THE RUSSIAN DOLL
“In that gigantic instant I saw millions of delightful and atrocius acts; none astonished me more than the fact that all of them together occupied the same point, without overlapping or transparency… What my eyes saw was simultaneous: what I shall transcribe will be successive, because language is successive.”
Jorge Luis Borges, El Aleph
I want to make a film with a fragmentary narrative that compiles different times, whereby all three stories each (with their own sequential narrative) are subordinated to one superior narrative: spatial montage. This structure will permit that the three parts act in parallel creating links that can participate in different stories and vice versa. I therefore want to establish a linked narration system that –much like a Russian doll- puts in contact both narration levels within a complex system.
Schematically, this narrative could be defined as a kind of superior cover: a spatial montage (installation and interactivity) that is host to three stories that make up a film. In this montage I aim to highlight the “between” of the stories: the relation between generations. A “between” that takes into account what is not told but what exists as a link and works through synapse, as memory itself does. In this montage, past, present and future can converge, offering us a second level of narrative.
The contact between these two levels will generate intersections between concepts such as times/space and reality/imagination. During the Master, it will therefore become necessary to revise these concepts depending on the evolution of the artistic installation, the internal structure of the film and the relation of the viewer with it. I will seek to develop the construction of a single voice within the narrative. The voice will not be gender specific, but a uniform us (a ‘you’, a ‘me’, a ‘her’) that changes constantly, lending sense to the term “family memory”. The voice thus becomes a collective; a multitude, a family.
Successfully articulating this narrative concept will be one of the main challenges in my research. This necessary challenge will give the project its own language; a language that will be faithful to the complexity of memory and the different space-time layers.
I have sketched a scheme of themes and generational links to organize the structure on which I would later develop the second level with a spatial montage.
