Layers, traces and gaps: Collage, found footage and the contested past

Abstract

Critical realism is an anti-reductionist approach that asserts the independence of an external world whilst accepting that knowledge of that world is socially constructed and transient. It offers an intermediate position that reconciles the binary opposition of objectivism and subjectivism, challenging the ‘false choice’ (Lovell, 1981) between empiricist and idealist ontologies. In recognising the dense complexity of being and the social world, it advances a stratified reality comprised of co-dependent structures and mechanisms. The paper will describe a framework for practice research that uses found footage and animated collage within a critical realist methodology. The research deploys strategies that privilege simultaneity, overlap and hybridity in articulating layered temporalities that foreground a dialectical conception of history. The practice explores how critical realist collage can challenge essentialist, unitary historical narratives that suppress the interdependence and complexity of socio-historical phenomena. Can the partial and irregular experience of remembering, evoking the contingent and furtive conditions of personal and collective memory be rendered through the aesthetic of moving collage? In reference to animated documentary, the work investigates how spatial and temporal found footage collage can expand the language of non-fiction films that address memory and the past. The paper will argue that the deeper understanding of memory and history that critical realism offers could be apprehended through the construction and mediation that the vocabularies of animation and collage contain.