This book marks the ten-year anniversary of the project
A Collective
Memory by Azin Feizabadi. The project encompasses five
narrative-driven films, alongside other artworks. Each film has its own
urgency, approach, and point of departure. The films naturally vary in their
subjects, they touch upon stories of migration, uprising, transformation,
revolution, renewal, collapse, defeat, depression, and desire that connect
the life of the artist with those around him. The research materials that
have come up over the course of this project consist, on the one hand, of
concrete historical events and, on the other hand, all the innumerable,
fragmented personal memories spread between pats, presents, and futures that
narrate every-changing stories of how things were, are, and may be.
How to translate the principles of such layered project into a publication?
How to imagine through the films? What stories could be further told? What
happens after leaving the cinema? Where does cinema begin and where does it
end?
After cinema collects narratives, each contributor to the
publication was asked to watch one of the five films in
A Collective
Memory and to write a fiction in response. Or rather, a continuation
of the story, a personal variation, a translation in the literal sense: a
carrying over of the film into one's own language. In many ways, the artist
wanted to let go of his films and see them anew through the eyes of others.
Indeed, to whom belongs a film—to its author, its director, its cast and
crew, its audiences, its critics? The films are showed in the book as images
that flicker across the screen or the page, exploring how the stories of
others intersect with them, together forming unexpected conversations.
Amongst the authors, both Rasha Salti and Shahab Fotouhi have composed
screenplays in response, a decision that engages with the formal backbone of
film itself. In doing so, a transformation has taken place: two very
different films appear, in Salti's case a re-articulation of
The
Negotiation with a new set of characters and a dialogue that updates
itself to address her personal, political concerns, while Fotouhi transposes
the psychological abstraction in
The Epic of the Lovers: Mafia, God and
the Citizens to create concrete personalities that reflect the
contemporary social and emotional tensions hә wishes to portray as a
filmmaker.
Jan Verwoert and Ashkan
Sepahvand have both written short stories that subtly entangle their
respective biographies with that of their fictional narrators. Having grown
up in the Ruhr Valley where
Cryptomnesia takes place, Verwoert's
story takes the small-town, post-War humdrum that characterizes the area's
cities to present us with an uncanny place, possibly in the after math of a
disaster, where not much at all takes place beyond everyday routine—that is,
until something does. For Sepahvand, the transposition from one body to the
next that drives the narration of
Uchronia allows him to imagine
the story of a figure who may or may not be himself in another tịme and
place. For Sarah Rifky, the dreamlike structure of
The Conference of
the Birds inspires her to suggest altogether different dates and
settings within which words generate poetic images.
Running throughout the book, a text by Nanna Heidenreich poses questions and
reflections on the role of media, memory, migration, belonging, and
authorship, a conversational form that simultaneously expresses her critical
perspective as an engaged viewer of film and her long-term familiarity with
A Collective Memory.
