Passing Down, Frame One

HD Video, 3/4, 10 min 36 sec , color, sound, French with English subtitles, Aix-en-Provence and Berlin, 2007

"The filmwork seeks to reconstruct the story of the artist´s
jewish grandmother during the Second World war by using
audio recordings and visual footage captured in
Aix-en-Provence, France and Berlin, Germany.
During the process of editing the intention
to document a part of individual and family history
extends to a complex investigation of the instability
of memory, the image as a document and
personal identity.
The work explores how memory is constructed and
presents the relationship between witness and
documentarist as a crucial and fragile one,
as the need to provide closure and the longing
for experience by a narrative that allows
personal identification produces fictions of coherence
and papers over gaps.
As the artist realized in the process of filmmaking,
any coherence of narration is based on authority,
order and selectivity. The film as an archive of
selected audio-visual documents always relies on the
source but also on the interpreters system to translate,
categorize and edit.
As any archive it organizes oblivion to the same extend than
personal and collective history.
PASSING DOWN, FRAME ONE makes that graphic.
By doing so, the filmwork reflects the archive itself:
as a dominant, authorized monument in history
as well as an archaeological sculpture of subjective
artefacts that doesn ?t picture historical reality
but re-contextualizes fragments of a past through
the filters of the present.
Hereby, the work draws attention to the impossiblity
of objective documentary representation but highlights
subjectivity and the lack of definition in any
(hi)story as an adventurous encounter of the past
in our present."

Anette Vietze