Memory

Mori, Keiko

The objective of this project was to overcome the problems with communicating via images: Images can hardly convey abstract thoughts and easily have hundreds and thousands of meanings. In this project, the technique of montage was used to challenge these problems. Montage juxtaposes different images to create a grammar of images.

In this short film, my point of view is how time in our memory is treated differently from that in real time. I encountered this idea while working on the idea of "Time manipulation" on the Location project for Design Major Studio. In addition to what I was pursuing for the Location project, I started questioning where we can see this time manipulation in our daily life. Memory was the answer to this question. Some events are stretched in time, some are reduced, and some are paused in our memory. For example, it seems time goes really fast when we were on a busy street. On the other hand, when we are in a country side relaxing, time seems to go really slow. This is how these events remain in our memory.

In order to emphasize my point of view in my film, I also introduced contrasting idea of time manipulation in our memory: Time is constant and immutable in real time. The basic structure of a film contains beginning, middle, and end. I applied these two contrasting ideas to this structure: Beginning is real time, middle is memory, and end is back to real time. This is the overall structure of montage in my film. In the part of memory in my film, I also introduced two contrasting time manipulations next to each other. Throughout the film, montage creates a visual grammar to fix meanings of the images used in the film and to convey my certain point of view.