P E R F O R M I N G M E M O R Y A N D A U T H O R S H I P

T H E D O C U M E N T A R Y O E U V R E O F A L I O N A V A N D E R H O R S T

L a r a v a n d e S a n d e

MA Thesis Film Studies Professional Oriented Track (Documentary) University of Amsterdam

Supervisor: Dhr. dr. F.A.M. (Erik) Laeven Second reader: Dhr. dr. F.J.J.W. (Floris) Paalman Student number: 10634231 June 28, 2019

For my father Rien van de Sande (1947-2016)

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Ugliness is beauty that cannot be contained within the soul. It is the transformational force of poetry or imagery, that is what you are looking for as a filmmaker, or an artist. Aliona van der Horst

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Contents

Preface…………………………………………………………………………………………5 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………...……7

Chapter 1: The rise of subjective documentary filmmaking…………………………………12 1.1 Origins: a cinema of auteurs……………………………………………………….12 1.2 The start of female documentary authorship ………………...... 14 1.3 Defining the practice: a mode instead of a genre…………………………………..17

Chapter 2: Memory, emotion & narrative…………………………………………………...20 2.1 Cognitive frameworks: narrative, emotion and memory ………………………….20 2.2 Media and memory: remembering (without) experience……………...... 22 2.3 Memory is mediated…………………………………………………...... 24 2.4 Prosthetic memory: the artificial limb made of imagined memories………...….…..25 2.5 The filmic translation of personal memory………………………………………26

Chapter 3: Turning memory into narrative in Voices of Bam……………………………...…28 3.1 Voices of Bam’s narrative of experience: wandering through the rubble……………28 3.2 The inner voices talking: active remembering in direct address…………….…….. 30 3.3 Resembling memory and emphasising absence………………….………………33

Chapter 4: Negotiating and performing authorship in Water Children.…………...………..38 4.1 Reflexivity on art and life…………………………………………………………38 4.2 Self-reflexive authorship as negotiation and performance……………………....44 4.3 Performing experience and subjective perspective: the two visual languages…….49

Chapter 5: The performance of memory and authorship in Love is Potatoes………………..53 5.1 Van der Horst’s inheritance: six square meters of memorabilia……………………53 5.2 Silent mothers and interrogative daughters: the generational gap in memory…….55 5.3 Van der Horst’s negotiation of authorship: The struggle with buried memories of a painful past ………………………………………………………………………57 5.4 Van der Horst’s response to denial: memory performance………………………...61 5.5 A new kind of historiography: Aliona van der Horst and the personal frame……...64

Conclusion……………………………………………………………….…..……….……...68 Epilogue…………………………………………………………………...………….……...73 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………...……..74 Filmography Aliona van der Horst / Other………………………..………………………...77

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Preface

Utrecht, 27 mei 2019

Beste Aliona,

Misschien herinner je me nog, maar misschien ook niet. Een aantal jaar geleden liep ik stage bij Zeppers Film. Je was in die tijd al bezig met Liefde is aardappelen, of Zes Vierkante Meter zoals geloof ik toen de werktitel was. Inmiddels kruis je mijn pad wederom, maar deze keer via een andere weg. Deze keer gaat het over mijn scriptie voor mijn master Film Studies aan de UvA, die ik heb gewijd aan jouw auteurschap.

Ik was lang terughoudend je hierover te lichten, want wat betekent een analyse van auteurschap nu eigenlijk? Is dat niet juist hetgeen een regisseur in het ongewisse wil laten? Zou ik dingen niet op een andere manier hebben geïnterpreteerd dan dat ze zijn bedoeld? Maar ik kwam ook al vrij snel tot de conclusie: waarschijnlijk is juist dat de kracht van film. Dat het de films zijn, geboren uit het brein van een regisseur, die transformeren en zelf op zoek gaan naar betekenis, wanneer ze hun vleugels uitslaan in de wijde wereld.

Een belangrijke reden waarom ik je werk wilde analyseren was dat het aansloot bij een periode in mijn leven die getekend is door een poëtische mix van elementen en thema’s die ik herken in jouw werk: naast dromerigheid, vrouwelijk auteurschap, de mijmering van associaties, zelfreflectie en kunst als troost, ook de betekenis én verschijningsvorm van herinnering.

Want hoezeer ik mijzelf ook uit deze scriptie schrijf als academicus, toch vind ik dat ik open moet zijn over mijn persoonlijke betrokkenheid met je werk die hoe dan ook deze thesis heeft gekleurd. Ik heb niet voor niks herinnering als centraal aspect gekozen. Terwijl ik aan deze masterthesis werkte, ruimde ik de twee huizen van mijn jeugd uit. Het ene was het huis van mijn vader, een alleenstaande schapenboer in Gelderland, die heel plotseling overleed. Mijn zusjes en ik – toen 18, 19 en 22 - bezaten opeens een boerderij. Een huis vol herinneringen, relikwieën aan vroegere plattelandsfamilies en oude romances, schapenstiften, oude kaarten, boeken, een wei vol schapen en vooral een hoop troep.

Ook mijn vader was een verzamelaar en ook nogal fan van Rusland. Uiteraard ben ik vernoemd naar Dokter Zhivago. Het was een stronteigenwijze academicus die eigenlijk het liefst zijn hele leven boer was geweest. Hij had het altijd gecombineerd, zijn schapen als uit de hand gelopen hobby naast zijn werk aan de Universiteit van Nijmegen. Het was een intellectueel die het boerenleven zag als utopie. Met het grootste gemak begaf hij zich onder zowel juristen als koeienboeren, met dezelfde mate van interesse– alleen wel met een ander accent. Ergens zie ik daarin een analogie met Ryzhy. We hebben het nooit over je werk gehad, maar ik denk dat hij Liefde is Aardappelen vooral heel mooi had gevonden. Eenvoudige boerenfamilies waren altijd zijn favoriete onderwerp in de kunst.

Nog geen maand na zijn dood onderging mijn zusje, leverpatiënt vanaf dat ze klein is, haar eerste levertransplantatie. Een rare tijd waarin voor rouw geen plek was, maar eerder voor blijdschap dat ze het had overleefd. Helaas ging het niet lang goed en leefden we in spanning onder het oppervlak. Toch wilden we vooral ook gewoon normaal leven – ik ging verder met een documentaire researchstage bij Submarine voor een online documentaire-project over de oorlog in Syrië. Heen en weer was het leven tussen het ziekenhuis in Groningen en onze huizen in Utrecht – twee zusjes tegenover elkaar in hetzelfde appartementencomplex, allebei gingen we er op een andere manier mee om.

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Werken ging me beter af dan een strijd alleen voor de computer. Ik legde mijn scriptie telkens weg; hoe kon ik bezig zijn met academisch gezever als zij aan het vechten was voor haar leven? Na een tweede levertransplantatie hing haar leven aan een zijden draadje. En toen herstelde ze zich na enkele maanden wonderlijk genoeg opeens. Niet volledig – en de toekomst blijft onzeker - maar de situatie is beter dan in jaren. Ze studeert, heeft weer wat energie en is niet meer geel. Dat heeft erin geresulteerd dat ik het afgelopen halfjaar écht aan mijn scriptie heb kunnen werken en nu eindelijk deze brief stuur.

Dit terwijl ik nog een huis aan het uitruimen ben: dat van mijn moeder. Die heeft besloten eindelijk weer terug te gaan naar haar wortels: Vlissingen. De zee roept haar al jaren. Met de verkoop van haar huis, verlies ik voorgoed alle banden met mijn geboorteplek Druten, een klein dorpje in Gelderland aan de Waal. Ergens lach ik om hoe alles in het leven dan altijd samen lijkt te komen in momenten: vandaag lever ik de eerste versie van mijn scriptie in, terwijl de verhuisdozen van Druten naar Vlissingen gaan. Het is wederom een labyrint van herinneringen, verspreid over dozen en vastgekleefd in de muren en grond van het huis van mijn jeugd, waar ik me in onderdompel. Maar het markeert ook het einde van een best lastige periode waarin herinneringen ronddwaalden zonder huis. Misschien is het een metafoor voor een nieuw begin, bedenk ik me onder de appelboom, grinnikend in mijn schoot geworpen door het leven.

Het schrijven over herinnering was niet alleen meditatief, het was ook noodzakelijk. Meer dan ooit is me duidelijk hoeveel herinneringen in ons hoofd bestaan door het werk van verhalenvertellers, waaronder documentairemakers zoals jij. Mijn beeld over Japan – Rusland- Iran - het zijn prothetische herinneringen die voelen als mijn eigen herinnering. Het heeft mijn eigen passie voor het vertellen van verhalen, in documentaire, maar ook in scenario en in literatuur, alleen maar versterkt. En dat is mede te danken aan jouw auteurschap. Het einde van deze scriptie was lang een blind einddoel: langzaamaan ga ik nu weer nadenken naar wat hierna komt, of dat documentaire research is, of misschien toch schrijven. Ik zie wel wat er het eerst op mijn pad komt. Momenteel zit ik in de laatste fase, eind juni lever ik mijn definitieve scriptie in, die ik je zal sturen als je dat leuk vindt.

Het was niet per se mijn bedoeling om mijn hele familiegeschiedenis hier uit de doeken te doen, maar ach, soms ontkom je er niet aan. Maar ik denk dat het te wijten is aan wat jij hebt gedaan: de personages uit jouw films worden een spiegel waar je jezelf in ziet. Ik wilde je alleen vragen of je misschien – bij wijze van epiloog op deze masterscriptie – interesse hebt om een keertje een kopje koffie te drinken. Ik ben in het echte leven een stuk minder sentimenteel dan op papier.

Lara

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Introduction

Over the past two decades, there has been a shift in the field of documentary studies towards the acknowledgement of the documentary director as an auteur. This might sound strange nowadays with a lot of famous documentary filmmakers, but for a long time ‘documentary’ was not easily linked to ‘authorship’. Fiction films are often associated with the notion of an auteur, whereas for documentary, it is a different story. Why? As documentary scholar Stella Bruzzi (2011) points out, “the intervention of an auteur disrupts the non-fiction film’s supposed allegiance to transparency and truthfulness”(112). Bruzzi acknowledges that the documentary genre, supposedly telling ‘truths’, has struggled with being linked to a subjective author/director who framed these ‘truths’. But with the rise of a more performative and reflexive type of documentary filmmaking since the 1990s in which the director’s presence is no longer shunned, the position of the documentary auteur deserves to be considered in more detail too. In this thesis I will examine the authorship of Aliona van der Horst (Moscow, 1970), a documentary auteur whose oeuvre consists of a wide variety of films with an outspoken filmic style. From the moment she started her career in 1997, many of her poetic documentaries have been internationally awarded and highly appreciated.1 Her most known works are Love is Potatoes (2017), Water Children (2011), Boris Ryzhy (2008), Voices of Bam (2006), The Hermitage Dwellers (2006) and The Lady with the White Hat (1997). The reason for the international appeal of her work is undoubtedly correlated with her very defined style of poetic filmmaking and the international topics she addresses. Van der Horst also frequently appears as a guest lecturer at film festivals and film schools, that welcome her creative and poetic take on documentary filmmaking. Born as a child of a Russian mother and a Dutch father, Van der Horst’s dual nationality seems to have translated within her work as a documentary filmmaker. Van der Horst grew up in The Netherlands with a Russian-oriented upbringing, not only due to her mother’s Russian nationality, but also because of her father who studied in Moscow. Van der Horst decided to study Russian literature, after which she also graduated from film school. She started her career as a documentary filmmaker with her graduate film Lady With the White

1 She was awarded with the special Jury Prize at the Tribeca Film Festival, the Grand Prix of the FIFA, the Best Mid-length Documentary Award at IDFA, the Best Documentary Award of Edinburgh film festival, Best Feature Documentary at Doxa Vancouver, the ‘Gouden Kalf’ for Long Documentary and the ‘Kristallen Film’ award (presented when films reach 10.000 visitors in Dutch theatres).

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Hat (1997), which immediately landed her career as an internationally awarded documentary filmmaker, depicting a Ukrainian school teacher that was unrightfully put in a psychiatric clinic for refusing to work for the KGB (like many people in the former Soviet Union). In most of her other films, Van der Horst depicts Russia’s troubled history, often finding a way to consider (politically inflicted) tragedies that have been swept under the rug.2 But Van der Horst’s documentaries are not bound to Russia’s borders, with Voices of Bam (2006) being set in Iran, Water Children (2011) in Japan and a few other films set in The Netherlands. Rather, they are bound by an auteurist style of filmmaking that features personal stories. Over the past two decades, she has developed a personal essayistic mode of documentary filmmaking that pays a lot of attention to poetic cinematography, rhythm, associational montage, sound and music. Most of her films are in collaboration with cinematographer Maasja Ooms, who is responsible for most of their dreamlike visual style. The poetic long takes that look like they come straight out of a Tarkovsky film (showing movements of the elements and provide a sensory experience), have become one of the key characteristics of Van der Horst’s work. When I first saw Water Children (2011), a film about fertility, I had a deeply emotional experience and it stayed with me for a long time. Not only the poetic feel of the film had triggered this reaction, but also the way in which Van der Horst incorporated herself and her feelings into the film. During the process of making the film, Van der Horst felt she had to include her personal fear of remaining childless, although she did not intend on being in the film. But precisely because of this inclusion of her memories and feelings in relation to her personal struggle with fertility (her fear of remaining childless), I felt a more intimate connection with her and the women she portrayed. When studying the discourse of documentary authorship, I searched for a theoretical approach that would help to describe Aliona van der Horst’s authorship in its totality: not only her outspoken filmic style with a strong connection to art and other artists, her fascination with the theme of loss and her use of metaphors to create multiple layers of meaning, but also how her personal relationship with the depicted world is translated into a

2 For instance also in Boris Ryzhy (2008), a film about a Russian poet that committed suicide, whose work is a tribute to the Perestroika generation, a generation that was lost in the violence of the gang fights after the fall of the Soviet Union. Or, by depicting her parents’ love story in After the Spring of ’68 (2001): a film that shows how the clashing political climates - communism versus capitalism -prevented her parents from being together and damaged their relationship. And for instance also in The Hermitage Dwellers (2006), a filmic ode to Russia’s most renowned museum, its art and employees, that also shows how the museum survived the Russian Revolution, Stalin’s reign, WWII, and the post-Soviet years.

8 filmic strategy that has an emotional effect on the viewer. Throughout her work, Van der Horst marks her identity as a filmmaker, but also her own personal identity – while she remains concerned with depicting the other. In this thesis, I want to investigate how Van der Horst creates her signature film style that accomplishes a level of personal engagement that results in an emotional viewing experience. In the first chapter, I shall consider how the personal presence of the filmmaker within documentary has been theorised by film scholars as Bill Nichols, Michael Renov and Jim Lane and more specifically within the essayistic tradition by Laura Rascaroli. I will show how personal modes of filmmaking can be linked to the politicised origins of female documentary authorship in the 1970s. Various concepts used to describe this tradition by Lane are still relevant to understand Van der Horst’s work. I’m aware of the wide scale and diversity of the discourse of documentary authorship, such as varying definitions of the filmmaker in debates about essayistic documentary, or even the theoretical objections to the possibility of an auteur in (documentary) filmmaking in general, since some consider documentary filmmaking only as a collective enterprise. Van der Horst’s films are obviously not created solely, but emerge from collaborations with her crewmembers.3 However, I consider her personal vision – both expressed in content and style - strongly apparent in every film by her hand. Not much of the debate is focused on the way in which the documentary filmmaker’s presence might give meaning to the story, especially if the story is not (only) about the filmmaker. In purpose of my research, I have chosen to base my notion of authorship primarily on a theoretical framework that focuses on the presence of the documentary auteur as an active point of engagement, which I found in the work of Trent Griffiths (2014). But in order to consider Van der Horst’s authorship in its totality, I selected a variety of theoretical frameworks, not only originating from film studies, but also from memory studies. Theorising memory in relationship to documentary provides tools for a more detailed textual analysis that can provide a deeper understanding of the emotional engagement Van der Horst’s films evoke through both form and content. In this respect, memory functions as an umbrella term that encompasses both aesthetics, the role of the director and the viewer’s engagement. Various theorisations of memory allow us to explain the relationship between form and content in Van der Horst’s work, and how they work together as experience.

3 In particular her regular cinematographer Maasja Ooms, but also recurring composer Harry de Wit, or Tomoko Mukaiyama in (Water Children 2011) and animator Simone Massi (Love is Potatoes 2017).

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Memory allows us to explain Van der Horst’s filmic style and how she creates intimacy and a certain sphere through visualisation of internal thoughts and experiences, making her films more experiences than straight-lined narratives. In chapter two, we will see how cognitive research on memory’s relation to documentary allows us to explain documentary form and content, and how narratives engage us with a process that presents an experience. In addition, we shall see that looking into the mediality of memories (Dijck 2007, 2004) can help us understand how media shape the way in which we remember, and how documentary can function as a prosthetic memory that is able to function as a stand-in for memory based on lived-experience. We will also see how filmmakers can feature an ethical awareness in their depiction of (traumatic) personal memory within their films. This awareness, as I will argue in this thesis, may be coming from a position of postmemory, a concept introduced to clarify the way in which personal ‘inherited’ familial memories are marked by a generational gap (Hirsch 1997, 2008). This allows us to explain how a position of postmemory may influence the filmmaking of a new generation of filmmakers. From chapter three on, I will start with a detailed textual analysis of three of Van der Horst’s films, which I consider representative of her oeuvre of twenty years of filmmaking (see filmography) and her authorship. The order in which I discuss these three films is not only chronological, from her first feature film from 2006 to her most recent film in 2017, but also shows her increasing personal presence in her films. I have selected Voices of Bam (2006), Van der Horst’s first feature documentary, which she co-directed with Maasja Ooms, to show how she finds a filmic translation for personal, intimate memories and how she rejects conventional modes of filming personal loss and disaster. In chapter four, I will discuss Water Children (2011) and show how Van der Horst uses performativity and (self-)reflexivity to portray the authorship of the artist Tomoko Mukaiyama, but also of herself and her involvement. By the work of Trent Griffiths, I propose recontextualising the current debates on performativity and reflexivity in terms of self-reflexivity as a tool for empathy rather than showing epistemological awareness, and to show how Van der Horst’s performative involvement results in an active point of engagement. In chapter five, I will show how in Love is Potatoes (2017) these two important tendencies within Van der Horst’s work seem to come together in a synthesis which actualises memory as performance framed by a present auteur and how this allows her to reshape collective traumatic memories.

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Like Van der Horst does in her films, I want to be reflexive of my own position within this examination of her work. The choice to dive into the work of a female documentary director places herself in the context of her family did not come out of nowhere. For the past few years, I have always been drawn to filmmakers who incorporated their memories in their stories by using performance and reflexive filmic techniques.4 Little by little it dawned on me that I am fascinated with the cinematic personal language of the concept of memory, and that this may have something to do with my own memories and family history. When I was writing this thesis, my father suddenly died and my sister became very seriously ill. Because of this, I spent a lot of time thinking about my own past, reflecting on what my memories actually meant. I found comfort in watching films that were also about loss, life, death and family histories and how to reflect on my own position in everything that had happened. Examining Van der Horst’s films, in particular Love is Potatoes, for me has been a way to deal with my own memories and emotions. While Van der Horst was cleaning out this 6m2 square room on my laptop screen, I was cleaning out my father’s farm. And although this is my academic master thesis and not a personal work of mourning, this thesis undoubtedly has a strong personal connection to my life that has influenced the way I personally engage with her work.

4 For instance the work of Agnès Varda, who reflects upon her cinematic oeuvre in the autobiographical documentary Les Plages d’Agnès (2008), in which she plays with her own memories through performances and playful montage. Or Sarah Polley, who creates a kaleidoscopic meditation on the meaning of family ‘memories’ or ‘stories’ in her autobiographic Stories We Tell (2011) by incorporating all the different versions of the memory of her mother.

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Chapter 1: The rise of subjective documentary filmmaking 1.1 Origins: a cinema of auteurs Before exploring Van der Horst’s authorship, I would like to show how the notion of a documentary auteur slowly emerged in the documentary landscape, which contributes to a better understanding of her filmmaking strategies in context. Secondly, I will narrow this down to how essayistic documentary has been theorised, and how essay film is connected to certain tendencies within female documentary authorship, which prove a preoccupation with the filmic representation of memory and experience through engagement with the depicted world. It was not until the “autobiographical outbreak of the 1980s and the 1990s” - as Michael Renov has famously put it - that personal documentaries started to conquer the documentary landscape (2004, xxii). Nowadays, we are very used to the fact that many documentaries give more prominence to the filmmaker, but the expression of a subjective perspective in documentary has long been controversial. This has everything to do with the origins of documentary and the claim that documentaries have to be ‘objective’ (Nichols 2010, 21–24). As the famous documentary theorist Bill Nichols has pointed out, the dominant modes of documentary representation had been based on realist-conventions that avoided a disruption between the viewer and the on-screen created world – and thus did not reveal the presence of the filmmaker in documentary itself (156). But over the past few decades, other ways of documentary representation have emerged and they seem to have dropped this ‘notion of objectivity’ increasingly. Although the six modes of documentary filmmaking, which Nichols distinguishes, provide a relatively simple way to sketch the origins of subjective documentary, they are very general and tend towards a genealogical approach.5 One of the most important authors in the theoretical discourse on the characteristics of subjectivity in documentary film that I will discuss in this thesis is Laura Rascaroli. Her monograph The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and The Essay Film (2009) is a thorough investigation on essayistic cinema, but she also pays attention to other forms of subjective

5 Although Bill Nichols states in Introduction to Documentary (2010) that his six modes are not strictly chronological, nor does he argue that are they exact and a precise fit for any type of documentary, he does connect them to a certain timeframe while in fact the characteristics he adjudges to the expository, poetic, observational, participatory and performative mode are more interwoven and nuanced within current documentary traditions.

12 filmmaking.6 First of all, I will examine how certain technological and historical developments have paved the way for personal documentary filmmaking. Investigating the rise of the prominence of subjectivity in documentary, there are two important tendencies that need to be addressed. Firstly, as Rascaroli puts it, this is the “process of postmodernism of social and artistic fields”, and secondly, “a continuation and the evolution of filmic practices that emerged within European modernism” (2009, 4). As Rascaroli argues, subjectivity was already expressed way before the era of postmodernity, firstly in the form of “personal cinema” of the avant-gardist, (mostly) European filmmakers in the 1950s and 1960s (2009, 6). In the 1940s, in the idea of ‘cinematic subjectivity’ emerged in French film theory. This auteur theory as it was called by Andrew Sarris (Truffaut’s manifesto from 1954 called it la politique des auteurs), prompted the director as the artistic mastermind overseeing the production crew and therefore responsible for the cinematographic quality. The foundations of this auteur theory, derived from literature studies, were largely based on the cinematic theories of André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc. Astruc coined the concept of the ‘caméra-stylo’ (camera pen), arguing that directors should use their camera like writing with a pen. He urged directors to see cinema as a way for directors to express their thoughts, as their own visual trademark (Rascaroli 2009, 26). In the second half of the 1950s, this idea crystallised in the nouvelle vague movement that emerged in France.7 Although French pioneers had already sought ways to express their personal dreams within their films, it was this new wave of filmmakers who really experimented with their personal style as directors (26). This movement was characterised by a very personal style that created auteurist style and voice in their fiction films (Rascaroli 2009, 24). With new editing techniques, new lightweight portable cameras and a great need for change, the nouvelle vague directors broke many of the dominant ‘rules’ in cinema and created room for new forms of cinema production. Although this movement took place within the field of fiction film, it also had major consequences for documentary production. In fact mostly the Left-Bank group of the nouvelle vague experimented with personal non-fiction films, such as Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda. In France, many first-person, short documentaries were produced that approached

6 Rascaroli mainly focuses on the ontological origins of the essay film and on the paradigm shifts that have coincided with changes in filmic style. Michael Renov does pay a little more attention to other technological developments that also contributed to the rise of subjective filmmaking. 7 Filmmakers such as (the Cahier du cinéma critics/directors group of) Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and (the Left Bank group of) Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda (Rascaroli 2009, 26-27).

13 documentary in the same way as the fiction films of the nouvelle vague: with their own approach to reality and their own vision featured (Rascaroli 2009, 28). In addition to this trend, other French filmmakers such as Jean Rouch experimented with new documentary production modes like the participatory ethnographic documentary such as Chronicle of a Summer (1961), which he directed with Edgar Morin. With the now available lightweight cameras and synchronous sound and image, it became easier to go into the world without a large camera crew (Nichols 2010, 179). The participation of the filmmaker with documentary subjects became an important aspect within films, and was no longer shunned. The cinema verité movement rooted from Rouch’ work in France at the end of the 1950s (Bordwell and Thompson 2010, 448). Cinema verité introduced new techniques, such as avoiding authoritative voice-overs and incorporating self-reflexivity (Rascaroli 2009, 44). The French filmmaker Chris Marker criticised cinema verité for the notion that some sort of truth could be grasped from the filming. In his films he proposed a critical standpoint towards his own subjective perspective and the address of the spectator was now very direct (Rascaroli 2009, 66).

1.2 The start of female documentary authorship In the 1970s, the cinema verité principles seemed to gradually disappear. Like Rasaroli, other scholars as Michael Renov, Jim Lane and Julia Lesage have convincingly argued that there is a strong link between the growing foregrounding of subjectivism as a filmmaking strategy within the documentaries, and a growing awareness in terms of class and gender debates from the 1970s onwards (Rascaroli 2009; Renov 2004; Lane 2002; Lesage 1999). As Renov argues in his article "New Subjectivities: Documentary and Self-Representation in the Post-Verité age,” the direct-cinema filmmakers of the 1960s were mostly white men who could easily shun self-reference since they “had assumed the mantle of filmic representation with the ease and self-assurance of a birthright” (1999, 94). Subjectivism within documentaries therefore also emerged as an alternative to the hegemony of the ‘white male’, which was closely related to the various social-economic movements that emerged in the period of 1970 to 1990: in particular the women’s movement, but also the black power movements and the new gay and lesbian politics (Renov 1999, 89). Renov discusses the impact of the women’s movement on the foregrounding of the personal lives of women:

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Women and the issues that mattered to them – forthright interpersonal communication; equal stress on the integrity of process as well as product; open and universally accessible structures for decision making; shared responsibility for the domestic and familial – received scant attention. The women’s movement changed all that and helped to usher in an era in which a range of “personal” issues – namely race, sexuality, and ethnicity – became consciously politicised. In all cases, subjectivity, a grounding in the personal and the experiential, fuelled the engine of political action (1999, 89).

Renov explains that in the cultural climate of this time in the Western world of the sixties and seventies, feminism contributed significantly in shift from the politics of the social into the politics of identity (1999, 89). Lane’s chapter “Women and the Autobiographical Documentary” in The Autobiographical Documentary in America (2002) also focuses on the aspect of female identity in relation to personal documentary. Since female filmmakers have highlighted their significant different position in society by expressing their views and opinions about identity, it is relevant to further discuss the characteristics of women’s personal accounts in more detail. Lane advocates four important aspects of women’s subjective documentary filmmaking, supported by the work of literary theorists as James Olney and Annette Kuhn, and with that of film theorists like Julia Lesage, Patricia Erens and E. Ann Kapplan, which he describes as: ‘historical intervention’, ‘writing’, ‘alterity’ and ‘dialogic engagement’ (145). He argues that a lot of personal documentaries emerged from the second wave of the women’s movement of the 1970s. Based on the work of historians Robin Morgan and Sara Evans, Lane notes that the women’s movement helped to spread the notion that showing the personal lives of women became of great importance, since the position of women had long been under- or misrepresented (146). Documentary filmmaking was suited as a means to create social change for many female filmmakers, some of whom had been in underappreciated positions within the direct-cinema movement, as Joyce Chopra (Lane 2002, 145). Olney, talking about literature, argues that women’s autobiography is the only writing mode that brings such a detailed description from within a ‘culture’, that it gives “privileged access to experience” (Lane 2002, 147). Lane notes that these female documentaries can be divided in two categories: firstly biographical portraits of women as positive role models, and secondly films that centre on important female topics such as birth control, abuse, marriage and abortion (146). Lane

15 argues, by the work of film theorist Annette Kuhn, that we can even speak of a specific feminine cinematic writing mode:

[…] Kuhn traces the shift from the biographical or issue-oriented films to autobiography as a move toward a specifically feminine mode of cinematographic writing that marks a transformation from a collective, participatory cinema to an individuated cinema (147).

Within these individuated women’s films, the construction of identity in the form of autobiography is mostly interpersonal, instead of the traditional notion of autobiography given by George Gusdorf’s model of autobiography within literary traditions, who sees it as a ‘unified self represented across time’ (Lane 2002, 148). This relational exploration of the self, for example to dominant structures or persons within their own families, has often started with some sort of marginalisation of the filmmaker in some kind; whether that is because they have chosen their career as a filmmaker, or for other reasons (Lane 2002, 148). It is in this sense that Lane talks about the concept of “alterity”. Although autobiographical films made by men have also been about families and are often also interpersonal, the films of female filmmakers stand out because of their wide variety in strategies that are deployed to critique power, especially that of their family (Lane 2002, 148). Lesage argues that:

Unlike social-issue documentarists working in a realist mode, (many) women artists do not presume to represent a continuous stable identity or a cohesive self. Rather they pursue an epistemological investigation of what kinds of relations might constitute the self, using as a laboratory their own consciousness (Lesage 1999, 311).

Fourthly, there is the concept of “dialogic engagement”. Literary theorist Sidonie Smith argues that the female autobiographical documentary directors do this in a way that lies ‘within and outside the male dominance as they strive for self-representation’ (Lane 2002, 149). Lane claims that the female directors take on the role of daughter, sister, mother or girlfriend within their documentaries, while at the same time criticising gender issues. The production of the autobiographical documentary, the act of choosing to record their story and choosing film as a tool, can be seen in many of these films as a struggle for acceptance (Lane 2002, 149). Lane quotes film theorist Julia Lesage:

Women have taken up the romantic artist’s quest, arising out of culturally induced paralysis to look inward, and express themselves, with a whole

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different tenor. Their motives, tactics, and results are completely different from those of their male forebears and counterparts. Heirs to the romantic tradition of using art as a tool for psychic expression, women and artists from dispossessed groups have used the tactics of the romantic artist to give voice to what had been voiceless in their environments, to provide especially for their group the open and public articulation of other subjectivities that the dominant culture systematically denies and silences (Lane 2002, 150; Lesage 1999, 326- 327).

Although over the last few decades women’s role in society has changed, the characteristics of the female authorship, as described by Lane, are still relevant and applicable to Van der Horst’s authorship, whose work fits into the categories of ‘historical intervention’, ‘alterity’, ‘dialogic engagement’, and ‘writing’, and which overlap with concepts from memory studies.

1.3 Defining the practice: a mode instead of a genre Since birth of female subjective documentary in the 1970s, the documentary landscape has changed. The number of personal non-fiction films, made by both female and male directors, has grown immensely. In the 1980s the camcorder emerged, which made documentary production way cheaper and easier than 35 mm or 16 mm filmstrip. This technological development resulted in a boost of the recording of ‘autobiographical’ material, since it was now easy to access the equipment to record one’s life. In addition, the development of computers and the spread of the Internet in the 21st century made the personal perspective so prevalent as it had never been before (Renov 2004). These developments also represent larger paradigm shifts that have changed non- fiction cinema at a philosophical level. In a globalised world full of images, many scholars have drawn comparisons between postmodernity and the fragmentary nature of human experience today. Rascaroli notes that increasingly fragmented experience in our everyday lives as a result of these developments in technology, ask for new ways of representation that include a sense of uncertainty (2009, 4). Searching for answers in autobiographical documentary for example, is a way of searching for unity in one’s fragmented life (2009, 5). Subjectivity is often featured because the faith in the traditional values of objectivism within documentary have started to decline. The scepticism towards authoritative accounts of representing ‘truth’ within documentary has grown and many filmmakers try to reflect that

17 awareness in their films by incorporating subjectivity in varying degrees in their cinematic writing style. We have seen that different factors have contributed to the rise of subjective tendencies within documentary traditions. However, it is difficult to choose an umbrella term that encompasses the wide variety of forms subjective filmmaking since there have been so many terms coined in an effort to capture the wide diversity of it: autobiographical documentary, metadocumentary, autobiographical film, essay film, egodocumentary, hybrid documentary; just to name a few. Renov and Lane discuss the start of autobiographical documentary production when discussing this ‘genre’. Although autobiographical documentary is definitely a form that highlights subjectivity, this is a narrow definition that excludes many films that express subjectivity without being strictly autobiographical. And this is of key importance if we want to understand the place of films like Van der Horst’s in the landscape of documentary film. Alisa Lebow has proposed as ‘first person film’ as a “less imperfect” alternative since she mostly sees subjective filmmaking as a mode of address instead of a strictly defined genre (Lebow 2012, 2). Lebow states:

First person films can be poetic, political, prophetic or absurd. They can be autobiographical in full, or only implicitly and in part. They may take the form of self-portrait, or indeed, a portrait of another. They are, very often, not a cinema of ‘me’, but about someone close, dear, beloved or intriguing, who nonetheless informs the filmmaker’s sense of him or herself (15).

Another - and in this thesis more suitable – term, since Van der Horst’s films are not only autobiographical, is ‘essay film’. Hans Richter first coined the term in the 1940s in his article “Der Filmessay, Eine neue Form des Dokumentarfilms”. He regards it a new form of documentary and applauds its purpose to “visualise thoughts on screen”, resulting in a more emotional and intellectual type of cinema (Rascaroli 2009, 24). Rascaroli proposes not to think of essay films as a strict genre, but rather as a mode in which a certain topic is cinematographically investigated. Within this mode, we can look at the attitude of the essayist, his or her idiosyncratic outlook, experimentation with the medium and the reflection on the workings of that medium (2008, 33). Rascaroli suggests viewing “subjectivity as the product of the text’s adoption of certain strategies” (2009, 12). She classifies works as Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955), Chris Marker’s Letter from Siberia

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(1957) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Here and Elsewhere (1976) as examples of the essayistic mode (2009, 2). Rascaroli argues:

Metalinguistic, autobiographical and reflective, they all posit a well-defined, extra-textual authorial figure as their point of origin and of constant reference; they strongly articulate a subjective, personal point of view; and they set up a particular communicative structure, largely as I will argue, on the address to the spectator, or interpellation (2009, 3).

Rascaroli states that essay films can be very personal, without having to be strictly autobiographical (2009, 106). The rejection of a strict distinction between autobiography and biography is useful in this thesis, since I would propose understanding Van der Horst’s authorship as a personal mode of filmmaking with varying levels of subjectivity, but all characterised by a strong ‘authorial figure’. Although I am primarily concerned with understanding the filmic strategies that Van der Horst deploys within in her work, and not with a genre analysis, I consider these concepts helpful in showing how the construction of memory and identity form the backbone of the work of a lot of female, essayistic filmmakers8:

Reading the films of Heddy Honigmann, Annelies van Noortwijk argues that through a paradigm shift from postmodernism towards what she proposes to refer to as meta-modernism, a new kind of poetics comes to the fore in which senses of ‘sameness’ and ‘presence’ and a drive towards inter-subjective connection and dialogue are pivotal. At the same time a turn to the subject, the real and the private, are the preferred strategies to address the central topics in contemporary culture: that of (often traumatic) memory and identity. Indeed, the re-evaluation of the female subject as an active, embodied and emotional individual is fundamental to such a shift (Ulfsdotter and Backman Rogers 2018, 5).

This focus on the subjective qualities of memory and experience is still quite vague. Memory studies can provide a welcome addition to better understand how the filmic assemblage of memory and identity can blur the lines between ‘the actual’ and ‘the imagined’. In this thesis I will show, with various theorisations from the field of memory studies, how filmic strategies embody this memory and identity, and how they work together to create the intimate and emotional sphere of Van der Horst’s films.

8 I must include here that I think this is not only the case for documentaries from female filmmakers, but that I recognise the trend strongly in the work of lot of female documentary filmmakers.

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Chapter 2: Memory, emotion & narrative 2.1 Cognitive frameworks: narrative, emotion and memory Different theories on the relationship between memory and cinema provide useful concepts to better understand Van der Horst’s work, to analyse its effect (how does documentary narrative evoke emotions?), its content (how does mediated memory relate to a collective traumatic memory?) and its form (how is memory visualised?). Some scholars in the field of cognitive psychology such as Douwe Draaisma (2000) and Henry Roediger (1980) try to explain how the human body works by using the cinematic apparatus as a metaphor. They compare the functioning of the human eye to that of the lens of a camera, and for example, the memory of events in our mind’s “storage” with the camera’s film strip/digital storage (Rincón, Cuevas, and Torregrosa 2018). Other scholars such as Alison Landsberg (2004) and Marianne Hirsch (1997) attempt to explain cinema’s characteristics by using concepts borrowed from the field of (cultural) memory studies, such as collective memory, postmemory and prosthetic memory (Rincón, Cuevas, and Torregrosa 2018, 17). Another group explores the continuous interaction between cinema and memory, such as Ib Bondebjerg (2014), who combines cognitivist thought and media, and José van Dijck (2004; 2007; 2008), who examines the interactions between media materiality and cultural memory. I will focus on the latter two groups, agreeing with the notion that there are similarities in the structure of human memory and documentary narrative, both evoking emotions in an active process, but also considering documentary as a ‘carrier’ of cultural memory. The notion that memory is an active process rather than a fixed object or solidly ‘saved’ in the human mind has become prevalent within most academic fields that pay attention to memory (Rincón, Cuevas, and Torregrosa 2018, 17). Based on cognitivist theory, Bondebjerg shows how memory, narrative, and emotion are deeply intertwined. Cognitive research, which has gained a more prominent place within humanities and social studies over the last two decades, can help us understand why narrative structures in documentary are built in a certain way and how they influence the viewer on a cognitive and emotional level (Bondebjerg 2014, 13). Bondebjerg explains human memory as ‘the cognitive, emotional dimension through which humans combine short-term memory and long-term memory’ (18). By citing the work of Jonathan Gottschall, Bondebjerg argues that humans make sense of the world by explaining it through certain narratives. Bondebjerg points out that cognitivist film theory has

20 shown that in certain situations, such as the confrontation with ‘stories, images and human interaction’, certain emotional structures are activated (15). In this sense, stories are not only something we see in films and read in books, but are also fundamental frames in which we understand and remember the world. Bjondeberg quotes cognitive linguist George Lakoff:

Complex narratives – the kind we find in anyone’s life story, as well as in fairy tales, novels and drama – are made up of smaller narratives with very simple structures. Those structures are called “frames” or “scripts”. Frames are among the cognitive structures we think with […] the neural circuitry needed to crate frame structures is relatively simple, and so frames tend to structure a huge amount of our thought […] dramatic event structures are carried out by brain circuitry. The same event structure circuitry can be used to live out an action or narrative, or to understand the actions of others or the structure of the story. In addition, neural binding can create emotional experiences […] narratives and frames are not just brain structures with intellectual content, but rather with integrated intellectual emotional content (2014, 15).

Susan Radstone and Katherine Hodgkin also emphasise that remembering is an action, a creative process in which we try to reconstruct or re-actualise an absent reality of the past. Film as a medium is well suited for doing this, because it can externally represent this memory actualisation process. A film can show the content of memories, and at the same time it can incorporate the ‘act of remembering’ (Rincón, Cuevas, and Torregrosa 2018, 17). Documentary in particular mimics “patterns of social and psychological involvement” of everyday life in its rhetoric structure (Bondebjerg 2014, 21). As opposed to social constructionist theory, cognitivist film theory stresses the fact that narrative structures are not only cultural and social constructs, but are in fact partly biologically determined in our brain (Bondebjerg 2014, 14). These cognitive structures in our brain are translated to different forms of documentary rhetoric that engage with these structures. The expectation of documentary in general is mostly that it makes direct claims about the real world, whereas fiction films do so in a more indirect way (Bondebjerg 2014, 14). But within different sub- genres of documentary, there is variation in how they engage the viewer with reality through certain strategies. These strategies differ in the way they combine narrative, emotion and memory. When a filmmaker revisits situations, subjects, objects or events from the past in his or her narrative, they trigger a unique interplay of the viewer’s emotions, personal experience

21 and own memories (Bondebjerg 2014, 17).9

2.2 Media and memory: remembering (without) experience

Since the 1990s, remembrance has seemed to grow immensely within media practices. As Van Alphen points out, we have reached an era in which remembrance practices are everywhere – even so that we might even call it a genre (2007, 63). Whether that is a memorial, a museum, historical documentaries, Hollywood biopics, they all feature a past which we can activity revisit in the present. The frame in which the past is presented is not neutral – media can make us feel the past too. That has everything to do with the way we engage with these structures on an emotional level. In this age of remembering, topics that have been unable to be addressed for a long time are now being pushed everywhere. We can see this, for example, in documentaries about topics as trauma, migration, the Holocaust, other genocides and wars (Van Alphen 2007, 63). The remembrance practices present us with things we have often not even experienced for ourselves. In 1997, Marianne Hirsch (being the child of a Holocaust survivor) coined the influential term ‘postmemory’. By introducing this type of memory, she explains a type of memory that a second generation can ‘inherit’ from their parents after a trauma. A generation of children who grew up as children from a traumatised generation, often have a very powerful memory of that trauma although they have not experienced it themselves (Hirsch 2008, 103). This type of memory is interesting since “its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation” (Hirsch 1997, 22). Postmemory is thus partly similar to prosthetic memory in its imaginative character, but the difference is that with the concept of postmemory, Hirsch really focuses on the aspect of the ‘generational gap’ in remembering. It has mainly been used in relation to the remembrance of the holocaust. Even though the children of holocaust survivors have not experienced this trauma, it is still part of who they are and how they relate themselves to history. A trauma such as the holocaust is for most people today something that they have not witnessed for themselves, but it still continues to affect the next generation in the present. In other words, they do remember it – partly because of transmission of stories within the private sphere of the family, partly because of mediated images. As Hirsch argues, this second

9 Bondebjerg categorises these strategies in a somewhat similar way as Bill Nichols; he identifies authoritative, observational, dramatised and poetic-reflexive prototypes of documentary.

22 generation can grow up in the shadow of these ‘inherited memories’ of traumatic events, with the risk of not having the freedom to create own memories and stories (2008, 107). The second generation after a traumatised generation is heavily reliant on photographic images as a source of information on the trauma (Hirsch 2008, 111). She underlines the importance of family photographs as ‘a medium for postmemory’ and their affective power with the work of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Georges Didi-Huberman (M. Hirsch 2008, 115). Hirsch states:

When we look at photographic images from a lost past world, especially one that has been annihilated by force, we look not only for information or confirmation, but also for an intimate material and affective connection. We look to be shocked (Benjamin), touched, wounded, and pricked (Barthes’s punctum), torn apart (Didi-Huberman), and photographs thus become screens—spaces of projection and approximation and of protection. Small, two-dimensional, delimited by their frames, photographs minimise the disaster they depict and screen their viewers from it. But in seeming to open a window to the past and materialising the viewer’s relationship to it, they also give a glimpse of its enormity and its power. They can tell us as much about our own needs and desires (as readers and spectators) as they can about the past world they presumably depict. While authentication and projection can work against each other, the powerful tropes of familiality can also, and sometimes problematically, obscure their distinction. The fragmentariness and the two- dimensional flatness of the photographic image, moreover, make it especially open to narrative elaboration and embroidery and to symbolisation (M. Hirsch 2008, 116–17).

If we want to explain this theory in relation to documentary practices, we can argue that in the past decades many filmmakers incorporated this postmemory position. James Young has extended Hirsch’ theory and argues that, also in relationship to the holocaust, postmemorial work should feature this fragmentary nature of memory. Especially the generation (of artists) after a period of trauma has the obligation to depict the past ethically; that means to feature this fragmentary nature, the uncertainty and the gaps in knowledge in experience, rather than hiding it (Young 2000, 6). Although Young talks about the holocaust, this can also be easily applied to other historical traumas. As Michael J. Lazzara points out in the case of Latin- American post-dictatorship era, a new generation of filmmakers has reflected this postmemory position with cinematic techniques that feature performativity and reflexivity within the documentary landscape (Lazzara 2009).

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2.3 Memory is mediated José van Dijck’s theory on mediated memories, a term she coined to describe personal cultural memory and its mediality, has been very influential within the field of memory studies. This concept of mediated memories is relevant here because it also explores the relationship between private memories, for instance looking at collections of our memorabilia that we keep in the shoebox under our beds, as sites where the personal and collective meet (Van Dijck 2007, 2). Van Dijck claims that memory and media should not be seen as fixed objects; they are continuously in interaction and influence each other. Media technology does not simply transmit memory; it shapes it into something new. Memories are not just saved to the ‘hard disk’ of our brain, nor are they safely stored in the objects we remember them by. Rather they are mediated. Van Dijck: “Mediated memories perform acts of remembrance and communication at the crossroads of body, matter, and culture” (2004, 364). These memories are ‘mediated’ for three reasons. First of all, these objects mediate memories to us. Next to that, they exemplify relationships to groups of people. Thirdly, they are made of certain media: whether it is a VHS videotape, the fabric of a concert bracelet, a polaroid sheet or an mp3 file (Van Dijck 2007, 1). With the concept of mediated memories, Van Dijck reconceptualises the relationship between the brain, material objects and the cultural climate from which they stem (2007, 28). New media technology create new practices of remembering that will change the way cultural memory is shaped (2007, 29). Our personal online ‘objects’ such as playlists, social media profiles, digital videos and photos are now also an important part of how we remember. In our digital culture, these mediated memories are not only more visible all around us, but at the same time we create much more of them, for instance on social media (2004, 364). Film as a medium has the ability to register events, to revisit existing mediated memories, and at the same time to shape public identity (Van Dijck 2008, 71). If we look at documentary, a lot of mediated memory objects are incorporated in filmic representation, which creates new mediated memories in its own right. Van Dijck argues that the incorporation of family home movies in documentaries should therefore be considered with some reservations:

Family portraits captured in moving images are never simply retrospectives – found footage as relics of the past – but they are complex constructions of mental projections

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and technological substrates, […] and technical substrates interwoven with socio- cultural norms and conventions […] (2008, 77).

Van der Horst revisits many analogue private items in her films, such as letters, photos, albums, clippings, notes and tapes. Most of her films form a sharp contrast with contemporary digital culture, since she mainly revisits analogue memory objects. But the mediality of these items influences the poetic and affective quality in which they convey their message; they radiate nostalgia and mark a past time, and take on a new meaning in their newly mediated form (the film).

2.4 Prosthetic memory: the artificial limb made of imagined memories Alison Landsberg is known for her influential contribution to the memory discourse with her introduction of the concept of ‘prosthetic memory’ (2004). With this term, she refers to the abilities of modern media to shape cultural public memory of traumatic events. With mass media like television, cinema and the Internet, part of our understanding of collective memory is shaped by memories of events we have not experienced for ourselves. We have only seen certain events through mediated images, nevertheless they often feel so real that we regard them as our own memories. These memories therefore are prosthetic, as Landsberg argues, and function like “an artificial limb, actually worn on the body” (20). They are artificial since they are imagined memories, but at the same time these memories are real and important in our understanding of the world. Landsberg points to the ethical possibilities this brings for media in a capitalist society (18). By visiting a movie theatre and watching a film about a war we did not witness, it is possible to create a prosthetic memory of that war. Because we empathise with the characters we see on screen, we actually deeply feel this memory and consider it as one of our own memories. This prosthetic memory can change our subjective viewpoints on war in general, just as a personal memory of a lived-through event would (2). Cinema therefore has the potential to actively reshape the way we think about others in terms of race, class and gender differences, because it is now possible to literally see through the eyes of the other (148). Janet Walker argues that a certain type of films present an alternative way to recreate the feeling of traumatic events (2005, 189). She defines films that try to depict historical traumas as trauma cinema. A common feature of trauma cinema seems to be the use of

25 fragmentary, sensory and abstract cinematic strategies (190). Often it features an experience to make the viewer part of this traumatic memory (189).

2.5 The filmic translation of personal memory Anthropologist and filmmaker David MacDougall provides us with a framework that can help us consider how that experience of memory is translated into film. He points out that cinema is faced with a difficult task. How can we represent memory’s ‘images’ and arrangement if they are never seen? In other words, how does a director create an audio-visual translation on screen for that what we cannot see? Memory has an elusive and incoherent nature and is composed of sensory and verbal data (MacDougall 1998, 231). MacDougall convincingly discusses memory’s difficult relationship with representing it in film:

It [memory] offers us the past in flashes and fragments, and in what seems a hodge-podge of mental “media”. We seem to glimpse images, hear sounds, use unspoken words and reexperience such physical sensations as pressure and movement. It is in this multidimensionality that memory perhaps finds its closest counterpart in the varied and intersecting representational systems of film. But given this complexity, and equally the aura of insubstantiality and dreaming that frequently surrounds memory, we may ask whether in trying to represent memory in film we do something significantly different from other kinds of visual and textual representation. We create signs for things seen only in the mind’s eye. Are they nevertheless signs like any other? (1998, 231)

MacDougall notes that films that focus on memory are not able to record memory in itself. Instead they capture the ‘secondary representatives of memory’. He points to the external signs of remembering, such as physical objects that have survived the wheel of time, or revisiting places that have a connection to the past for the subject of the documentary. The showing of these objects in documentary is not the same as the memory in itself, since the objects are now different than they were in the past (1998, 232–33). Their status has changed with time passing by, for instance Polaroid pictures were an example of new technology in the early 1970s, but are popular today because they mediate a nostalgic and vintage (old) look. This is a shift in meaning and interpretation of those objects that is easily overlooked. Many documentaries tend to treat these objects if they actually are the memory itself. Interviews in documentary are often edited with photographs and archival footage, which are inserted to function as an exemplification of the memory of the interviewee (MacDougall 1998, 232).

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Traditionally, these secondary representatives of memory are incorporated into film in various ways. MacDougall categorises these “signs” in four different categories: signs of survival, replacement, resemblance and absence. These signs are useful, since they break down the different ways in which a director is able to visualise the memories of subjects, or that of him or herself. The signs of survival, replacement and resemblance are most often used in the depiction of any personal memory in documentary, but it seems that combining these three with the fourth category of signs of absence, seems to distinguish a specific directorial awareness concerning the depiction of the past.

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Chapter 3: Turning memory into narrative in Voices of Bam

3.1 Voices of Bam’s narrative of experience: wandering through the rubble In Van der Horst’s first feature documentary Voices of Bam (2006), she depicts the daily life of the surviving inhabitants of Bam, a medieval city in Iran that was completely destroyed by an earthquake in December 2003. This resulted in the death of a third of the entire city’s population of 100.000. Voices of Bam is a poetic mosaic documentary without real protagonists: it shows a chorus of more than ten voices of survivors who share their personal memories while they perform their daily rituals such as washing the dishes, walking to the market, rebuilding a home and riding a motorcycle. The camera stays with them for a while and follows them in their daily habits, after which it moves on to the next participant with a new story, leaving the previous participants behind (and who do not reappear in the film). In this way, the film’s narrative is structured as a journey in the present of watching the film. The film, which she co-directed with her cinematographer Maasja Ooms, was produced under unusual circumstances. In a seminar, Van der Horst explains that during the research for this film, Ooms and Van der Horst established the idea for the outspoken filmic style, which was based on the culture of lamenting the dead by talking to their photographs, which they experienced everywhere in Bam (Scottish Documentary Institute 2017). After three research visits to Bam during which she recorded these voice-overs that form the base of the film (later on, this will be described in more detail), Van der Horst was denied entry to Iran for unknown reasons. Luckily, Ooms was able to enter the country and record the imagery. The film thus contains fewer filmmaker-participant interactions than most other films of Van der Horst, because she was not on set filming the imagery. But because the voice-overs had already been recorded and edited by Van der Horst earlier, the basic structure and visual style of the film were already determined; Ooms knew what she had to look for in terms of the accompanying imagery.10 Despite these circumstances, Voices of Bam convincingly shows how Van der Horst brings together memory, experience and emotion in her narratives. Voices of Bam breaks with the realist documentary conventions of depicting historical traumatic events. There is no authoritative voice-over and no clear historical narrative (Bondebjerg 2014, 19). Instead, the filmmakers are invisible and silent throughout the film

10 Ooms even listened to Van der Horst’s montage of voice-over on earplugs while shooting the imagery, in order to search for the right rhythm in the accompanying images (Scottish Documentary Institute 2017).

28 and seem to follow daily life as it unfolds before their eyes. Van der Horst does not use interviews to acquire a testimony from her participants. Doing interviews is usually a common strategy for depicting historical events according to Bondebjerg (19). He also acknowledges the incorporation of newsreel footage as another important characteristic of historic documentary (19). Van der Horst however, discards the archival (news) footage of the earthquake, such as images of bodies pulled from under the rubble, crying women on the streets or ambulances approaching and vanishing. Because of this rejection, she limits herself to the present day as source of imagery. This is an ethical choice, taking into consideration the painful confrontation of the survivors with horrific news images. But it is also an aesthetical choice, because the exclusive use of poetic cinematography also strongly contributes to the immersive and emotional viewing experience of the film. From a fly-on-the-wall perspective, the camera continues to follow the different participants and their surroundings, discovering what is left of Bam like a “ghost wandering through the city” (“Voices of Bam” n.d.). The film only consists of long takes shot on Super 16 film, which give the film its visual poetic aesthetic. The participants in the film are first introduced by long observational takes that allow the viewer to immerse their self in the world of this person.

Image 1: Voices of Bam, 00:02:07.

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3.2 The inner voices talking: active remembering in direct address These dreamlike and surreal shots of the cityscape in rubble are accompanied by an audio track consisting of the voice-overs of survivors of the earthquake and an intricate soundscape that guides the viewer’s focus into an internal world of experience.11 In these voice-overs, most of the participants talk directly to a person they have lost, sharing their intimate thoughts and memories in a one-way-conversation. Others talk directly to God.12 They address their loved one or God with their concerns to move on with life after their death and how they can cope without them. Since these internal thoughts are only featured in the voice- over (and never visually articulated in on-screen scenes), this results in the fact that the whole film has the experience of being inside someone’s head. This is amplified by the fact that Van der Horst has asked the participants to speak slow or whisper in these voice-overs. This generates a greater sense of intimacy. It creates a feeling of proximity and trust, because usually we only allow someone to whisper in our ear when we know (and trust) someone. In this way, the mode of address is personal and has a strong emotional resonance. She finds an audio-visual translation that respects the intimacy of personal memory. It shows that while moving on in everyday life, your head is still somewhere else: with the lost people you love. She honours the different ways in which the participants want to talk about their own grief and memories, instead of forcing them to reply to (invasive) questions about a trauma (as many directors do). She also edits these voice-overs in a different way: instead of combining them with a close-up of the participant, they are usually combined with wide frames as the camera zooms out to show the surroundings after a close-up of a participant. In this way, the viewer is stimulated to discover meaning in the various elements of the surroundings while listening to the voice-over: for instance different people walking on a square (image 6). These voice-overs are often combined with family pictures from before the earthquake within the film. The happy family pictures with the family members smiling (image 2) contrast with the appearance of the documentary’s participants in the present day (image 1). These photographs are signs of survival, a term MacDougall coins for images and objects that

11 The soundscape, composed by Harry de Wit, is also very important for the emotional sphere in Voices of Bam and deserves to be examined more closely, but due to limited room within this thesis I will focus on the use of voice-over. 12 There is one story in the film in which two inner voices talk to each other (and thus are both still alive). That is the story of the couple whose wedding is portrayed in the film. In the voice-over of their inner voices, they tell the other how their forbidden love for the other felt before the earthquake and how their marriage a finally allowed after the earthquake.

30 have a physical link to a past time, such as old photographs and films. In the case of photographic imagery there is an indexical relationship with the past too (MacDougall 1998, 234). These family photographs now have a radically different meaning than they had at the times they were made. Once they were reminders of happy events, now they seem almost sacred reminders of a completely different life that was not marked by grief and loss. In Voices of Bam the analogue photos are the only tangible depictions of the people who have died; therefore they are of huge importance in remembering.

Image 2: Voices of Bam, 00:03:53.

Sometimes these family pictures are inserted as full screen static shots; sometimes they are presented within the narrative as one of the participants engages with these pictures, in which the importance of the surviving photographs is clearly visible. Multiple participants are shown in scenes in which they cherish the photos dearly; this is the closest they can be to their deceased loved one. Especially when the photos are honoured by one of the participants in the film, memory is performed as an active process. The participants keep engaging with these photographs to revisit their memories, which allows them to keep the memory of their loved one alive in their daily reality, but also in the film. The engagement with these signs of survival is shown in a heart-breaking scene in which an orphaned boy desperately wants to kiss a surviving picture of his parents. The little boy is hysterically crying to take the picture out of the cabinet in which his elder sister has carefully stored it behind glass to keep it safe. His strong emotional reaction - he starts

31 throwing a tantrum - to his sister’s reluctance to take the picture out of the cabinet, proves the importance of these signs of survival for both the little boy and his sister. She does not want to risk something happening to the picture of their parents and is reluctant to even to touch it, and her little brother wants to hug the picture and kiss the faces of his parents on the glass

Image 3: Voices of Bam, 01:03:27. frame (image 3). Both cherish the picture as if it was the memory of their parents itself. But in the case of Voices of Bam, many of the indexical reminders of the life before the earthquake are gone. However, there are objects that function as substitutes: the destroyed photographs that can be found in the rubble of Bam. MacDougall coined the term signs of replacement when the original objects are not there anymore to be filmed. The damaged photographs do not bear the same indexicality as the original photograph because are (partly) demolished and torn. A woman who has lost her children asks a man who owns a photo studio to restore some of the damaged photos into a video. “Can you make a nice landscape on it? Can you make it really beautiful?” They get into a short conversation on the type of music that should be inserted; would she like sad or happy music? The lady is worried if it will turn out all right. The man from the photo studio reassures her that he will make them as beautiful as his own family pictures. The man scans the torn pictures to his computer and we see him edit the pictures on his computer. The partly demolished photographs are turned into a colourful montage video, with the cheesy backdrops, cheap editing effects and accompanied

32 with a sad song. This montage video has become a replacement for the original photographs

Image 4: Voices of Bam, 01:01:19. of the children (image 4).

3.3 Resembling memory and emphasising absence Powerful metaphors or associative imaginary can attribute to this interpretation of past experience (MacDougall 1998, 234). The cityscape full with broken concrete rubble forms the backdrop of nearly every shot of Voices of Bam, which not only functions as indexical evidence of the natural disaster, but also as a metaphoric depiction of the survivors’ inner states: shattered. They strengthen the dramatic tension and the affective dimension. MacDougall coins the term sign of resemblance for associative means which rather express ‘how something felt’ instead of ‘how something was’ (1992, 31). However, not many documentaries also incorporate signs of absence (MacDougall 1998, 235). These signs not only feature the gaps in memory, such as forgetting or the intentional distortion of memory, they also try to capture the atrocities that words fail to describe. The limitations of the accessibility of the past are translated into objects that embody an absence. They can use historical objects ironically, or replace them with a complete opposite or question testimony.13 We can argue that films that incorporate these signs of absence,

13 MacDougall uses the example of the vast empty environment shots in Shoah as signs of absence (Claude Lanzmann, 1985) that put extra emphasis the atrocities that took place there (MacDougall 1998, 236).

33 highlight the difficulties of representing history.

Image 5: Voices of Bam, 00:00:45.

For example, when Van der Horst shows photographic negatives that have been pulled out of the rubble (image 5). Opposed to developed photographs that show the actual captured image, negatives are not often part of a documentary since they do not show the complete image. Showing a negative without the context of a photographer at work, but holding it handheld to the sky to discover only a cut-out of a face, is therefore a dramatic and poetical choice. It gives the impression of a person, but we don’t actually see or recognise the person. In this way, featuring a negative is thus a powerful sign of absence because it embodies an absence. It becomes an anonymous representative of all the other people who have died in Bam and underlines the fact that their stories will remain inaccessible for the viewer. But I want to argue that Van der Horst at the same time makes use of signs of absence and signs of resemblance. MacDougall proposes these categories as two different categories (1992, 31-32), but I suggest considering them in interrelation within Van der Horst’s work. In one of the most important scenes in the film, the camera stays at a busy crossroad for over 5 minutes (from 00:25:30 to 00:30:58, image 6). In this long take, the camera focuses on the people who cross the street, on foot, by car, on a motorbike. The camera lingers and follows the action of what happens on the street, exploring all the faces, following them for a bit and moving on to a next one. This poetic long take is accompanied by a voice-over that consists of fragments of stories about the earthquake, told by different inhabitants of Bam. Each of these

34 stories gets cut off, and is faded into another story after a short time, resulting in a fragmented voice-over track consisting of a multitude of voices, combined with the images of the crossroad in the city and its diegetic sounds. Because different inner voice tracks are layered on top of each other and fade in and out, they become incomprehensible. The subtitles can only catch fragments of what is being said. Van der Horst layers these fragments of inner voices of loss and projects them onto random strangers that happen to be crossing the street. These inner voices are inserted here in a different way than in the rest of the film, they are not comprehensive accounts of an experience of a participant that we have been introduced to. Through Van der Horst’s montage, the chaotic bits and pieces of (horrific) stories are projected onto random passers-by, as the camera catches a glimpse of their faces when they cross the street.

Image 6: Voices of Bam, 00:26:44.

This makes the scene a powerful metaphor for the collective memory of the disaster. This metaphoric collision of voices in the audio track captures the grief that is felt on every street corner in Bam. This mimics van der Horst’s own experience of walking through the streets of Bam. This audio montage with the haunting collision of voices, the noise of the busy crossroad in combination with lingering long take, resembles the multitude of grief that can be felt by anyone who crosses the streets. The use of the voice-over in terms of these inner voices that are featured throughout the film is, however, also a sign of absence. Throughout the

35 film, just as in the scene at the crossroad, we hear people talk directly to a person they know will never respond: the voices of the dead are absent. Featuring these inner voices of the survivors of Bam, who are talking directly to their deceased loved one, underscores the fact that the person on the other side does not talk back anymore. With their death, the victims left behind a large void in the life of the survivors, and this sudden absence in their life is translated into a narrative that is based on this absence. Through the editing of the film, the soundscape, the poetic observational long takes of the participants, combined with the voice-overs, a metaphorical chorus of ‘inner voices’ is created that represents the tense atmosphere in Bam, and to which the film owes its name. The filmic creation of these ‘inner voices’ makes it possible to express grief and traumatic memories in an intimate and active way, allowing the viewer to feel a small fraction of what the people in the film have experienced. It captures the beauty of survival after a tragic loss, by showing that daily life goes on. Although the severity of the earthquake is present from the beginning of the film, there still is room for the reminiscence of Bam’s beauty before the earthquake, and the participants still occasionally smile. The film begins relatively ‘light’, with scenes like a boy playing with birds (image 1) and the marriage of a couple which is finally allowed to marry. But the narrative gradually shifts to people who are increasingly marked by grief: children who have lost their parents, and parents who have lost their children or whole family. Instead of starting directly with the disaster, Van der Horst gradually shows a little bit more grief, eventually ending in perhaps the saddest place in Bam: the graveyard. Because as we hear the people of Bam crying in the graveyard, Van der Horst captures children playing in the very same place, showing that life will go on. By taking the viewer on a gradual emotional journey, she finds a subtle way to increasingly engage and immerse the viewer. Because she does not start with ‘the worst’ stories, Van der Horst avoids the reaction that often happens when watching the news; people frequently avert their eyes and distance themselves from disasters depicted in the news. Instead, Van der Horst carefully layers the fragmented pieces of a painful shared collective memory in a bearable way. This gradually results in a more emotional engagement with the atrocities that have happened in Bam. Voices of Bam is based on the narrative that is constructed of the voice-over of the inner voices that actively remember their loved ones. It shows that memory isn’t static, but is in fact a process. Van der Horst and Ooms have tried to make this personal memory accessible to the

36 viewer using direct address and a matching poetic cinematography that captures the beauty of life (by lingering through the city and discovering life as it unfolds), in order to present it as an experience that takes place in the here and now of the film, but which at the same time is fuelled with (painful) memories of the past. This multi-voiced, fragmented narrative represents the notion that everyone has a different experience of a traumatic collective memory of the same event; at the same time, it mimics the fragmentary nature of memory itself. In this way Van der Horst is able to find an alternative representation style for this ungraspable feeling of the grief that lingers over Bam like a dark cloud.

37

Chapter 4: Negotiating and performing authorship in Water Children 4.1 Reflexivity on art and life Water Children (2011), van der Horst’s sixth film, is a feature length essay film about fertility. Van der Horst follows the Japanese-Dutch artist Tomoko Mukaiyama. Mukaiyama is both a concert pianist and a performance artist. Van der Horst films Mukaiyama while she is creating the multidisciplinary artwork ‘wasted’. Mukaiyama creates an art installation exploring womanhood and fertility, which she builds in a small village in her home country. The reactions of the visitors to the visual artwork will be the inspiration for variations that she turns into another form of art: the variations that she will make to Bach’s famous Goldberg Variations on the piano. The art installation consists of labyrinth of 10.000 silk white dresses, all elegantly sown together. When they are carefully positioned in an empty school building, the result is an almost heavenly looking temple. Visitors are invited to walk through this white maze of dresses and immerse themselves in the artwork. Van der Horst shows this immersive experience: how the dresses move with the visitors as their bodies touch them, how the artwork moves their emotions as they walk through it. In the centre of the ‘cathedral’ of

Image 7: Water Children, 00:14:12. dresses, hangs a strand of dresses that have been covered in Mukaiyama’s own menstrual blood, like a symbolic tree of life (image 7). Mukaiyama invites the women who visit the artwork to join her in the ritual of bleeding on a white gown. Each woman is given a dress to perform this ritual at home and to share this experience. Based on the personal experiences

38 these women write back to her, Mukaiyama wants to create new variations to Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Van der Horst collects the testimonies of women who want to share their personal experience with the menstrual ritual: what memories did the artwork evoke? The stories of all these women are framed by one larger presence that manifests itself in the voice-over at the beginning of the film: Van der Horst herself. The first part of this voice-over follows a conventional characteristic of personal documentary. It immediately prompts awareness to the fact that we are watching a story that is created by a filmmaker. The film opens with Van der Horst’s own voice-over:

One day, Tomoko Mukaiyama was sitting behind her piano in her home in Amsterdam. She was practicing Bach’s Goldberg variations. That day, she told me that she was planning to make a huge artwork, a cathedral of 12.000 white silk dresses in a village in Japan and this music was going to be part of it. I decided to go and film it (00:00:33- 00:01:06).

Van der Horst has experimented with variation in the degree to which she incorporates herself into her films. Whereas she was absent on-screen and in the voice-over of Voices of Bam, many of her films seem to feature her persona in varying degrees - whether by visual appearance within the frame, or only briefly in the voice-over. Unlike documentary directors14 that always perform a particular version of their identity as their recognizable trademark (Griffiths 2014, 2, 26), Van der Horst seems to explore the degree of subjectivity needed to tell the story she wants to tell within each film. In Water Children, this process of the internal exploration of her own involvement is a substantial part of the film – even though the film is not (only) about her. If we want to analyse the varying degree to which a filmmaker is visible within his or her documentary, a large part of the theoretical debate seems to be focused on the division between objectivity and subjectivity. This has often resulted in the classification of these films and their directors in certain categories (Griffiths 2014, 15) that do not fit Van der Horst’s work: it is not just autobiographical, nor is it purely biographical. The fact that the presence of the documentary auteur (on-screen) has been analysed in such opposing categories, has everything to do with documentary’s origins of ‘objectivity’. The indexical relationship that the documentary image has with the actual world, clashes with the idea of subjectivity and has

14 For example playing the neutral geek (Louis Theroux) or performing the role of the cynical, political activist (Michael Moore).

39 often had a negative connotation (Griffiths 2014, 207–8). When a filmmaker does enter the frame as a subject, the traditional filmmaker’s objective authority is challenged (Griffiths 2014, 1). Theories on the on-screen presence of filmmakers have been conceptualised as reflexivity, for example by Jay Ruby and Bill Nichols. Ruby was one of the first critics to talk about reflexivity in relationship to documentary. He argues that it functions as an alternative to naive documentary realism, in which now the producer, product and process are revealed (Ruby 1977, 3). Reflexivity in relation to documentary has become well known through Bill Nichols’ adaptation of Ruby, coining the term of the ‘reflexive mode’. Nichols considers reflexivity to be an important analytic tool for investigating a filmmaker’s on-screen presence as meta-commentary on representation. He argues that it “prods the viewer to a heightened form of consciousness about his or her relation to a documentary and what it represents” (Nichols 2010, 197). Through for instance associative editing, or by entering the frame (or through their voice), a filmmaker can draw attention to film form that reminds the viewer of the fact that he or she is watching a film, a representation that is not ‘the truth’ in itself, but rather ‘a truth’ constructed by the filmmaker. However, I consider performativity and reflexivity to be more intertwined than Nichols and Ruby, which cannot be distilled as separate entities. In this chapter I will look at Water Children in terms of this reflexivity, but I will use different theorisations of the term, presented by different authors, in order to do justice to the complex reflexivity and performativity that defines Van der Horst’s oeuvre, whose work does not fit into any category. In the case of Water Children, reflexivity is certainly present on different meta-levels. I propose to regard reflexivity in a broader sense than both Ruby and Nichols; taking into consideration the viewer’s own abilities to signify analogies and make associations, and the encapsulated room to discover for the viewer’s own experience of Mukaiyama’s artwork, also as reflexive strategies. First of all, reflexivity is expressed through explicitly meditating on the making of an artwork and how art is able to move people in a profound way. We see how the cathedral of white dresses is built from the brain of an artist; subsequently we see how it evokes emotions, even for people who are hesitant towards art, especially with a taboo subject like menstruation. Most of the villagers have never even seen a modern artwork. Since the visitors are unaware of the conventions of modern art, such as regular criticisms to modern art in

40 terms of shocking the audience with taboo subjects for pretentious reasons, brings the attention back to the question of the relevance of art. We hear the experience of the visitors who start with a ‘blank canvas of art experience’. In this way, the film is meta-meditation on the relevance of art. It shows the process of making it: the origins of inspiration, the creative process of Mukaiyama, the questions she asks herself while making it and understanding the response to her artwork – “I am not sure how all the stories are connected yet,” Mukaiyama asks herself (00:37:19). But what is interesting is that Mukaiyama goes even further in incorporating these responses to her artwork in the next phase of the artwork: the variations inspired by the women’s stories to Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The fact that she includes the visitors’ reception of her artwork within the artwork itself is highly reflexive. By doing this, the complete artwork ‘wasted’ becomes a cycle, resembling the cycle of menstruation. This filmic exploration of the authorship of Mukaiyama - as a visual artist as well as a pianist - bares great similarities with the way Van der Horst works as an artist creating her artwork: the documentary. The film implicitly shows the importance of art in terms of its ability to move us. Both artists share their own doubts facing the issues of representation. They also both feature a reflexivity of ethics concerning taboo subjects: both women have a respectful and intelligent way of approaching the people they come in contact with during their creative process. Whether it is the visitors of the artwork in Mukaiyama’s case, or the way in which Van der Horst engages with the people she interviews. Mukaiyama immerses the visitors through an installation that you have to experience rather than just see. She succeeds in creating an artwork that is open to many different interpretations but also has a generally valid appeal that stimulates one’s own contemplation on personal experience with fertility. The mystery of fertility remains intact by introducing it in this particular context that bears great resemblance to (sacred) rituals. If forces the visitor to consider his or her own place in relationship to the artwork. In a way, it is almost impossible to grasp the sensation when confronting this artwork in words. But there is another art form that is also fundamental to the film’s meaning: music. Mukaiyama incorporates the reactions to her visual artwork again into her other strand of authorship: she performs variations on her piano to Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The Goldberg Variations, although the title of the piece indicates that they were once also variations, is a well-known static piano piece for every concert pianist. In a way, Mukaiyama is taking two rituals as a starting point for her artworks. Rituals have to be performed in the

41 same way: they form a base. In Mukaiyama’s case, it is the variations to the base that interest her. First of all, this is the case for Bach’s piano piece, which has been ritually performed by pianists all over the world. Secondly, it is the bleeding on the identical white gowns by her and the other women. By first marking what the ritual is, she is able to capture the process of variation to that ritual, which is also reflexive in exploring the uniqueness and personal subjectivity of every person in the world. By using Mukaiyama’s powerful visual metaphor to access the personal experience of the other women, Van der Horst is able to touch the issue of menstruation in a way that is not tacky or impolite and that respects intimacy, a feature that is distinctive for her authorship. In this way, this is also a reflexive choice because it takes into account the role of the artist and his or her ethical obligation to handle the topic of menstruation with delicacy and respect, a breeding ground from which intimate testimonies are able to emerge. This results in a film that draws attention to a metaphorical representation as an alternative to the exploitation of documentary participants (which could easily have happened with the topic of menstruation). Secondly, the way in which Van der Horst stimulates the viewer’s associations on a meta-level in order to connect more intricate cross connections between life and art, can also be considered reflexive. The issue of menstruation is in day-to-day life not usually connected to larger questions in life concerning life and death, but is rather something that people hide out of shame and put in the category of other human faeces. However, Van der Horst re- establishes the topic of menstruation in relation to fertility, with the female womb as the poetic origin of all life. The topic of menstruation is an entrance to further mediate on the meaning of life and death in general. The wide variety of shots of the Japanese fertile lands, not only form a pretty backdrop for the story (image 8). They connect menstruation to fertility in a larger context; there is a meta-analogy between the volcanic soil of Japan with flourishing green grounds packed with life in all of its forms, and the female womb, together meditating on the whole circle of life. This editing is reflexive because it encourages the viewer to consider interrelations in these themes and stimulates meta-reflection. That reflexivity on both art and fertility as a source of life is also expressed by subjects in their testimony, for instance in a scene with a Japanese farmer who states:

42

Image 8: Water Children, 00:15:14.

I’m a farmer. I work the land. When you get rid of weed, it always grows back. How shall I put it? When I work the land… I feel the force of life. Before this [Mukaiyama’s artwork and the making of the documentary] I was less aware of that. So now I bring a camera when I go and pull weeds… and then I take photos of a dragonfly, for instance (00:20:48-00:21:25).

Firstly, the farmer reflects on the power of art to change the way we see our reality, to heighten our awareness and to see things in a new light. He is not the same as he was before this transformative experience prompted by the artworks of both Mukaiyama and Van der Horst. But he also reflects on the analogy between the fertile lands and the topic of female fertility: seeing similarities in the miracle of menstruation, the growing of weeds, and the life that the fertile lands bring (the bugs), all seeing them in a new way: they should be cherished instead of being demolished. It reflects the similarities in terms of performance of a ritual of Mother Nature in the artwork as it happens in nature outside the artwork. Japan has a lot of volcanoes and their eruptions have caused very fertile lands over many years. There is an analogy in destruction in nature, as volcanoes can destroy and erupt with their hot lava, just as menstruation does in a way (the death of the endometrium causes a fierce pain while leaving the body). But both are discarded in order to make way for another potential to give life; for a woman, a new ovulation is another chance to get her egg fertilised, and a volcanic eruption causes fertile land from which new life can grow.

43

By mentioning the fact that the farmer now wants to capture this ‘force of life’ with his camera, he also reflects on Van der Horst’s influence on him as a (documentary) photographer, because now he feels the need to record the beauty of life with his camera in order to show others, just as Van der Horst does with her documentaries. Next to that, the wide shots of the rice fields also stimulate the viewer’s own contemplations and associations, because this setting of tranquillity and natural beauty would in day-to-day-life also be a place to reflect on life (rather than for instance a busy street). This sequence, layered with reflexivity, prompts the viewer to explore these associations of fertility too – heightening our awareness by the sharing of this reflexive testimony. The analogy of the coinciding creation of these artworks, the reflexive dialogue between Mukaiyama and Van der Horst, and the reflexive layering of themes legitimise both their roles as artists. Their artworks are in constant dialogue with each other throughout the film. Both show the issues of (visual) representation and embrace the wide variety in its reactions; how it creates a different meaning for everyone. All the women share different stories on fertility when approaching the same artwork. The stories told by the other women, actually function as a mirror for both Mukaiyama and Van der Horst. In a way, this makes the film reflexive of the issue of authorship as well. They both reflexively show their identity as producers within the frame but also literally in artwork (Mukaiyama for instance with her own menstrual blood in her artwork and Van der Horst with her voice-over), while at the same time show the creation of their product (the installation, the variations to the piano piece), and reveal the process (their concerns in making representations of reality).

4.2 Self-reflexive authorship as negotiation and performance There have been a number of scholars who have criticised this understanding of the effects of reflexivity in terms of the viewer’s understanding of reflexivity as epistemological awareness. For example, scholars as Charlotte Goveart who has argued for reception studies to question the assumption that reflexive elements within documentary would automatically lead to epistemological awareness with the viewer (Govaert 2011). Another major issue with explaining reflexivity is pointed out by Trent Griffiths, who argues that the presence of the filmmaker is not just reflexive in terms of epistemological concerns. A filmmaker’s on-screen presence is actually responsible for creating the emotional meaning of the story because they

44 are not just ‘authorial objects’ behind a camera, but are also interacting as a subject with the world they depict (Griffiths 2014). In this respect, I want to argue that Van der Horst’s presence within her films is not just to reflexively consider ‘documentary truth’. As Griffiths argues, there is an alternative to approaching the documentary auteur that avoids the ‘hard’ division of the subject portrayed in the documentary opposed to the documentary’s author. What if we look at the director’s presence as a subject with whom we empathise? Griffiths convincingly argues for a different way of textual analysis that avoids these theoretical limitations of these restrictive oppositions that have been used to define personal documentary. In the case of what he calls ‘filmmaker in the frame’ films, he argues that certain documentary directors do show their appearance (through sound, in the frame or in titles) but are still concerned with depicting the other in their films (Griffiths 2014, 5). As we propose to see Van der Horst as both the subject as the author of her film, it directly foregrounds – as Griffiths has argued - the affective quality of one’s work (Griffiths 2014, iii). This proposition avoids Van der Horst being regarded as a purely authorial object that can only reveal epistemological concerns, or as an autobiographical filmmaker who shares her (entire) personal life. Traditional theories on reflexivity would predominantly focus on Van der Horst as an outsider who proves her trustworthiness in representation as a filmmaker to the viewer; but I also want to focus on how she is self-reflexively exploring her own authorial identity as a filmmaker in order to let us empathise with her. Just as Griffiths shows in the case of Werner Herzog in Grizzly Man (2005), the consideration of authorship becomes key to the perspectives created through filming (2014, 30). Griffiths differentiates between self-reflexivity and reflexivity, with self-reflexivity as a way in which filmmakers place themselves in the depicted world as subjects who are:

“[…] engaging with their own identity and authority as filmmakers and using their subjective experience of representation as a lens through which to make meaning of the shared social world” (2014, 209).

Self-reflexivity is thus connected to the filmmaker’s presence as a subject with whom we engage. I propose to consider the differences between self-reflexivity and reflexivity not as rigid as Griffiths does, but more as a gradual difference that changes when there’s more emphasis on the filmmaker as subject. The filmmaker’s presence is enacted through

45 performance. Griffiths proposes to consider the filmmaker’s exploration of his or her own authority performative, based on the concept of performing identity of Judith Butler (Butler 2011) and that of documentary as being always performative because of a collision as Stella Bruzzi argues (Bruzzi 2011). The combination of these theoretical frameworks results in considering authorship, authority and identity as not solid or set, but always performed in a specific action: whether that is in interaction with a person or a situation, it is something that is a process that arises from a specific context and produces meaning because of these particular interactions (Griffiths 2014, 10–11). The first bit of the voice-over that I mentioned in paragraph 4.1, follows the reflexive tradition of introducing the filmmaker as a more authorial object; it tells us that there is a filmmaker but not a whole lot more. It gives us information about the origins of the idea for the film and is reflexive of filmmaking. But then the voice-over continues:

In the time to come, we would speak to each other a lot. But there was one topic we stayed clear off, time after time. Tomoko didn’t tell me why it was inevitable for her to make this work of art. And I, I kept silent about why I wanted to film it (00:01:25- 00:01:49).

This puts extra emphasis on Van der Horst’s own personal engagement, which makes it self- reflexive. Van der Horst reflects on her own subjectivity, female identity and authorship. From the very beginning, it has us wondering what the relationship between the director and the subject is, and about these ‘secret’ intentions Van der Horst and Mukaiyama did not share with each other while making the film. Although Van der Horst will not reappear in the next twenty minutes after this voice-over (which marks the start of the film), nor is she seen in images or titles, her presence and our curiosity to her personal relationship to the topic has been planted by this early voice-over. The next time she introduces herself is because Mukaiyama directly addresses Van der Horst in a dialogue, in which she suddenly looks right through the lens of the camera into Van der Horst’s eyes:

Mukaiyama: When are you coming into this film? Because you’re not in it now. Van der Horst: I’m in it with my questions. Mukaiyama: Not this time. You’ll be really in it. I just know. Van der Horst: How do you know? Mukaiyama: I feel it. Right? (00:25:21-00:25:46)

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Image 9: Water Children, 00:25:41.

Mukaiyama’s gaze into the camera is not just directed towards Van der Horst as a ‘distant’ filmmaker, but also to Van der Horst as a woman who is part of the story as much as Mukaiyama herself (image 9). We feel the intimacy of a friendship, not only because of the proximity and framing. We feel the sensation that Mukaiyama might know Van der Horst even better than she knows herself. The scene is very intimate and self-reflexive, functioning as another point in the story arc to explicitly remind the viewer of Van der Horst’s personal engagement, and in what light she negotiates her position in relation to the perspectives of the different women mediating on the topic of fertility. Although she does not reveal her exact intentions here yet, it creates the dramatic tension of the documentary, which is based on Van der Horst’s personal negotiation of authorship and her own involvement with the topic of fertility. At the same time, dialogues like this challenge Van der Horst’s authority. Because Van der Horst is the director and the choice if she wants to be in her film or not, seems to be hers and not that of Mukaiyama. By breaking the convention of the filmmaker asking questions and the documentary subjects simply answering them, it becomes clear that the documentary representation is rooted from a collision between Van der Horst and her subject Mukaiyama in which Van der Horst is negotiating her authorship. Later on, the conversation continues, this time on screen with both of the women present within one long take, focusing first on Mukaiyama, and then on Van der Horst (image 10 and 11):

47

Image 10: Water Children, 00:45:42.

Mukaiyama: Because of this music and also this ‘red room’ … I’m exposing myself in a way. And I was really getting curious: When is Aliona going to expose herself within this film? That’s why I asked: when are you coming into this film? Van der Horst: You were right. It’s true. I never told you. Also because I was the director and I felt it would burden you in some way. Mukaiyama: Why? Van der Horst: You get so many responses from all these other women. My story is very short.. It’s like… I’ve been trying to have children for a long time. For seven years, maybe eight. And it just doesn’t happen. Van der Horst: When I started the film, I was still trying. I had this really strange superstition. I thought: maybe in the year I’m making this film I’ll get pregnant. You don’t know. I thought: Maybe it will turn around. Maybe my fate will be different. (00:45:30-00:46:51)

Image 11: Water Children, 00:46:32.

This conversation finally presents us answers in terms of Van der Horst’s own engagement with the topic that was coined in the early voice-over, namely her troubled relationship with

48 fertility, which made her fascinated with the topic from the beginning. In the last part of the film, she finds a ritual – that of Mizuko kuyō; a Japanese ritual dedicated to honour stillborn children and miscarriages which are called ‘water children’, which becomes a powerful metaphor for her own mourning. The title of the film thus resonates with her personal involvement with the topic of fertility: the metaphor of the water children forms a way to let go her grief. Van der Horst finds the metaphor for her own grief over her (imagined) water children. Van der Horst explains how she imagines them in the voice-over. Her imagination of her water children is found in the faces of the children she meets while filming, but also in the water children she makes: little puppets from clay. She uses another type of imagery to differentiate her own audio-visual response to Mukaiyama’s artwork: she presents it as an experience.

4.3 Performing experience and subjective perspective: the two visual languages

Image 12: Water Children, 01:08:31.

Van der Horst combines visual diary on Super 8 footage with the testimony of a couple mourning their four premature babies. Van der Horst mirrors her loss in this ritual, making it a powerful visual translation for an invisible loss. Van der Horst includes sequences that combine Super 8 footage with a ticking projector reel in the audio track, creating a vintage home video aesthetic. These sequences are mostly seen in the last part of the film but are also

49 noticeable throughout the film in small fragments (see image 9 too). This Super 8 footage has a different quality of image than most of the film. The Super 8 footage is grainy, handheld and vintage coloured (image 12). The choice of incorporating newly made Super 8 footage for stylistic reasons is quite similar to the inclusion of historical Super 8 home movies, which are often incorporated in personal documentary; mostly childhood memories or rituals that have been recorded by a family member.15 What they share, is that both historical Super 8 footage and newly created Super 8 footage have a very strong affective quality that is tied to the immediacy of experience. A home movie aesthetic reminds us how something felt, and at the same time it opens up room for

Image 13: Water Children, 00:28:34. Image 14: Water Children, 01:01:58. associations: the viewer can relate to his or her own experience and memories. Whereas family Super 8 movies mainly function as a visual representation of the past, Van der Horst creates a visual translation for her own present-day lived experience while making the film. Van der Horst’s feet plunging in the water, her hands carving a little water child doll out of clay: these shots all feature her body engaging with her surroundings, creating the feeling of the sensory experience from her point of view perspective (image 13 and 14). These shots are highly relatable because they are point of view shots; we literally look through her eyes, as if her body is temporally ours to engage with the surroundings. They simulate the feeling of being there with her on this personal journey. They function as a visual translation of Van der Horst’s own involvement in the topic of fertility and represents the invisible mourning of her unborn children, who had ‘no grave and no funeral,’ in Van der Horst’s own words (01:01:40). These sequences therefore function as somewhat of a personal visual diary of Van der Horst that is interwoven with the other stories of other women. However, by choosing these different qualities of image within the same film, she creates a separate visual language for her

15Ernst van Alphen, who will be discussed in more detail in chapter five, has argued that the found footage home movies in the work of Peter Forgacs provide a personal framework which the viewer engages with, since it highlights the affective relationship between director and his or her surroundings, thus creating intimacy (van Alphen 2007).

50 own experience. She distinguishes her own subjective experience as an unwanted childless woman and filmmaker, which is shown in the Super 8 sequences (image 13 and 14), from that of the other women she depicts (in the images shot by Maasja Ooms, image 7). At the same time, these shots remind us that there is filmmaker that frames all these stories, which is reflexive because we are reminded that they stem from a filmmaker’s personal viewpoint. But more importantly, they are highly performative: they feature the filmmaker’s subjectivity that functions as a personal framework through which we feel the personal experience of making this film, to walk in Van der Horst’s shoes, rather than reminding us that this film is a construction. Not only are these sequences translating Van der Horst’s subjective experience. It mimics the viewer’s own experience in terms of the sensory depictions of a body engaging with its surroundings, leaving room for contemplation. It poses a way in which a viewer would explore Japan and this constructed experience of physically being there creates more engagement with the story. After this dialogue, Van der Horst interviews Mukaiyama’s daughter. Van der Horst asks whether she has had her period yet, to which she replies that she has not bled yet. In scene that follows we see Mukaiyama’s daughter also running through the installation of the white dresses. Compared to the other adult women in the film, her perception of the artwork is different. She approaches her mother’s artwork with more lightness and playfulness, laughing and with almost the feeling of playing tag with the camera. She does not seem to feel the heaviness of its meaning yet (as the older women did). By running through the artwork with her childlike innocence, she becomes a metaphor for all generations of women to come (image 15). It becomes a metaphor for the fact that we all come from Image 15: Water Children, 01:11:15. the same origin of life - the female womb - and at the same time, how these girls will grow into will become women who shall undergo this ritual for themselves. This scene therefore becomes exemplary for what van der Horst herself doesn’t have: a child. It marks the difference between these two artists, because one of them is a mother and the other wants to be a mother but remains childless. Knowing how Van der Horst feels about her own struggles

51 with fertility, this scene poetically symbolises Van der Horst’s mourning of her unborn children and a reconciliation with this feeling, but it is also a universal mediation on the ‘miracle’ of giving birth and creating life. The associative editing is (self-)reflexive and performative at the same time. The film has many subjects: not only Tomoko, but also the women who talk about having a child, the woman who talks about losing a child, the couple who mourn their water children and Van der Horst herself. But by defying a narrative in the traditional sense, there is room for the performativity from the viewer. This is not only due to the lengthy shots that stimulate the feeling of presence. The viewer is also presented with a similar immersive experience as the local visitors who visit Mukaiyama’s ‘wasted’. The artists both work with universal images and metaphors, which require a personal interpretation (and can be interpreted in many different ways). They both create space in their artworks for the interpretative action, which results in a personal viewing experience that defines both Mukaiyama’s and Van der Horst’s authorship.

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Chapter 5: The performance of memory and identity in Love is Potatoes 5.1 Van der Horst’s inheritance: six square meters of memorabilia Love is Potatoes (2017) is Van der Horst’s most personal film rooted in Van der Horst’s own family history from her mother’s Russian family. Her mother grew up in a family of farmers with five other sisters, not far from Moscow. When Van der Horst’s aunt Lyuba dies in their old and wooden Russian family home, the children of three of the sisters are forced to come together to empty out their mothers’ childhood home. Together with her cousins Tania and Sasha, Van der Horst faces the question of what to do with their inheritance from their mothers’ past. They each inherit six square meters of the tiny house, which is packed to the ridge with items that reminiscence 20th century Russia.16 Being thrown in her mother’s past, Van der Horst wonders why her mother always kept silent about her youth and why her mother was always hard to pin down, as if she was running from something. “Who were you, before you became my mother?” Van der Horst asks her mother rhetorically in the voice-over, knowing that she will not get a testimony from her (00:04:49). Van der Horst’s mother Zoya is still alive when the film starts, but is heavily paralyzed due to a muscular disease and cannot talk or move.17 Zoya had emigrated from Russia to The Netherlands in the 1960s for love and continued to live there her whole life.18 Since Zoya is unable to answer the questions, Van der Horst tries to get testimonies from the other still living family members. The film starts with casual dialogues that Van der Horst records with a handheld camera, which take place in and around the family house. Most of these conversations are conducted while cleaning out the house, or while searching for something in the mess, or after their greetings. These sequences immediately sketch the personal relations between Van der Horst behind the camera and the surroundings. For instance, in one of the first scenes of the film, Van der Horst films the wooden family house from a wide angle, making an establishing shot. Suddenly footsteps can be heard in the snow. Van der Horst turns to the source of the footsteps with her camera rolling:

16 Tania is the daughter of recently passed aunt Lyuba, Sasha is the son of aunt Liza (who is still alive by the beginning of the film). Van der Horst, Liza and Sasha are the offspring of three of the sisters from the original family: Zoya, Lyuba and Liza. 17 Although Zoya’s mind is still clear she is unable to speak or move, prisoning her to her chair in The Netherlands. 18 Van der Horst’s mother Zoya had left Russia in the 1960s to be with her love, the Dutch student Simon van der Horst. The love story of Aliona van der Horst’s parents is told in her documentary After the Spring of ‘68 (2001), in which she retraces he difficulties her parents faced to be together, divided by differences in the political climates in Russia and The Netherlands in the 1960s.

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Rima: Are you filming the whole house? Van der Horst: Yes, all of it. […] Tatjana: I’m Tatjana, this is my sister Rima. Van der Horst: Ah, the neighbours. Rima: I said to my sister, ‘I saw her once when she was small’. You had curly hair. You look like Zoya. Van der Horst: I do. Tatjana: You are her daughter after all. Ah, there’s my cat. Rima: Do you know Zoya? Other neighbour: Yes. Rima: This is her daughter. She’s come to sort things out. Other neighbour: To divide the inheritance? Van der Horst: You could call it that. Other neighbour: There is not a lot to divide. Van der Horst: One sixth. Other neighbour: Really? Wow. Van der Horst: My mother is bedridden now. Rima: I know, Lyuba told me. She won’t recover. Van der Horst: That’s right. (00:02:43-00:03:50)

Image 16: Love is Potatoes, 00:03:02.

In this short ‘accidental’ scene, a lot of information is introduced within the dialogue: the scene establishes the likeness between Van der Horst and her mother, her mother’s illness and the inheritance of a sixth of the house. Not only does Van der Horst depict the setting of a Russian village where nosy neighbours want to know everything, she also clearly marks her identity as more than just a filmmaker. Incorporating this ‘accidental’ footage, in which she spontaneously engages with her surroundings with her hand-held camera, is also a powerful

54 rhetoric choice. Instead of turning the camera off by the interruption of her filming, she uses the spontaneous encounter to self-reflexively introduce her position within the whole film. The neighbours frame her as the ‘outsider’ with a camera, the western looking woman with the curly hair, who speaks Russian but whom they consider a foreigner. These conversations feel ‘accidental’ to the viewer, but they are actually sequences of importance.19 The camera functions as a start for a conversation for the people she meets, and form a translation of Van der Horst’s experience as she is filming. The people she films mirror what they see when they look at her. It is a powerful rhetoric choice that has a sincerity and honesty to it, given the fact that it happens spontaneously. The handheld-aesthetic has a strong affective quality. It features the immediacy of being there, thrown in Van der Horst’s experience while filming. At the same time, these random encounters establish the affective relationship between Van der Horst and the participants in her film.

5.2 Silent mothers and interrogative daughters: the generational gap in memory

Image 17: Love is Potatoes, 00:11:40.

Within this sequence, Van der Horst directly addresses her mother with questions she has had for a long time (image 17). This direct-address of her mother, is part of the narrative backbone of the film; that of a daughter trying to understand her mother. It is a rhetoric choice to tell her mother’s history in this way, one that feels more direct and affective than

19 This seems to be a recurring motif within Van der Horst’s work, for instance also with the old Russian neighbour in Boris Ryzhy (2008) and in Water Children (2011), these random encounters frame Van der Horst’s part in the story.

55 talking about her mother from a third-person perspective. This is due to the level of intimacy of a conversation between a daughter and a mother, which has more emotional poignancy than a director talking to an unknown viewer.

As always you are the centre of attention, mum. You all loved to be photographed under this apple tree. Six sisters. Two of them have already died, you’ve lost contact with two others. You did something unheard-of. You emigrated to Holland. They stayed. Was it love that made you leave or was there more at stake? How did you dig up this exotic, Dutch student in Moscow? In the Brezhnev era, when it was dangerous even to talk to foreigners. Did you realise it would make you look like a traitor to your Motherland? You brought your fears with you to Holland. You never sat down for a moment. You were either running around or running away. I saw that you were running away from something. You never saw it. What was it you were running from? (00:11:03-00:13:08)

When Tania finds letters in the house that Zoia wrote to her sister Lyuba, Van der Horst finds a way to let her mother reply. Van der Horst films herself while reading the letters, but she does not enunciate them on screen, creating the feeling of intimate reading in one’s head (image 18). In the voice-over, a recording of Van der Horst’s voice reading these letters starts, while her words also appear in titles inserted halfway across the frame:

My dear sister Lyuba, My daughter, born in Moscow, has become so Dutch. She was always fighting with me. All through her childhood and beyond. I don’t know if our children will ever understand. Maybe never. You know I never liked to recall my past. But suddenly the memories come flooding back. As if a dam has burst. And I see it all before me as if it just happened. (00:17:4 4-00:18:54)

The fact that Zoya wrote to her sister Lyuba that she thought their children would probably never understand them because they grew up under completely different circumstances, marks the influence of memory on the relationship between mother and daughter. We see the same generational conflict with Van der Horst’s cousin Tania and her mother Lyuba, who also had a troubled relationship, to Tania’s regret. But although Zoya thought, and I guess that Lyuba and the other sisters did as well, that their children would not understand them; in the film

56 we see that both their two daughters are trying to understand their mother’s childhood with deep sympathy for their hardships.

Image 18: Love is Potatoes, 00:17:53.

Although their mothers may not have been talkative of their painful memories of their lives before, their daughters have felt the existence of these painful memories, which have left a scar on them too. This shows how memory influences the intergenerational dynamic enormously. The different responses from two generations living with a traumatic (inherited) memory have caused emotional friction, not only in the lives of everyone involved, but also in the film. Trying to explain the difficult relationship between Van der Horst and her mother, she wonders why her mother always kept silent about her childhood memories. The suspicions of a childhood trauma gradually crystallise into the main question of the film: what did the six daughters of the family experience in the Russia of the 1930s and 1940s and why did this change them for good?

5.3 Van der Horst’s negotiation of authorship: The struggle with buried memories of a painful past Layer by layer, Van der Horst peels off the layers of history. Zoya’s side of the story is expressed in her letters to her sister Lyuba and in notes of her childhood memories that she wrote down just before she became ill. It becomes clear that her childhood in Russia was very hard. The mother of the family had to work on the collective farms while the father went to

57 the front, while they almost got nothing in return. There was very little to eat and the children were alone and starving for most of the time. As Van der Horst reads her mother’s memories out loud, it becomes apparent how severe the situation of her childhood actually was:

1941, I’m five years old. It’s winter. In the morning there’s ice on the walls inside. We can’t go and play outside. No shoes to put on. I’m left alone with my sisters. We never see our mother. She works on the collective farm. But she doesn’t get any food or money. Father went to war. But I didn’t even notice his absence. (00:18:58-00:19:54)

When Van der Horst confronts her aunt Liza with the childhood circumstances Zoya describes, she is surprised with Liza’s response. She finds that her aunt does not remember the hardships (image 19). “I had a very normal life. […] If I don’t remember it, it has never happened,” Liza states (00:39:19-00:40:00). When Liza accuses Zoya making up fairy tales, the image becomes apparent that all of the sisters have coped differently with this traumatic memory.

Image 19: Love is Potatoes, 00:39:20.

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Van der Horst visibly struggles with this ‘false’ memory of her aunt because she had hoped to hear more about the difficult times her mother described. “Misremembering is a common feature of catastrophic memory,” Janet Walker claims, discussing of the denial of the holocaust by some (Walker 2005, 126). Repression of memories has been a survival strategy to deal with terror (Walker 2005, 19). The generation that grew up under the dictatorship of Stalin was forced to be silent, dreading the constant fear of being deported to penal colonies. Since 80 per cent of Russia’s population were farmers during the 1930s and 1940s, in terms of that aunt Liza is not wrong, but their family situation was no exception. Although it was definitely not normal to contemporary western standards, for many people it was the norm at that time. The fact that Liza does not remember the atrocities may have been heavily influenced by propaganda, the fear of repercussions of every form of critique of the Soviet Union, or the lack of visual evidence and official denial by the authorities. Stalin’s dictatorship has resulted in the fact that there is no visual evidence of the famine; (almost) every historic form of evidence from this time is purely propaganda (“DocTalks - Liefde is Aardappelen” n.d.).

Image 20: Love is Potatoes, 00:30:00.

Van der Horst incorporates the confrontations she experiences with her filmic search into the past. Her cousin Sasha doesn’t understand why she wants to film al the ‘rubbish’ in the house.

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“Enough with the shoe museum!” he exclaims in response to the performative act of the assembling of the shoes (image 27). Sasha thinks it is best to throw everything away, build a new house and move on. He disagrees with Van der Horst’s poetic quest for their mother’s memories. Although he does not deny the atrocities that have happened in the same way as his mother Liza, he does not see the point in looking back and showing compassion for it. In a way, Sasha seems the embodiment of a large part of Russia’s population that wants to focus on the future instead of looking back to a past marked by atrocities and hardships. Her other aunt Valya, who lost contact with most of the family, also refuses to talk about her memories in a telephone conversation with Van der Horst. Valya: “You do speak Russian, but your understanding is that of a foreigner. When you have a full belly, you cannot understand a hungry person”(00:51:04). With this struggle between Van der Horst’s Russian family members and her desire to make a film about them, she shows “the truth of the collision between the filmmaker-subject, the filmic apparatus and the world filmed”(Griffiths 2014, 211). Her authority, to use Griffiths’ words, is not just “assumed in the fact of making a film” (2014, 73), rather it is performatively constructed. She self-reflexively constructs her identity throughout the film, not only as a filmmaker, but also a more personal position, that of the foreign outsider in her own family. Not only is this a self-reflexive choice, making the viewer well aware of her intentions (you can feel which testimony she is after), but these scenes also prove that there is no clear distinction of ‘objectively filmed testimonies of others’ and ‘subjectively portraying her own feelings’ in the film. Van der Horst shows that the entire film is shaped by her identity as a foreign filmmaker and foreign family member, and that all the scenes are made from that same context: that of her personal collision with the world she depicts. Despite the struggle with denial and repression of memories and her ‘western gaze’ (which makes understanding Russia’s history impossible in the opinion of her family members), Van der Horst is determined to depict her mother’s past, guarded with her camera as a powerful weapon. As Walker argues, a new generation of filmmakers is not afraid to “take back from the deniers the ever-present amnesias and slips of memory that mark the return path to historical occurrence” (2005, 126). From a postmemory position, the “imaginative character” of that memory increases (Lazzara 2009, 149). Van der Horst responds in the form of her own language: performative cinema in which she translates her imagination of the traumatic memory.

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5.4 Van der Horst’s response to denial: memory performance As I have shown in my analysis of Voices of Bam, Van der Horst comes up with filmic strategies that present an alternative to something ungraspable; she finds this embodiment that creates the feeling of a memory, while at the same time embodying an absence. First of all, Van der Horst introduces animated sequences for an alternative representation of memory. As the documentaries such as Waltz with Bashir (Folman 2008) have also shown, animation can be a powerful tool in documentary to feature both the repression and survival of memory traumatic collective events. Through the animations of Simone Massi, Van der Horst brings the buried memories of her mother’s past to life: they show how this traumatic period in history must have felt like. The animations present a more universal image of shared collective memory and go beyond illustrating Zoya’s memories; they invite the viewer to actively immerse him or herself in the experience of the collective memory. Walker argues that trauma films often try to make the viewer part of the traumatic experience; to create the feeling of actually being there (Walker 2005, xix). The animated sequences, based on Van der Horst’s imaginative act (she has not experienced these times), form a stand-in for the testimony of her subjects concerning the experience of the famine that has been repressed and buried by Van der Horst’s (still talking) aunts.

Image 21: Love is Potatoes, 00:01:21. Image 22: Love is Potatoes, 00:01:32.

In the animated opening sequence of Love is Potatoes, the animations are accompanied by the archival sound of a communistic speech of a lady praising Stalin. In the animation, we see workers on the land, with a horse, while the propaganda speech can be heard on the radio. The animated depiction of the radio speakers forms a way to connect the actual historic audio footage to the animations. In the sequence, the sound of the speakers is heard over the fields across working farmers on the land. Instead of just showing the archival footage and repeating the ‘original propaganda’, Van der Horst is able to create an image that forms an alternative to

61 the experience of the farmers in Russia at that time. It becomes a metaphorical depiction of the experience of a shared collective memory of working on the collective farms, which is necessary because of the lack of historical (visual) evidence of that time. In this particular scene the real historical footage (the audio) is combined with an imagination of this collective memory (image 21 and 22). It recreates what the reality of this time must have looked like: the constant stream of propaganda glorifying communist leaders, while they were in fact responsible for all the people who were dying from famine in the fields (as the other animated sequences in the film show). The form of these animated sequences also feature the elusive nature of (traumatic) memory and how it becomes distorted over time. The sequences have a dreamlike quality, with the ability to fly through the fields, see the people die and fading into the background, see inside the stomach of a pregnant woman, and see faces in the corn on the fields. Their dark colour and grainy quality create a feeling of a dark memory or dream, something you would see if you close your eyes and think back of a certain time; fragments that are connected through associations. These images present the viewer with an associative experience that allows us to understand what living under Stalin’s reign must have felt like.

Image 23: Love is Potatoes, 00:48:10. Image 24: Love is Potatoes, 00:48:19.

Secondly, Van der Horst uses her mother’s childhood diary fragments and letters of the times of their childhood in detail. In this way, Van der Horst is able to fill in Liza’s blank spots in her memory. Through her mother’s letters, she portrays Liza when she was younger, showing the loss of her high school sweetheart in the war, and the many abortions she performed on herself. Van der Horst brings her mother’s written words to life in poetic sequences. Memory here is presented as an action in the present in which the viewer is invited to experience the memory, rather than being told about it. While we hear Van der Horst reciting her mother’s words, the camera lingers over all the nostalgic, old objects in the family house that signify past times. The house is full of religious artefacts, photographs of family members, old books,

62 preserving jars, countless pairs of shoes, Maria pictures, paintings, communist portraits and pictures of Lenin and Stalin. In slow long takes the camera poetically explores the house, shot in Ooms’ signature cinematographic style. Similar to the cinematography in Voices of Bam, the viewer is left to discover what is in the frame, and to make his or her own associations. Next to that, the words of Van der Horst’s mother in the voice-over are not told from a past perspective (not “It was 1941”), but are formulated active in present time (but “It’s 1941,” see 5.3 for this diary sequence). Because of the style of the imagery that accompanies those letters, the images do not distract from the words, but work together to encourage the viewer’s direct associations and emotions: the viewer is immersed in the memory. The objects in the house thus become metaphors for multiple things, such as all the glass preserving jars that resemble the hunger, or the pictures in aunt Liza’s yearbook that become to represent an entire generation that was lost in Russia’s 20th century wars (image 25 and 26).20

Image 25: Love is Potatoes, 00:15:07. Image 26: Love is Potatoes, 00:35:01.

Van der Horst actively transforms these objects, signs of survival, into new metaphors - or into signs of resemblance, in MacDougall’s words. She collects the countless pairs of shoes into one big pile in her room of six square meters (image 27). By placing them on top of each other in a performative sequence, she finds a metaphor for the feeling of fear that her mother and sisters must have experienced – maybe sometimes unconsciously – throughout their entire life. The aunts could not throw anything away, since the fear of another famine with no shoes to wear had never left them.

20 For instance, also in Boris Ryzhy (2008), in which poetic shots in the train of the people of Yekaterinburg become a metaphor for the lost generation of the Perestroika.

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Van der Horst finds a way to confront her family members with the performance of a casette player with a tape recording with the voice of her grandmother (01:03:44-01:06:08). With the tape recording that Van der Horst recorded years ago, she confronts her family with grandmother’s side of the story. She films Tania, Sasha and his daughter and Liza as they

Image 27: Love is Potatoes, 00:53:21. listen to the tape. Van der Horst’s grandmother talks about how she lost two children in this period due to starvation. Faced with the direct testimony played on the sound recorder, which functions as ‘evidence’ of this time, there is very little to deny. She finds a way to re-access an old memory (long forgotten, since grandmother has died years ago) by introducing a memory object (the tape playing on the recorder) which causes a interaction (or collision) with a voice from the past as an active performative act.

5.5 Van der Horst’s performative (post)memory: a new kind of historiography Ernst van Alphen and Berber Hagedoorn have both argued that filmic strategies in documentary filmmaking - in their case the use of found footage home movies in work of Peter Forgács - can be considered as a new form of historiography (van Alphen 2007; Hagedoorn 2009). Van Alphen attributes this different form of historiography to the quality of the relationship the person depicted has with the filmmaker. Van Alphen characterises Forgács work as a new form of historiography because of the use of the found footage home movies, which creates a personal timeframe to engage with collective histories. I want to propose that Van der Horst seems to go beyond the showing of history by not only home

64 movies, but rather by all her filmic strategies which immerse the viewer in memories of collective events. By presenting memories as performances, Van der Horst is not only able to fill in the gaps in her own family history caused by her family’s silence, but also the gaps in Russia’s history. The film gradually gives an impression of the severe circumstances in which farmers lived under Stalin’s dictatorship of the 1930s and 1940; it becomes clear that his military actions came at the expense of the farmers working on the collective farms in the countryside. The film is thus not just a story about her family, but also about Russia’s tragic past and how it marked an entire population. Love is Potatoes therefore becomes a critical interpretation of the history of Stalin’s dictatorship through the personal frame of one family. The film becomes a historical intervention to Russia’s omitted histories that at the same time pays attention to all the other experiences of that story. The film constantly moves between different times and the different experience of the same event by different family members. Each family member reacted with different coping mechanisms related to the traumatic memory of living in a state in which the individual always had to be submissive to the collective. Lyuba became a communistic fanatic and later a religious fanatic, who did not stay in touch with her daughter Tania until only two weeks prior to her death, Liza doesn’t remember any of the events as traumatic, Zoya has fled her motherland to escape the painful memories and Sasha does not understand the need to look back to a traumatic past. And Van der Horst wants to know how the past influences her present to this day – the reason for making this film in the first place. Incorporating all these (clashing) perspectives to the same collective memory is reflexive since it underlines the fact that not every person shared the same memory or experience of a particular memory: thus proving that a representation is never fully able of depicting the past as it has happened; rather it can give an impression of what the past could have felt like for a certain person. Van der Horst not only reflexively introduces her voice and visual presence as a filmmaker, but also shows how her position of alterity in terms of understanding that her own identity- and her film - are shaped by the relationship she has with her family. Van der Horst is mainly concerned with depicting herself in relation to the women of her family, excluding Sasha who functions as somewhat of a male antagonist. In the press release of the film, it is even presented as “a history of women”(“Persmap Liefde is Aardappelen” 2017). Van der Horst uses dialogic engagement with her family members as the

65 most important rhetoric strategy to depict this tension between her and the other. But she also presents her identity a foreign family member in the film to illustrate her family members treating her differently because of her supposed ‘western gaze’. By showing fragments of experience coming from different times and different persons within the same family history, the film’s narrative resembles memory’s fragmentary nature from a postmemory position; presenting an ethical mode of filmmaking concerning the careful interpretation of a memory, the same ethical obligation as Young had described for postmemorial works (Young 2006). As Walker quotes David Thelen: “The struggle for possession and interpretation of memory is rooted in the conflict and interplay among social, political, and cultural interests and values in the present” (Thelen 1989, 1127). The traumatic memories inherited from the mothers of Van der Horst and her cousin Tania are expressed in one of the film’s final sequences:

Van der Horst: Even though I’ve never lived in Russia, I can feel a kind of fear. As if I’m nothing. As if the State, as if those in power, can do with me just as they please. Tania: They can. Van der Horst: Do you feel this fear too? Tania: I live with it every day. (01:23:34-01:24:01)

I want to argue that the film thus becomes a new bond that metaphorically represents a way to solve the “crisis in the child-parent relationship and the parents’ silence” (Loshitzky 2001, 29). By making this film, Van der Horst finally has a mediated and imagined conversation with her mother about her childhood, which continuously crosses time and space to answer her questions about a past they could never discuss. The title Love is Potatoes marks Van der Horst’s personal acceptance in this parent-child crisis. She now understands that in order to love, you have to be able to eat, and when there are no potatoes, there is no room for other kinds of love. So what is love? While her aunt Liza leaves the house, she asks her son Sasha: “Should we not give them some potatoes?” To which Sasha replies: “No mum, they have everything they need” (01:10:25). They have potatoes. Based on Van Alphen’s notion of a new historiography, which he considers to emerge when a conflict between the personal timeframe (in this case a family faced with the consequences of starvation) and the historical timeframe (Stalin’s propaganda of the glorious collective farms, which has not often been represented in another way) is created through filmic means, the viewer tends to engage with history differently (van Alphen 2007, 74).

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Through presenting the familiar frame of the family, Van der Horst is able to immerse the viewer in her interpersonal relations, providing an affective understanding of the historical experience. It can also explain her preoccupation with (traumatic) memory. Through the cinematic construction of a viewing experience, Van der Horst has succeeded in re-writing the history of 20th century Russia, through the frame of one family’s memories, which depict the terrors of communism, famines, and an overall fear. Van der Horst herself states: “I’ve always had a fascination with trauma. Maybe it’s because of my Russian background” (Scottish Documentary Institute 2017).

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Conclusion

In this thesis I have deconstructed how Van der Horst’s intricate layered films result in an emotional viewing experience. I have done so by arguing for two important tendencies that I recognise in her films: firstly, how she creates a filmic translation of memory by turning it into performance, and secondly, how she uses her own interaction with the depicted world as a form of engagement. The three films discussed in this thesis all represent a personal quest Van der Horst embarks on while depicting a certain topic: whether that is lingering through a city marked by immense grief in Voices of Bam, (2006), or meditating on what it means to be a woman and to be able to give birth in Water Children (2011), or how buried traumatic memories have shaped her own family history in Love is Potatoes (2017). Van der Horst invites the viewer to understand the depicted world from her personal viewpoint, whether that is the position of a wanderer on foreign soil, a woman struggling with fertility, or a bit of a stranger in the midst of her own family, allowing her presence in the film as a personal frame to engage with. Van der Horst creates filmic metaphors to visualise her personal experience of certain topics in the historical world. These topics are not always visually perceptible. Metaphors therefore allow Van der Horst to give an interpretation of the (often) invisible memories and feelings, which these topics evoke. Often this is a tragic loss or an absence of something or someone that only remains in memory. That loss often remains of great importance in the present because the pain caused by the loss lingers in memories. In Voices of Bam, it is the feeling of the absence of the people who died in the earthquake that hangs over Bam like a dark cloud. In Water Children it is the absence of fertility (Van der Horst’s fear of remaining childless and other women who struggle with an absence in relation to fertility). Finally, in Love is Potatoes, it is the absence of openly discussing a traumatic memory. It is the act of remembering that however keeps these absent entities alive in daily reality. Van der Horst shows that personal memories construct our sense of identity in the present; that of the people she films, but also how her own memories and relationships influence the way she looks at her participants and topics. Her metaphors mainly are a way to reunite past and present and find a certain (narrative) closure for some kind of grief within her films. Van der Horst’s filmic actualisation of these personal memories is realised through filmic strategies that externalise inner emotional states, deviating from the conventions of

68 documentary realism. How Van der Horst represents a memory, depends on the circumstances of the topic and participants in each film. Traumatic memories in particular often need an alternative form of representation, since they are so severe that words often fail to grasp the gravity of the situation. These metaphors vary in shape and size, sometimes they are found in everyday objects, such as the shoes that become a metaphor for fear in Love is Potatoes; or in the surroundings, such as the rubble of Bam that reflects the inner states of the participants in Voices of Bam. But frequently, these metaphors for memory arise through art, as the visual art and music in Mukaiyama’s ‘wasted’ become a metaphor for fertility and the cycle of life in general in Water Children, or the poetic assemblage of dreamlike cinematography and inner voices in Voices of Bam, or through an imagined and mediated conversation with her mother in Love is Potatoes. Instead of exploiting participants without taking into consideration the ethics of talking about trauma, Van der Horst turns to cinema to construct this absence. She turns it into performance and makes her personal negotiation with this absence the focus of her film. In this way, she presents alternative representations of absent persons, histories, and testimonies that influence the current reality of the depicted people in her films to this day. In Voices of Bam, Van der Horst is concerned with depicting the collective traumatic memories of Bam’s earthquake survivors. She finds a way to revisit the past through the memories of survivors, but she does not use traditional representational strategies for depicting disaster (such as interviews). Rather, she presents the viewer with a filmic experience by following the participants in their daily life, constructed in a way that the film feels like real-time journey of the viewer. This is done through poetic cinematography (the lingering long takes of the rubble in which the viewer is left to discover cross connections and meaning) combined with an inner voice monologue in the voice-over, featuring the intimacy of one’s inner voice. The feeling of secretly hearing how someone grieves (performed by directly addressing an absent person), invites the viewer to engage on a more intimate and personal level. It also shows that memory is not something static, but rather something performed in a process. The assemblage of personal memories is turned into the narrative structure of Voices of Bam. Gradually, the film reveals the magnitude of the disaster, instead of starting with it in a shocking manner, which may cause emotional blockage (as distancing easily happens when watching a disaster-documentary). The structure of the film thus evokes an emotional and

69 personal experience that mimics walking through the streets of Bam after the earthquake and feeling the grief on these streets. This structure mimics Van der Horst’s own experience in Bam while making this film. She turns the absence of a loved one into a piece of art, showing that while we grief there is still beauty left in life, and that people have the power to survive horrific circumstances. In this way, she provides reconciliation between past and present. In Water Children, Van der Horst introduces her own difficult relationship with fertility more explicitly. While she remains concerned with depicting the authorship of Mukaiyama as an artist and how her artwork touches upon the issues of fertility, Van der Horst’s own framing of the fear of remaining childless emerges, alongside other female responses to Mukaiyama’s artwork. The way Van der Horst introduces herself and uses her involvement and female identity in relation to the topics or characters she depicts, is used rhetorically to create an emotional effect, rather than just showing representational postmodern awareness and the limitations of truth in representation a documentary filmmaker faces. These actualised memories encompass an intertwined mix of reflexivity, self- reflexivity and performativity. Van der Horst introduces herself as a character with whom we empathise, just as her other participants. At the same time, she is an artist reflecting on the construction of artworks and the affective ability of art to stir up one’s deepest (repressed) feelings. Additionally, she presents performative metaphors for her own experience through Super 8-footage footage, featuring her sensory interaction with the depicted world, which physically engages the viewer. Interestingly, the viewer is also a subject: by filming Mukaiyama’s artwork in combination with her music in poetic long takes, there is room left for the viewer’s own meditations and associations with the topic of fertility. Through associative editing, the viewer is stimulated to experience his or her own feelings in relation to fertility; combining the immersive long takes (which poetically capture the 10.000 dresses) with Van der Horst’s tangible and relatable presence, which serves as an anchor for personal engagement. In Love is Potatoes, Van der Horst turns the camera to her family members and herself; she constructs a mediated dialogue about her mother’s buried past, which has influenced the relationship between mother and daughter their entire life. Through dialogic engagement with family members and acquaintances, she constructs her identity as a daughter of Zoya and as a filmmaker. Van der Horst uses her relationship with others to construct her own identity on screen (alterity). She performs her authorship by including the negotiation

70 with the depicted world; her relatives consider her an outsider who is incapable of understanding Russia’s past. As a response, she creates stand-ins for the missing testimonies of her relatives by memory performances (and performs a form of historical intervention). Objects around the house are transformed into performative metaphors for Russia’s tragic losses throughout the 20th century, by combining poetic cinematography and the personal form of address in the voice-over. Consequently, her family’s story becomes connected to the larger collective history of the famines, which cost the lives of millions of Russian farmers. By turning to animation as an alternative form of representation, she is able to depict an affective and universal image of an entire generation living in hunger. It evokes an active viewer experience, in which the viewer is thrown into a personal account of the past (instead of being told about it). It presents the feeling of what the famine felt like and functions as a prosthetic memory, which is based on mediation, instead of lived-experience. Incorporating different stances towards the same collective memory shows a reflexive postmemorial awareness of ‘memory’ as a highly subjective interpretation that can be distorted, altered and repressed and over time - but at the same time constitutes everyone’s present-day identity. Van der Horst’s ethical authorship may have been caused by the ‘inherited’ memories from her mother, who tried to escape her memories by fleeing her homeland. By including all these clashing personal perspectives to the same traumatic collective memory of the famine which is barely spoken of in Russia’s history books, Van der Horst provides a historical intervention, expressed through alterity, dialogic engagement and her metaphors for personal memories in her own auteurist writing style. Her personal family history transforms into a portrait of the horrible situation of an entire generation of farmers in 1930s and 1940s Russia. I have therefore argued to consider Van der Horst’s cinematographic writing style as a new form of historiography that uses the personal frame of the family (with performativity and affective relations) to emotionally engage the viewer with collective histories. The work of Aliona van der Horst is not easy to pin down in theoretical categories. However, looking into different strands of origins of personal documentary, provided tools to better understand her work. Firstly, it allowed me to consider her work as an example of an essayistic mode of filmmaking, which gives more prominence to a fragmentary aesthetic and has a subjective quality. Additionally, it enabled me to explain how the way of address is used to activate the viewer. The concepts used to describe a female politicised cinematographic writing style in the field of documentary also proved to be valuable in understanding Van der

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Horst’s films, although I have not performed a genre analysis and compared her work with other female directors. I think my theoretical approach with concepts from both film theory and memory studies has succeeded in highlighting the most important pillars of Van der Horst’s authorship in both form and content. This framework could be easily applied to Van der Horst’s other films. For example, to the relationship between poetry, personal memory and collective memory of Russia’s lost Perestroika generation in Boris Ryzhy (2008), or by analysing how an ‘accidental’ confrontation scene on a market square becomes a metaphor for the unjust response to thinking different as the Russian State in Lady With the White Hat (1997).21 My personal recommendation for further research into Van der Horst’s authorship would be a more thorough analysis of her rhythmic editing on a sequence level. The editing is of importance in creating the flow of experience in her films, and although I have touched upon it slightly, I think a more detailed analysis would be valuable in explaining how the rhythmic editing contributes to the affective experience of her films. As I reflect on the transformative emotional experience I had when watching Van der Horst’s films, plunging into her oeuvre stimulated the engagement with my own personal memories that were put at back of my mind for some time. Her performed memories did actively evoke and shaped my own, and intermingled with them, resulting in a cathartic experience. To reflect on Van Dijck’s argument, Van der Horst’s authorship and mediation have shaped the way I remember. True to Van der Horst’s style, I want to conclude with incorporating my personal response to Van der Horst’s authorship, by including my own metaphor for her films. For me, Van der Horst’s films are like a Matryoshka doll: not only are they rooted in Russia’s history, but there is also the promise of another layer every time you think you have reached its core. The dolls remind me of the water children and look like they could be found in Van der Horst’s old Russian family home. But I also associate them with the different participants throughout Van der Horst’s oeuvre, who carry the weight of their personal memories and collective histories in their bellies. Ultimately, these puppets are not just there to look at: they are characters to tell stories with.

21 Or the use of performativity in relation to other artists as in 15 Attempts (2013) and Folkert de Jong (2012).

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Epilogue

Amsterdam, 17 juni 2019

Beste Lara,

Wat een prachtige brief kreeg ik eergisteren. Een plezier om te lezen - ook- en juist- het familieverhaal van jou dat op allerlei manieren in de toekomst nog door jou zal worden gebruikt (schrijvend of filmend.

Ja huizen leegruimen, levens weer opnieuw in je hoofd vormen. We herschrijven constant het verhaal van ons leven en dat van onze familie.

Ik ben echt ontroerd. En echt, dit is waar ik het voor doe. En dit is precies zo goed verwoord. De film gaat zelf op zoek naar betekenis.

Tot mijn schaamte herinner ik me je niet goed - maar het was een foggy time - volgens mij was ik toen zwanger of met baby en een hoofd als een zeef…en ik ben niet zo goed in gezichten.

P.S.: Ik wilde altijd Lara heten nadat ik Dokter Zhivago had gelezen… Die vader van jou heeft er goed aan gedaan. Wat een geweldige combinatie: academicus en schapenleer - dat was me er eentje.

Met alle plezier drink ik een kopje koffie met je. Ik hou mijn antwoord kort, want deze weken zijn nog zo druk. Maar ik ben in juli in het bezit van vrije tijd. Dus roep maar iets.

Warme groet, Aliona

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“Bekijk winnaars Gouden Kalveren 38e editie Nederlands Film Festival.” Nederlands Film Festival, Accessed Oct 2018, https://www.filmfestival.nl/nieuws/gouden-kalveren-38e-editie- nederlands-film-festival-uitgereikt/.

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Bruzzi, Stella. 2011. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London; New York: Routledge.

Butler, Judith. 2011. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. http://public.eblib.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=710077.

Dijck, José van. 2004. “Memory Matters in the Digital Age.” Configurations 12 (3): 349–73. https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2007.0001. ———. Dijck, José van. 2007. Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Dijck, José van. 2008. “Future Memories: The Construction of Cinematic Hindsight.” Theory, Culture & Society 25 (3): 71–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276408090658.

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Hirsch, M. 2008. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29 (1): 103–28. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-2007-019.

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Lazzara, Michael J. 2009. “Filming Loss: (Post-)Memory, Subjectivity, and the Performance of Failure in Recent Argentine Documentary Films.” Latin American Perspectives 36 (5): 147– 57. https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X09341978.

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Filmography Aliona van der Horst (1997-present)

Horst, Aliona van der, dir. 1997. The Lady with the White Hat. Amsterdam: Nederlandse Filmacademie. https://www.npostart.nl/dame-met-het-witte-hoedje/23-12- 2011/WO_VPRO_033046

Horst, Aliona van der, dir. 2000. After the Spring of ’68. Amsterdam: Viewpoint Productions. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/afterthespringof68

Horst, Aliona van der, and Maasja Ooms, dir. 2006. Voices of Bam. Zeppers Film & TV. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/voicesofbam.

Horst, Aliona van der, dir. 2006. The Hermitage Dwellers. Amsterdam: Viewpoint Productions. DVD.

Horst, Aliona van der, dir. 2008. Boris Ryzhy. Amsterdam: Zeppers Film & TV. DVD.

Horst, Aliona van der, dir. 2011. Water Children. Amsterdam: Zeppers Film & TV. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/35766/123093174

Horst, Aliona van der, dir. 2012. Folkert de Jong. Amsterdam: Interakt. https://hollandsemeesters.info/posts/show/7736

Horst, Aliona van der, dir. 2013. 15 Attempts. Amsterdam: De Familie Film & TV. https://www.2doc.nl/speel~VPWON_1185081~15-pogingen-de-magie-van-kunst~.html

Horst, Aliona van der, Fabie Hulsebos, Hens van Rooy, Suzanne Raes, Sanne Rovers, Mario Steenbergen en Yan Ting Yuen, dir. 2013. Don’t Shoot the Messenger. Amsterdam: Docmakers. https://www.npostart.nl/dont-shoot-the-messenger-ncrv-dokument/04-11- 2013/NCRV_1648545

Horst, Aliona van der, dir. 2017. Love is Potatoes. Amsterdam: Zeppers Film & TV.

Filmography (other)

Folman, Ari, dir. 2008. Waltz with Bashir. Culver City, CA.: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2009. DVD.

Godard, Jean-Luc, dir. 1976. Here and Elsewhere. Paris: Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont.

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Herzog, Werner, dir. 2005. Grizzly Man. Santa Monica, CA: Sony Lions Gate Home Entertainment, 2005. DVD.

Lanzmann, Claude, dir. 1985. Shoah. Paris: Les Films Aleph, 2003. DVD.

Marker, Chris, dir. 1957. Letter from Siberia. Paris: Argos Films.

Polley, Sarah, dir. 2012. Stories We Tell. Toronto: National Film Board of Canada. DVD.

Resnais, Alain, dir. 1955. Night and Fog. Paris: Argos Films.

Varda, Agnés, dir. 2008. Les Plages d’Agnès. Paris: Les Films du Losange. DVD.

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