Uber memoria II

Check out Shaun Wilson's latest post on Über memoria II, part of his Über memoria video project which explores "the nature of locational memory through the moving image".

I had first met Shaun at the wonderful "Film and Memorialisation" conference he organised at Schwaebisch Hall, Germany, in October last year, where we discovered we shared common research interests in exploring time and memory in cinema. Two months later, we met up again in December when he swung by London while travelling to Europe, where he filmed footage of, among others, myself and Ian London, my fellow PhD supervisee, for Über memoria.

Looking at the first release video stills on his blog, I am quite thrilled (unprecedented for the extremely camera-shy me!), albeit with a little feeling of the uncanny. I've always thought that the indexical image is the ultimate unheimlich - the uncanny - that which Freud identifies as the intractable uneasiness poised on the boundary between life and death. But it is more than just the nature of the image. In the still on Shaun's post, I am pictured looking upwards - I had been directed to gaze at the top of a building across Lower Regent Street. As I fixed my eyes at the building roof while Shaun filmed, I remember thinking to myself at that time, "why on earth have I never looked at that building top before?" Rushing around as I do whenever I am out in busy, chaotic London, my eyes are always cast on the ground or looking absently ahead of me, preoccupied with my next appointment. And now as I remember that thought, it occurs to me that that is precisely the typical moment before death: the incredulous questioning, the slow realisation, the epiphany.