Memories
Erinnerungen
Length: 19 mins
Year of production: 2004
Exhibition Format: Quicktime file
Source Format: 35mm still photographs
Voice-over: Sylvia Schedelbauer
Language: German or English versions available
Synopsis: A woman grows up during the bubble economy in Japan. Why did her parents never speak about the past? Using a box full of photos found in her family archive, the filmmaker tries to construct one version of a family history.
"We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests." Milan Kundera, Ignorance
–––War and conflict bookend this untraditional family history, Schedelbauer's exploration of how the legacy of the mid/late 20 th century's complicated histories have shaped her own familial lineage. Constructed entirely of family photos, from documents of her grandfather's questionable involvement with the Nazis, to the joint narratives of her German father and Japanese mother, and finally to her own coming of age during the first Gulf War, Memories explores the vagaries and construction of memory and history. (Chi-hui Yang, program notes, The 2008 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar)
–––[Schedelbauer]'s experimental filmmaking is partially guided by a self-reflective reflection upon her own identity as a transnational and independent artist that began with her earliest film, Memories, inspired by her discovery of a box of photographs left by her father chronicling his youth in Nazi Germany and his years in Japan, where he met her mother and where Schedelbauer was born and raised. A revelation of the strange distance that can loom suddenly between even those closest to us, Memories is a poignant meditation on how so much of adult identity is based upon selective memory, be it conscious or unconscious. Schedelbauer exposes herself most readily in Memories, the type of autobiographical effort that many artists venture in self-exploration, looking at themselves in the mirror of others. Schedelbauer investigates a collection of family photos featuring her National Socialist grandfather, her businessman father, and her Japanese mother. The artist narrates the work herself, gradually moving from subjective ancestral past to recent history and contemporary society. This is autobiography as critical study. Her memories are occupied with war, politics, and other wider subjects of consequence. It is an unassuming and straightforward work, best as a personal rather than stylistic introduction. (Greg de Cuir, Jr., program notes, Academic Film Center, Belgrade) –––However, though the film begins with the discovery of just such a trove of documents and raw materials that will initiate its domestic ethnographic investigation of the family's history, the family secret is left undisclosed in Erinnerungen. What is discovered, or rather confirmed, is that little is known about the grandfather. Instead of leading to some sort of personal redefinition and self-specification on the part of the narrator, the research into the past leads to further confusion at worst and a continued state of nonclarity at best. And "family" and "home" appear neither as sites of intimacy and authenticity nor as sites where some greater understanding about the past might be achieved, be it in the form of family history or a broader social and political history unlocked through the perspective of that family history. Instead, "family" and "home" mark sites of distance, alienation, and an even further estrangement from history. The photos discovered in the box labeled "memories" are far from a mother lode of historical documents; instead they are a series of opaque, neutral, resistant images that seem to assert ever more insistently that this man, the grandfather, and his moment in history will remain forever out of the narrator's reach, useless in the project of self-reconstruction/ construction she seems on the verge of undertaking. One might assume that the narrator is on the verge of achieving greater proximity to her subject when she begins in the second and third section to address her parents' lives following the Second World War. After all, she knows them personally and has been able, as an adult, to ask them questions about their lives. But Erinnerungen does not, in the end, "provide ... an opportunity for the filmmaker to get to know his or her parents, to finally bear a detailed account of private life in a historical context that had otherwise remained particularly incomprehensible," as do most other German documentaries on the Third Reich and its aftereffects, which expose the filmmaker's family to "(non-fictional) filmic scrutiny.” (Christopher Pavsek, The Impertinence of Saying "I": Sylvia Schedelbauer's Personal Documentaries)
–––“War has stayed unimaginably alien to me,” says Sylvia Schedelbauer in her first work, Memories (2004). Yet the role that the Second World War had in shaping the filmmaker’s identity connects the film – and therefore her oeuvre, in which the theme of war figure extensively – to more contemporary narratives of displacement, often themselves a consequence of conflict-ridden countries. Schedelbauer, born in Tokyo in 1973 to a German father and a Japanese mother, moved to Berlin in her twenties to study at the Berlin University of the Arts and has lived there since. Her films, which have screened at numerous festivals and institutions, were presented in a retrospective at the latest edition of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, held each spring in Germany. Oberhausen, one of the oldest short-film festivals in the world, kickstarted Schedelbauer’s career with Memories, a profoundly personal short documentary film on the unreliable nature of memory and cultural identification in a transnational context, which was presented at the festival the year it was made. In it, Schedelbauer attempts to (re)construct her family history, using family photos to map out what led to her parents’ meeting in Japan, the details of which were never disclosed to the filmmaker. In a voiceover the filmmaker admits to having based her version of the family’s history (including mentions of her grandfather’s involvement with the Nazis) on fragmented conversations she had with her father. Her mother, on the other hand, had always been reluctant to share details of her past. Intriguingly, although Memories strives to critique the limits and fallibility of human memory, it also demonstrates how much history is susceptible to distortion and subjectivity. Photos of Schedelbauer’s parents are presented in a slideshow, but the filmmaker’s voice is the only one allowed to comment on them. Because of her parents’ silence about their past, Schedelbauer grew up in an identity vacuum, stripped of the cultural coordinates to make sense of her mixed-heritage existence within the fractured geopolitical landscape of the late twentieth century. Memories ultimately reflects on the generational trauma of the children of the Second World War – Schedelbauer’s parents – and the rippling effects it had on the filmmaker and her own generation. (Ren Scateni, Art Review) –––In Erinnerungen (Memories, 2004), her first movie, she counters parental silence directly, appropriating dozens of family photos, accompanied by a voiceover commentary that presents her plight. It begins with a series of images from a photo album she discovered in a shoebox buried in a closet when she was fourteen. Vivid and sepia-colored, these affecting, carefully framed photographs document her grandfather’s service as a German soldier during World War II. Seen at rest and in groups, ordinary, uniformed men emanate a humanist spirit wholly at odds with the realities of the ideology they served and the war in which many of them lost their lives. Though Schedelbauer tells us that her grandfather died at Stalingrad, she cannot identify him in any of the photos. As elusive as the past of which he was a part, he seems to embody the paradox that she implies is intrinsic to photography: its documentation of a world that remains unknown. For all its irrefutability as data, every photo in this group, however evocative and haunting, remains a tantalizing enigma, its truth-value indecipherable and irretrievable. Schedelbauer’s work suggests that this is not merely a matter of technical limits or human fallibility, but the byproduct of the perpetuation of wars and the conditions that promote them. Schedelbauer follows up with more casual-looking photos from the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, many presumably taken by her parents. In juxtaposing the suppressed past with the one she has lived through, she contrives a wished-for continuity, a gesture both pitiable and palpable. Thus when, near the close of her movie, she provides a list (retrieved from the Internet) of international wars, mostly throughout the twentieth century, she links her own incomplete story to those of the countless millions whose pasts were similarly fractured and suppressed. In so doing, she affirms that the distortions that beset personal and cultural histories are among the most far-reaching casualties of war. (Tony Pipolo, Artforum) –––Erinnerungen (“Memories”), one of her earliest filmic works from 2004, is a personal insight into the life of her grandfather on her father’s side, who served as a soldier in the Third Reich and met his end in Stalingrad. Her grandfather’s story is reconstructed on the basis of filmed photographs that he had kept in an album and which act as anchor points for Sylvia Schedelbauer to recount his story. Having no memories of her own about her grandfather, only these photos provide information about his past. After the end of World War II, this past was collectively hushed up for a long time, with complicity being denied and formative experiences cloaked in silence. And this was also the case with her grandfather’s past, which can only be revealed to some extent through the preserved photographs. Via her grandfather, the filmmaker then also progressed to her father, and was finally able to speak about her own childhood. From an early stage in her life she was accompanied by the feeling of not really belonging, of finding herself between her parents’ worlds. The longing for a cultural affiliation, one that promises a sense of security, permitted the desire to arise within her of being born in a different time. Like many of her generation, as the child of the first post-war generation, Sylvia Schedelbauer has been preoccupied with examining and coming to terms with her family history, about which few words were even spoken within the family. In this way, perhaps Erinnerungen (“Memories”) can be understood far more as an attempt to name and reveal an existing gap and its impacts on one’s own identity, rather than wanting to actually close this gap. (Lina Louisa Krämer, online journal, Kurzfilm Magazin) –––Memories lets memory speak in pictures, in quotes by Milan Kundera and in stories by the filmmaker. In one box she found the badge with the eagle holding the swastika in its talons. The find seemed to her like something forbidden: penetrating the secret of another life. The material came from the grandfather who died in Stalingrad. But the granddaughter could not identify him in the photos; he is an "alien" to her, one among many in the group. We see posing soldiers, harmless scenes, men shining shoes, on the road, resting, playing sports, having coffee. Men like on a family vacation. The filmmaker's voice ponders over the events depicted in the pictures: Who and what do the photos include, who and what do they exclude, who in them survived the war, who did what, saw, knew? Who was behind the camera, what remains invisible in the pictures? Who would recognize themselves in those depicted, who would look at them with what feelings, perhaps with horror, hatred, contempt? The story of "Memories" continues. Schedelbauer's father Wolfgang was born in 1933 in Berlin into the poverty of the violated republic. Barely too young to make the last stand for Hitler, he experiences the hunger years. The young man finds his future on the other side of the world, as a businessman in the Japanese economic miracle, and as husband of a Japanese woman, Setsu, who escapes her traditional parental home. The private photo album shows everyday family and work life, prosperity and success. Father and mother–daughter Sylvia reports–had broken off contact with their relatives. A distancing that she takes on in her relationship to her parents and their standards and values. They are everyday images, even if they are set against the backdrop of Japan. We all have inherited such images. They are images of life that indirectly say a lot about Schedelbauer. (Andreas Wilink, kultur.west) –––Sylvia Schedelbauer's film begins with the word 'Erinnerungen' (Memories), on what looks like an innocuous photo album. The next image reveals the German Nazi emblem above that word. Behind the cover of her grandfather's album are stories of his life in the German military during National Socialism. The grandchild tries to recognize a relative she never even met in photos of the troops, a man who died at Stalingrad. After the war, Schedelbauer's voiceover continues, her father had moved to Japan as a commercial agent, where he had married a local woman. Born in Japan, Schedelbauer herself grows up bicultural in a society that remains alien to her, and only discovers deeper reasons for her alienation as an adult: Those who do not know their roots will have an uneasy place in the present, the ‚here and now.' Both her father and mother remain silent about the past. Schedelbauer endeavours to find a narrative history to explain the photos; at the same time, she questions her search for identity. (Festival magazine, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 2005) –––How much can we remember about our past? Why are some events printed in our memory and others canceled instead? What is the selection process that our brain uses to decide what to archive and what to throw away? There are some traumatic events that we cancel in order to give ourselves the opportunity to go on and have a “normal” life, find a partner, have children, build our identity and professionalism. There are some evens that involve the whole society, events for which our memory merges with that of other people, creating what is called collective memory, a common memory that binds us to one another, its function is that of an activator, of a switch that turns on moments that are impossible to share because they are personal and linked to one’s way of feeling and seeing reality, so here in that case fragments of memory, painful, impossible, to remember without these activators, can resurface and look at us, just like they were here, now, crushing time and asking us “how did you forget about me?” (Stefano Romano, program notes, Art House Shkodër) Awards:
2006 Directorʼs Citation Black Maria Film Festival
The Impertinence of Saying "I": Sylvia Schedelbauer's Personal Documentaries, by Christopher Pavsek