The Wolf’s Lair: dreams and fragmented memories in a first-person essay film
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Date
24/11/2016Item status
Restricted AccessEmbargo end date
31/12/2100Author
Mourão, Catarina
Metadata
Abstract
This PhD by practice is an attempt to understand personal
archives through filmmaking, and the kind of knowledge we can extract from
them as well as how we can connect them to a wider social and political context.
These questions are the core of my research and are explored in their different
ways through both the film/practice and dissertation.
I have chosen to make a film about my absent grandfather and his lost
relationship with my mother during Fascist Portugal between the 1940s and the
1960s.
Family archives have been largely used in films as a way of documenting
realities, in the same way as any other public archival footage. In this instance,
I tried to explore family and official archives acknowledging their contradictions
and omissions with a view to finding a new “way of knowing” that is more
closely connected to our emotions.
I believe we all own a family archive regardless of its form. I named this
archive “the subjective archive” and in it, I include physical archives such as
paper documents, photographs and films, as well as a more intangible archive,
which includes our memories, the stories we tell and listen to (oral history) and
our dreams. The progression of the film is closely related to my journey as I
become immersed in the story and learn things through many layers of archive
documents.
As a conclusion, I argue that these invisible elements of the subjective
archive contain truth independent of their indexical nature, whereas physical
documents can mislead us.