This year’s project Contemporary Past: Moving Images as a Fluid Memory is a continuity of the project Contemporary Past: New Art Forms in Memorial Building (2009), which was dedicated to commemorational projects realized in Europe and elsewhere, especially focusing on the contemporary solutions for suggestive memorials. Although the project Contemporary past: Moving Images as a Fluid Memory continues to deal with the issues of memories and past representations, its main medium is moving images including a vast variety of expressions (fiction film, experimental film, documentary, video installation, etc.).
The main purpose of the project is to open discussions about moving images as a memorial and to explore its power for sculpting in time (Andrej Tarkovsky). The filmmaker describes the work of a film director in such words: “We could define it [essence of the director’s work] as sculpting in time. Just as a sculptor takes a lump of marble, and, inwardly conscious of the features of his finished piece, removes everything that is no part of it – so the film-maker from a ‘lump of time’ made up of an enormous, solid cluster of living facts, cuts off and discards whatever he does not need, leaving only what is to be an element of the finished film, what will prove to be integral to the cinematic image” (1986, 63-64).
As the theme of memory is inseparable from the notion of time, the aim of this project is to place an accent on the concept of cinematic time and to question fluid memory versus ideologically constructed memory. A person often encounters with the ideologically constructed memory which is rooted in propaganda films, historical dramas, epics and other generic films. This kind of memory is usually understood as a resource for the construction of history or the so called meta-narratives. However, there are always marginalized memories or individual narratives evoked by our fluid memory, which ‘leaks in’ the constructed meta-narratives and strides over them. This kind of memory can also be called a short memory, which is made in the present and usually easily forgotten in real life, but the moving images are particularly capable of grasping it. As the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze states: “it is in the present a filmmaker makes a memory, in order to make use of it in the future when the present will be past”. (1989, 52).
In his article The Event and the Image the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni also accentuates the dimension of temporality in film and points out that the task of a filmmaker is “to catch a reality which is never static, is always moving towards or away from a moment of crystallization, and to present this movement, this arriving and moving on, as a new perception” <…> The people around us, the places we visit , the events we witness – it is the spatial and temporal relations these have with each other that have a meaning for us today, and the tension that is formed between them. <…> To lose this contact, in the sense of losing this way of being in contact, can mean sterility. (Sight & Sound, 1964).