Testimony and memory : re-writeable video memoirs

In Chris Marker’s Sunless (1985), the narrator states: “We do not remember, we re-write memory much as history is rewritten.” This presentation considers the ways in which my parents’ stories have been (and can be) re-written. In 1996, my father and mother engaged in a process of remembering, narrating and re-considering their histories when their video testimonies were recorded for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. They experienced much of World War II in different locations – only re-united after many months. For these video testimonies, they were recorded separately – once again, with a distance of many months between. Whenever there is an attempt to protect a story from interruption and contradiction, narrative multiplicity arises. By comparing and analysing their separate stories in terms of what was said, what was not said, what was unspeakable, and what was unknowable, I am interested in the uncertainties, the gaps, and the different ways in which they attempted to re-make their own histories whilst in the midst of storytelling. I am also interested in re-editing these memoirs into a multi-perspectival family video album, in which the stories and storytellers re-inhabit a shared and re-writeable space of storytelling.