Swing Time: Ayisha Abraham’s Found Footage Movies and the Memory of a Medium

The second week of VAICA’s festival Fields of Vision was centred on the theme “Orbits of Desire.” This segment focused on the nature of media that informed image-making practices about the body, performances and gender. The films expressed various ways of approaching their evolving status as a complex medium for recording artistic and documentary practices. Here, the body became a close analogue for the changes, deteriorations and the belated attempts at preservation that film also demands today. When the frail and aged figure of Tom D’Aguiar appears on Ayisha Abraham’s Straight 8 (2005), he comes across as a living embodiment of the evolution in amateur video making traditions in Bengaluru. But while the body is marked with old age and its attendant decays of function and memory, the film is engaged in a heroic struggle of remembering, pointing with fictional narratives towards historical realities that once were and, perhaps, no longer are.

Abraham’s works delve deeply into the cultures of home video or 8mm filmmaking. These are often posed provocatively against the Pune-based National Film Archives’ (now slated to be merged with the larger National Film Development Corporation) proclivity to acquire 16mm or 35mm films for conservation or restoration. The implication seems to be that industrial or commercially standardised films—shared by millions or deemed “important” by public authorities—deserve archives of their own; whereas 8mm film practices are condemned to live in an eternal period of infancy, subject to the salvage of whoever can afford the technology of painstaking restoration. As a result, much of Straight 8 paints the difficulty of preserving and restoring film media—especially neglected film that gets pared down by the ravages of tropical weather. The noise of its decaying being fills the soundtrack of Abraham’s work. As shadows populate the edges of the frame due to poor transfers, the images jerk under the tension of imminent disintegration. Abraham films D’Aguiar’s 8mm efforts digitally, after projecting them. So, a two-way process is opened up that allows us to map the differences between recording, restoration and documentary practice by labelling it collectively, perhaps simply, as a fiction. These fictions could include extracts from the life of a city such as Bengaluru, as it grew in the twentieth-century along with D’Aguiar, or more direct attempts at imitating the industrial standard through camp retelling or spoofs, like the Nazi spy movie that D’Aguiar filmed with his friends (and without a script) around the city and its neighbouring countryside. The process is dialogic, so that the documents of early practice do not become a source of nostalgia for an integrated, holistic past of a particular community or nation. Instead, it works out an elusive and elliptical form that refuses to come into its own as an industrially finished product. Even in the colour tinged films D’Aguiar made of the charismatic dancer Ram Gopal, an uncertainty haunts the rushes, refusing to settle into a standard biography of the dancer. True to one of experimental films’ core principles, the aesthetic of an unfinished document is explored through the contrasting but richly synthetic styles of D’Aguiar and Abraham.

Abraham’s inquiry into the changing bodies of film-as-medium cleaves to the habits of memory too—as explored in another short included in the programme, Amnesia (2001). Through the simple conceit of a ladder that is collapsed into older analogic images of a slip and slide, the film again delves into the ways in which memory seeks the technological tools of filmmaking (like the match cut that is implied by Abraham) to construct their own narratives of coherent growth and meaningful change from one frame of life to another.

Domesticating the technology of filmmaking occupies a historical function that is only partially told in the public sphere. It is sometimes seen through precious references made by mainstream films—as a mode of evoking the palpable immediacy of everyday terror (like in Paranormal Activity)—or as a source of endless YouTube-algorithm-driven comedy videos (think of America’s Funniest Home Videos). With Abraham’s interrogations both modes are retained for their power of “relatability”—that great modern-day standard of establishing quality—but too many operations from the difficult process of film preservation intrude into the narrative to give us any smooth surface to appreciate. It is reminiscent, in this sense, of Stan Brakhage’s sly translation of “autopsy” as The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971), a film that graphically peels off layers of the human body to reveal the skull beneath the skin. It is an encounter with the body that is too intimate and invasive to produce any affect other than disgust or heightened fascination with the substance that contains our bodies. Abraham’s autopsy of the film medium does something similar for the way in which we regard 8mm home videos as a graphic container for our raw memories. One watches the swing sets in an old public park, a girl in a shiny dress or a man walking along an embankment, experimentally choosing his path of progress, much as one watches a clinical surgery being performed on a stranger’s body, with fascination and a vague feeling of discomfort that is probably due to our lack of knowledge about its fixed references.

Abraham’s video practice goes back to at least two decades, a time she has spent critiquing normative archives of film and teaching students of film at Srishti School of Design. The twin approaches to her work—pedagogic as well as artistic—allow for a playful admixture of forms like fiction and non-fiction. They constantly attempt to tell new meta-stories of film as an almost living medium. Abraham’s films do so even while keeping us entertained with the stories that the medium has always been entrusted with—telling others, including strangers.

To read more about the works featured as part of VAICA’s Fields of Vision, please click here, here, here, here and here.

All images from works by Ayisha Abraham. Images courtesy of the artist and VAICA.