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Introduction
Memory I : Fragmented identities
1.1 Presenting the unimaginable
1.3 What kind of immigrant filmmaker can I be?
Memory II Essentialism in diaspora
2.1 What part of me is intresting for you?
2.3 Memories of memories of memories
Memory III : The Swedish project
3.2 Re-thinking Us and the Others
Results
Before I moved to Sweden I wasn’t into nostalgia. The air in diaspora does something to you. At one point I found myself listening to old music. Another time, I asked my mother to send me pictures of my grandparents to put in the bookshelf, a Swedish classic String model, retro from the 1960’s. I migrated as social media became a thing. One of the activities me and the other Iranian twenty-something students often ended up doing at the end of parties was to search YouTube for old Iranian commercials. Ladies with squeaky voices and mini-skirts selling batteries and soap in past that was never for us to see. Look! That’s an old video of Hayedeh! Someone would say and someone else would imitate her coquette dance moves. We consumed the images as if they were old family albums and they gave us a sense of connection, between us and in a time-space logarithm with more dimensions than we could grasp. This yearning for a golden past through old sepia-colored pictures is a collective process of memory production specific for the second generation in diaspora (Malek 2021). We play with the idea of what could have been and re-imagine what was and what was lost. I do this too in my project Fragments, where I use family albums and archive material to trace the history and memories within one family. Nevertheless, I would say my generation, at least many of us who grew up in Iran, have an anti-nostalgia in juxtaposition to this memory of the exiled. The most vivid example of this is the band Bomrani, with their emotional black satire lyrics. In the song “Roozhaye khoobe koodaki” (the happy days of childhood) the lyrics are about a fun games, clapping hands, being joyful, with a child choir sampled singing a famous nurserys rhyme. The images in the music video show children in Iranian school from the 1980’s - a childhood far from happiness. In the same generation we have Marjan Farsad, singer-song-writer from Iran who migrated to North America in 2008. Her most famous song “Khooneye Ma” (Our house) is about longing for the trees in the back yard of the house and to play on the streets. In this image, the childhood has a sweet taste of cherry and pistachios. In the experimental documentary Sans Soleil (1983) it is at one point stated:
We do not remember,
We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.
How can one remember thirst?
How can I remember Iran before the revolution, when I was born after it? How can anyone remember anything, without distorting the image a little bit every time? With the understanding that all meaning is contingent, all processes of meaning-making open ended, every time we remember, we forget the parts that we don’t remember. We tell the story differently. With time and new memories added to the experience, we see it in new ways, remember it, yet remember a new memory. The same event may be described in different ways, by different generations or depending on the narrator. When we work with collective memories and documentations of history, these perspectives and angles shape the entire story. No one experience is more valid or true than the other. As a narrator, or filmmaker, one can only be attentive to these nuances, to know from which horizons voices speak and be able to identify the silences.
Memory work was developed as within feminist studies as a means to overcome the gap between theory and lived experience (Haug 1999). It is a collective process of analyzing individual memories within a group, to make sense of the process through which we become socialized into a collective (Onyx & Small 2001). The inherently collaborative structure of film production enables this work (Hornday 2016). This calls for an active search after voices that are marginalized, both in the official history of Iran and in the host countries, and even within the exiled communities, if there are dominant narratives about the collective. By incorporating more voices, the collective history and memory can be re-framed (Levey 2023)
Drawing on the ideas of memory work, I have reached two strategies to avoid the pitfalls of nostalgia and romanticizing the past. The first is to work with a plurality of narrative perspectives. In Fragments, I have three interviews with persons born in the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s respectively, voice over by a persons born in the 80’s and who lived most of her life in exile, and added to this is archive material for yet another dimension. The concept fusion of horizons refers to when several distinct perspectives may come together (Gadamer 1975). The process of understanding is here defined through a fusion of our past and present horizon. Past and present are thus interdependent and to make sense of a story, a film, and experience, requires to integrate it to the already existing memory and mind. In Gadamers hermeneutic ontology, we do not change our horizon with new understandings, we add to it, modify it in a constant process of experiences (Clark 2008). Hence, my first strategy, to work with multiple voices, enable multiple horizon to be communicated to the audience.
The second strategy has more to do with my self-identification. Coming from a background of journalism, concepts such as objectivity, neutrality and unbiased facts have been ideals in documenting news. Now that I shift to film production in broader sense, the journalistic ideal remains somewhere within me (the horizon hasn’t completely dissolved), although other perspectives challenge these norms. Obviously every story is told from a perspective and nobody can make claims on objective, unbiased facts. The key is to not give in to the pressure to reproduce the established narrative and the single story. One way is to make way for multiple micro stories in every story. But another strategy is to renounce the claim to authenticity and representation. This is not a film supposed to encompass the lived experience of 80 million Iranians in Iran, nor the millions abroad. This is one of innumerable possible ways to remember a story. It’s the narrative I fell for.
In the communication regarding A weekend in Tehran, the producer asked if I planned to make a personal film. At first, I didn’t intend to. My inner journalist had more a historical documentary in mind. However, as I edited the material, it dawned on me that I might loose the film by detaching myself from it. Everything about the topic, the pictures, why it was important to me, had to do with my personal memories. I was there. I couldn’t un-see what I had seen during those days, pretend to be an outsider with a camera who just discovered the music scene in Tehran. Here, I deselected to include a plurality of narratives. We were five guys that had a band and this will be our story. Like in Marjaneh Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis, many in our generation have the plight to not forget, to never forget (Chute 2008). Satrapi’s narration has two voices, her older self in the text and her younger self in the graphics (as well as other characters). This way of approaching the past through the present can be a way to try to separate the two, a diffusion of horizons one might say, which can be an alternative path to both nostalgia and cynicism.
The two strategies, to include multiple voices and a (dif-)fusion of horizons, have the same goal; to enable the audience to access the same story through different angles, to create a thickness or complexity that tickles the memory and creates bonds of empathy.