Time is in many ways the subject of Petite Maman, which opens with the ticking of a clock, suggesting an almost stillness reminiscent of a childlike imagination of how time is perceived, with the Nelly spending her days coming up with different ways to occupy herself. I think the closeness between the two girls fills the gap between Nelly’s desire to understand why her mother has left her, without the child Marion ever telling her. In Nelly’s case it is never actually revealed why her mother is depressed or must leave, but through the games the girls play, and the way Nelly observes her mother and grandmother she later understands on some level why her mother might do the things she does. Despite the film being a highly optimistic and fantastical sketch of what closure might look like for a child searching for answers from their mother, it is charming nonetheless and a touching interrogation into intergenerational dynamics, grief and mother daughter bonds.

 

Some quotes I enjoyed from the film: 

 

 

 

 

 

''She feels as if a book is writing itself just behind her; all she has to do is live. But there is nothing.” 

''We scribbled down writers’ reflections on life, discovered the joys of describing ourselves to ourselves with shimmering turns of phrase, ‘existence is to drink oneself without thirst.’ We were overcome by nausea and a feeling of the absurd.”

“At every moment in time, next to the things it seems natural to do and say, and next to the ones we're told to think - no less by books or ads in the metro than by funny stories - are other things that society hush up without knowing it is doing so. thus it condemns to lonely suffering all the people who feel but cannot name these things. then the silence breaks, little by little, or suddenly one day, and words burst forth, recognised at last, while underneath other silences start to form.''

''When I write I do not have the impression of looking inside me, I look inside a memory ''

Ernaux has gained a long and communal perspective. She reminds us that we are material beings, and that we remember in and with the body. And our communal memory makes us part of one body.’

 

I like how she uses the term ‘biomythography’ as she believes her work does not conform to simply a myth, biography or historical memoir, but instead deserves its own genre. I think this rejection of conforming to a simple ‘biography’ Is something that rings true to in what I set out to explore in my FMP, as interpreting our life through stories often holds an unreliable element, that may or may not be conscious but is undeniably present. 

 

 

‘’My claim is that human beings must be understood as spatio-temporally situated objects contributing to an event’’ –  I find some academics approach to understanding personal life events so two dimensional and out of touch with the point of retelling life events. 

 

If we were to take the approach of writing a biography through a properly ‘conceptualised approach’ it would be incredibly boring and no one would want to engage. 

 

 

“This is not a bleak world,” Goldin writes in her prescient preface to ‘The Ballad of Sexual Dependency’, the photographic landmark that distilled the essence of ’80s downtown life, “But one in which there is an awareness of pain, a quality of introspection.” Like all ballads, its vernacular is simple and concrete, its sequencing measured and meticulous. Louche lovers, friends and strangers sprawled in bathtubs, lying supine on sofas and across the backs of convertibles – people bonded not by blood, but by a similar morality, the need to live fully and for the moment – seen in candid light, captured in and out of bed in pre- and post-coital moments, posing, celebrating, immortalised with feral immediacy. The rich mélange of experience as depicted through her trademark slideshows has the power to resist, rupture and make noise, to move against the tide of “good taste”.

One of the most difficult elements is her complicated relationship with her parents, who deliver a bone-chilling, soul briefly leaving your body moment with a Heart of Darkness quote near the end, their dead daughter on the mind: “Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of inextinguishable regrets.”

 

I have never been able to watch or experience this artwork fully, however I have listened to several interviews with Price and I enjoyed her discussion of her work Felt tip. In particular, her use of collected objects over time, specifically ties. Ties are not only symbols of status, masculinty but also memory.  The earlier ties she collected were embellished with emblems signifying elite colleges the wearers belonged to or clubs attended, and alluded to social memory, as time passed and as Price began collecting ties from the 70’s and 80’s where the imagery these ties bore seemed to allude to technological memory or the capacity for memory. 

 

I think the idea of natural memory vs technological memory is more relevant than ever now as the vast majority of the western world has access to smart phones that can take photos and hold them in their memory. Technology has unlocked a capacity for memory that the human brain is unable to hold onto with such a visceral quality, with access to a camera role at your fingertips you can simply scroll back years and return to videos, or photographs that unlock sedated memories. 

 

BeReal set out to do one thing, in a world of totally curated images of our lives it offered a space to be genuine and an ‘accurate’ representation of daily life. Accept the app couldn’t be more inauthentic. Despite the marketing, it appeared that the “two minute” time frame to take a picture could actually be anytime within 24 hours. Instead of taking pleasure seeing other people being lazy on a Saturday morning, users saw them wait to post nine hours later from more interesting settings like a bar, or 30 minutes later, when they were out of their Disney pyjamas.

 

I think that the incessant desire for people to post late at a time when they know they are doing something that socially might be deemed as ‘interesting’ or prove ‘coolness’, ‘popularity’ etc, just proves how the stories we tell of our lives seem particularly unreliable. 

Family photographs, in particular historical ones seem to be a visual indicator of genealogy and family history. I think it is interesting, that for my mum’s side of the family there seems to be a real lack of photographs, and those that did exist were lost after my grandparent’s death. Through conversations with my mum the desire not to hold onto photographs stems from some of her sibling’s desire to let go of childhood. This was down to the somewhat tricky relationship with their parents. Haven spoken to her, I think now that many years have passed since their death, she regrets not taking more agency over the situation of preserving my grandparent’s belongings and wishes she had kept images of them. 

 

Images during my grandparent’s lifetime and my parents’ childhood were physical handheld objects, that were temporal; they taken with film; if the film was not developed properly the images would be lost, they would fade with time, they could be ripped, burned or hidden, this is something we don’t have now.  Photographs are forever stored in technological memory and even when images are deleted; there never quite gone, as they float around in the ether of ‘The Cloud’.

 

I think also family photos are an inaccurate representation of family life; especially historical ones as taking images was not as accessible as it was today, as cameras were expensive, and so families would go to photo studios for images to be taken. If cameras were owned, you were reduced to taking 36 images at a time, which meant people thought more consciously about the images that they took. 

 

When I interpret the lives of my grandfathers, they appear very differently. 

My grandfather on my mum’s side grew up in rural tribal Zimbabwe under colonial rule, and from what is known had no access to cameras, at least on a first-hand family basis. This means that the story of my Sekuru (Shona for grandpa) is relied upon entirely by word of mouth; the stories told to me by my aunts, uncles and mum, and even then, there very little is known of his biography. By stark contrast, my Opa (Dutch for grandpa) on my dad’s side of the family came from a middle-class family of chemists and had access to a family camera, this meant that there are relatively many images of my Opa as a child. I think that the access to not only a camera but space and time as a middle-class family meant that many of the documents that tell my grandpa’s life story have been preserved, and means I have a rich understanding of his life story.