thing or someone looked like and contemplation (reflection), and therefore also
distance to what is seen. If the footage appears old, the distance is connected to
a historic past. There is a historic past inOne Day, although it is a recent past.
The film refers to a specific past in the life of an actual person. But this historic
pastness is not indicated by the footage as such and nor by any old auditory
record. InSolvorn, the situation is quite opposite.
The Historical Past ofS
LikeOne Day,Solvornis also a documentary that refers to a rather vague
historic past. The film presents a collection of photographs made by a specific
photographer betweenandin one particular geographical area, but,
except for the fact that several of the characters are named in the voice-over, the
details of these pictures remain vague and unspecified: Was there a specific oc-
casion that these images show? Do they present a typical situation or something
that happened only once? LikeOne Day, the voice-over narration inSolvorn
also produces a strong sense of presence. Despite that, the voice-over inSol-
vornis obviously added to the imagery as part of the film’s post-production,
that it employs a retrospective mode, uses the past tense, and the second-person
pronoun“you”and a curious attitude regarding why the pictures were made in
the first place (what motivated the grandmother’s photographic practice and
what made her stop taking pictures in), creates a strong emphasis on the
voice-over as contemporary with the audienc. The form of address seems to
establish the audience as a witness to the filmmaker’s voice-over monologue or
unidirectional dialogue with her dead grandmother, while she is looking at, and
showing us, her grandmother’s pictures.
However, in contrast toOne Day, the historic pastness inSolvornis clearly
marked by the older footage. Its age is indicated by the style of the photographs
and the way the people are portrayed (their clothing and poses) as well as by
the voice-over, which informs us about the one-hundred-year gap between the
film and the production of the glass-plate photographs. The historic distance
between the filmmaker’s era and that of the photographer is also underlined by
the strong emphasis on the presence created by the voice-over’s form of address
and the lack of information about the photographs. The sense of narrational
presence, in other words, accentuates the experience of historical pastness in
Solvorn.
The Temporalities of the Narrative Slide Motion Film 99