This Is Not My House: Notes on film-making, photography and my father

Jackson, David (2020) This Is Not My House: Notes on film-making, photography and my father. In: Developing a Sense of Place: The Role of the Arts in Regenerating Communities. UCL Press, pp. 98-115. ISBN 9781787357761

Preview

Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (15MB) | Preview

Abstract

An essay on my filmmaking practice and visual methodology which takes as its starting point Annette Kuhn’s premise that memory is a process, an activity, and a construct. The film attempts to mobilise her definition of memory-work as ‘an active practice of remembering’ by stitching together a montage of closely observed vignettes in which I ask my father to re-enact aspects of his everyday life before the camera. My intention in the film and the essay is to explore the question of how the past may be re-enacted in the present through what Kuhn calls ‘performances of memory’ and at the same time to find an equivalence between ways of looking in terms of visual methodology and what is actually being looked at as object: my father.