5. Bella Exchange
May 18, 2008
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TV Shows
An elderly Canadian woman, a distant relative of mine, peruses a crumbling, photograph album and I film her. The camera wanders from the photographs to close-ups of her body yielding more than a formal interview normally would, an approach I have used to break with traditional interview film practices in order to gain a heightened sense of time and space. The woman's reflections on the photographs are punctuated by the sound of her carer, who interjects occasionally as he clatters around the apartment. The film sequence is cut short by the sound of a telephone ringing. Filming my relative describe who is in the photographs, which I was doing initially for sound and not for picture, I found that the camera had captured something much more touching. It made me think of what are photographs for, what do we do with them all? In many ways this is precisely what most people end up doing, just pointing to people to say their names, and then, when another photo comes along, there they are again.