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

“All happy families are alike

[might be: amateur films often show similar motifs];

each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”

First sentence of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

⇒ ENTER

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