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The following
is from 312 No. 4, April 2005 [Download
Publication in .PDF format]:
I
remember…
“Do
you remember? Do you remember that day we spent at the beach?
I know I remember it well. That’s because I have this footage
to look at…”
As the female
narrator calmly speaks, a couple briefly appears onscreen, one
of them wielding a video camera, its gaze fixed upon something
in the distance. This could have been me on Grand Beach last summer
in Manitoba, videotaping the waves lapping the sand. It could
also have been my partner, recording the pelicans moving about
the rocks offshore. It could very well have been any one of us,
members of the Digital Class, predisposed to documenting our life
events through the lenses of an arsenal of cameras. I’ve
been engaged in a selective archiving of my life for as long as
I can remember. My parents captured the earliest moments for me,
before I saw it as necessity. Nearly everyone I know is this way—it’s
part of everyday life. In Tania Sures’s “MIRROR (i’ve
missed you and i’ve been meaning to show you the tape from
that day at the beach last summer)”, I’m reminded
of why.
“I
never did send you a copy, did I? I guess I’ll have to send
you a copy… here, look—maybe it’ll bring you
back to that moment…”
When I don’t
take pictures myself, it’s inevitable that someone else
is for me. These images remind me of the moment itself—how
I was feeling, what I was doing, what I did the rest of the day—and
all the other unrecorded information. Of course, these documents
are always somewhat deceiving due to the human tendency towards
social performance (“Smile!”), but it’s this
unrecorded information I’m really after, everything the
image can’t hold. Sometimes, what’s left ndocumented,
or edited out completely, is what’s most important. In this
way, these images are prompts for memory, and, occasionally, for
nothing at all. They’re stand-ins.
“Why
haven’t you written? You know… you know I’ve
missed you. I’ve been missing you for awhile.”
Sures’s
narrator gets personal with me, a stand-in for her missing person.
I’m the audience, and I receive her question as though it
were addressed to me. As a substitute, I’m free to imagine
the context defining this day at the beach. I never get to see
her missing person, so I become the perpetually offscreen other.
I hear hints of unrecorded information: her frustration with someone
not visible but implied, and, eventually, her insight into the
relationship. Without the narration, it would all seem like just
another home video, the modern equivalent of the vacation slideshow
(“I was here and here and here…”). But there’s
something more to the recording’s appearance as well: it’s
a video of a video, a camera observing a camera observing. I watch
the footage with Sures’s narrator, as though we’re
reviewing it together. I’m involved, even though I’ll
never know the whole story behind this trip. Likewise, I’ll
never know more than the video and the narrator allow me to know
about the implied missing person. I don’t remember because
I wasn’t there, but I know she does—I know she wants
to remember it all in a very specific way. For her, this obviously
wasn’t just another day at the beach.
“I
remember…”
I’m
not really sure how I select what parts of my life to record.
It seems random, but it can’t be—otherwise I’d
tape every moment without any editing, hair combed or not. I record
what I don’t want to forget, while I don’t record
what I want to forget or don’t want anyone to know. So much
slips away without notice, so much escapes our attention. I want
to remember and so does Sures’s narrator. It’s about
how I choose to remember my life. It’s not just vanity or
self-preservation—all that unrecorded information is at
stake.
Mark Prier.
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