Ciné, ma vérité: Memory as a Creative Force in the Process of Constructing Subjectivities

The main impulse behind this essay is to explore some of the themes and methods I employed in Batum (2015, Super8, 12 mins), a film that takes as its starting point my personal experience of near drowning in the Black Sea of Batumi, Georgia. As such, Batum is induced with a desire for an auto-ethnographical self-interrogation as I wish to move towards creating a personal cartography of my experiences. Images that feature in the film are a constellation of memories that are mine (one may think of Roland Barthes’ punctum here), and those that I acquired through the knowledge of history and culture (Barthes’ studium). The latter ones I call prosthetic and they are exemplified here by the poems of Osip Mandelstam and Joseph Stalin, among other cultural tropes. Mikhail Bulgakov’s unpublished play Batum resonates throughout my film, least of all in its title. While making Batum I was set to explore a certain displacement of identity that emerges when we encounter past experiences. I sought to experience how memories become fiction once recorded and how in this process of recording, the camera itself held a mysterious agency. I am, above all, always interested in ways in which film, as one of the technologies of memory, can be seen as an innovative creator of memories themselves. The complex relationship between personal and collective memories often subverts the social and political indentity constructions, which I tend to explore in my films.