakhtin, 1981). In Castellar a yearning for the past by descendants of the original, close-knit families, or ‘clans’, is exemplified through a desire to hunt wild boar. However, this nostalgia for a lost past eventually led to violence, and in 1991, the murder of an idealistic outsider, the village shepherd. Despite arrests of villagers and three trials nobody was convicted and a pall of silence hangs over the village. My aim was to mediate the effect of this silence through observational footage of daily lives, archive footage and interviews−and since memory itself cannot be brought to the camera, cinematic strategies that evoke the past as a continuing present; the voice-overs of three semi-fictionalised characters; the short-story writer Katherine Mansfield; the murdered shepherd; and me. The overall spectatorial impact of the films is a powerful and poetic evocation of collective memory and contested identities.