âAs if they were my ownâ: An Interview with Emilie Serri by Jesse Cumming
âAs if they were my ownâ: An Interview with Emilie Serri by Jesse Cumming
An easy personal highlight from this yearâs Images Festival was No Time For Tomorrow, a new work by Montreal-based filmmaker Emilie Serri. Despite an shared concern with bodies in motion and a nuanced understanding of the relationship between sound and image, the film is in many way a departure from the filmmakerâs early 16mm works. Working in found footage for the first time, the filmmaker utilizes to footage as a means to investigate her shifting relationship with Syria. Both more political and more personal than earlier films, Serri blends and manipulates publicly sourced YouTube footage with home videos in an attempt to reconcile her familial heritage and the nationâs ongoing conflicts; No Time for Tomorrow looking to the past in order to better understand an even more opaque present. She was kind enough to answer some questions about found footage and the negotiation of overlapping histories.
Jesse Cumming: Was this your first time working in found footage? How did you come to this material?
Emilie Serri : Yes, it was. When I started this project, I didnât have any images of Syria to work with. With the ongoing war, it was impossible to travel there and so shooting my own material was out of the question. Working with found footage was therefore mostly a practical choice.
I first started looking for visuals in institutional archival funds but I didnât find much there and it was quite expensive. I then turned to YouTube and spent weeks looking at clips relating to Syria. Most of it was newsfeed from the war. I didnât know exactly what I was looking for but I knew I wanted to show âanotherâ Syria. When I stumbled upon this travelogue containing these images of a wedding shot in Busra, I felt like it contained a much larger history of Syria.
JC: What led you to make a film on Syria? I feel as if viewers canât help but bring their knowledge of the regionâs current turmoil to the film, and while No Time for Tomorrow makes reference to the ongoing civil war, it is not foregrounded.
ES : Thatâs right. No Time for Tomorrow isnât a film about the Syrian Civil War. But it is mostly because of the war that I felt the urge to make a film that would investigate my Syrian cultural heritage. Syria was disappearing before my eyes and time was running out to get to know this country I thought would always be thereâŠ
The idea for the project first came about after a trip to Syria with my father and sister - one of the rare times I had travelled there. Not long after our visit and right before the beginning of the war, my grandmother passed away and I realized I didn't really know her or Syria. Half-Belgian, Half-Syrian, I was born and raised in Montreal and never had much contact with that part of my cultural heritage. And so both her passing and the beginning of the uprising in Syria triggered the need to investigate this post-diasporic Syrian identity that was both so familiar and foreign to me.
JC: What was your intention in working primarily with 1970s footage of dances and weddings and what sort of connections do you wish to explore by pairing it with present-day images of conflict?
ES: Thinking about post-diasporic identity and memory inevitably led me to want to investigate the past. But which past? Since I didnât know much about Syria or my family there, I had to imagine it. I worked with these found images as if they were my own. I imagined that this couldâve been my family celebrating and dancing. I thought the little boy in the film looked like my brother and the young man clapping like my father. Working with found images allowed me to transpose my personal experiences and desires onto someone elseâs images, speaking from a place that was both intimate and distant at the same time.
From an anthropological perspective, weddings are part of the larger category of rituals and as so are universal features of human existence. By editing the footage of these traditional wedding dances with the present-day images of conflict, the counting and the voice over, I was trying to reinterpret my relationship to Syriaâs past and what it meant to me in the present. Through montage, I was able to open up a new space of thinking that wasnât bound by linearity. The mixing of the public (YouTube archives) and the private spheres (home movies)âas well as the intertwining of past and present tenseâwere meant to suggest the construction of a complex political identity rooted in both the personal and the collective. No Time for Tomorrow was a way of including myself in the history of a country that remains unknown even though it is my own.
JC: Iâd like to ask about the triptych format. My first thought is the connection with a three-screen installation format. The viewerâs eyes tend to float across the frame(s), and the film remains quite open, yet at times you isolate or freeze shots, almost as if to emphasize or offer guidance. How much do you consider the audience and spectator when youâre developing your work?
ES: This project was first conceived as a single channel installation but it has been shown as a film and as a three-channel installation. The triptych format was especially interesting to me in that it allowed the eye to wonder in the spaces in between. I find those spaces particularly rich and complex because of their ambiguous status.
In the film, the triptych structure echoes the counting (my father teaching me how to count in Arabic) which in turn acts as a reversed countdown of the time left before Syriaâs disappearance. Itâs also designed to transmit to a viewer a sense of the uncanny that is the essence of the mnemonic fallout generated by the contact between historical images of different statures and functions but which nevertheless are the products of a specific culture and history.
The freeze frames and isolating of the shots are formal strategies I used to emphasize the rythmical qualities already present in the dancing while disrupting the viewerâs sense of time. When the image is frozen, time is suspendedâŠjust like it is in times of war. By suspending time, I insist on its passing. I make it visible. I also make it clear to the viewer that they are watching a construction of reality, that they are watching a film. Itâs important to me to engage in a dialogue with the audience, to open up a space where the spectator is able to activate its own imagination and critical thinking.
JC: Iâm curious both in terms of content and exhibition format â Iâve mentioned the ways I could picture this film in a gallery - but do you think there is a potential loss with such a shift, where the film might be experienced non-linearly and the introduction of the present-day footage no longer appears at the âendâ?
ES: I donât really see it as a lossâŠThey are just fundamentally different experiences and I think they both have their strong points. In the context of the gallery, I like that the film plays in loops. It allows the viewer more time to engage with the work. The film moves in circles in a way that is closer to thought process. There is no end and no beginning, which I think allows the viewer more freedom to make its own connections.
JC: Can you say a few words about sound? At several points it also operates in a triptych form, with Arabic and French voice-overs counting to three. Additionally, the film opens with a French-subtitled Arabic voiceover declaring, âMy dear mother, this video is for you. A present for Motherâs Day.â Is some of the audio sourced from found materials as well? If so,how did you choose this piece? Do you work with found sound differently than found images?
ES: Sound is a central element in all my films. It is often through the disjuntion between image and sound that Iâm able to convey meaning. In this piece, there are 2 main sound elements: the counting in Arabic/French and the opening voice over. The opening voice over is from a family home movie my parents shot in 1986. The audio segment I chose is from a video my father recorded for his mother as a gift for Motherâs Day. I chose to use only the sound because I felt that it was really powerful on its own. I liked the floating presence it had without the image.
I have seen this home movie so many times I almost know it by heart⊠But every time I watch it, I find something new. In this case, the video my father recorded for his mother struck me as something that had a deeper meaning in the present day context of the war and after my grand motherâs passing. It felt like a parting letter to both his mom and Syria.
tangentwithtanner
areudirty
yousharknotpass
jacobvanloon
ellievsbear
turnnoffyourmind
pixelskylines