sharon
(sharon)
#1
friends of Varda. She finds him running a bookshop in Paris and shows
him the picture, but he remembers nothing. She shows him a painted
copy he once made, but he can add no more, replying: ‘It’s reality and
fiction’. (She shows the photo to a goat too. It eats it.) Varda has added
next to nothing to her understanding. So, since the boy is called Ulysse,
she opts instead for a freer interpretation via Greek mythology. This soon
becomes tiresome and forced. The boy’s mother then appears, telling
Varda that ‘Ulysse’ was really just his nickname all along. The hold a
photograph can have over us may be unaccountable, even with detailed
research. It may not be explained literally through its manifest content or
through the moment of its making. Varda’s quest is not satisfied directly
and perhaps it never could be. Even so, a compelling film emerges from
the salutary realization that memory cannot always be recalled, rewritten
or invented, even in the face of photographic evidence.
The animated shortFrank Film( 1973 ) avoids evidence altogether.
The American Frank Mouris narrates his own life with the aid of 11 , 592
separate images, none of which is autobiographical in the familiar sense.^18
His film is a permanently shifting collage of magazine cut-outs of con-
sumer goods and commodified body parts. There is a double soundtrack,
forming its own collage. On one track Mouris’s deadpan voice recounts
his uneventful middle-class upbringing in post-war North America.
He speaks of being saved from tedium only by discovering animation
and making this very film. On the other he simply lists things beginning
with ‘F’. As the life story meanders along, the hyperactive collage pres-
ents equivalents for his every experience: dozens of tumblers of whisky
flood the screen when Mouris discovers alcohol; endless lipsticks spiral
when he starts dating women; hundreds of car tyres roll past when he
learns to drive. It all ends in comic anticlimax when he has no great
insight to offer about all this. It is a confessional film with nothing much
to confess. Even so, Mouris produces something idiosyncratic out of
the unpromising material, refusing to judge whether individuality can
survive the marketed desires of mass culture. The whole film is resolutely
homespun, an artisanal assembly in which every one of the images
has been through Mouris’s hands and scissors, conferring unexpected
108 personality upon them and him.
