Date of Award
Spring 5-16-2022
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Film and Media Studies
First Advisor
Martin Lucas
Second Advisor
Ivone Margulies
Academic Program Adviser
Andrew Lund
Abstract
In the film Anamnesis I bear witness to the injury and death of my childhood best friend Dominic, when I was 11. The film is a quest: A search for a visual memory that I have forgotten or perhaps, deliberately hidden from myself. Can remembering the events in their entirety and chronological order help me heal? Is searching for the lost memories nothing more than a smokescreen to avoid the steps I must take to deal/heal the trauma?
I communicate the relationship between the interplay of memory-making and sense-making and the reconstruction process that enables our past and present to help us make sense of who we are. In the process of recalling events we memorialize the physical media itself. The simplification of memory is drawn from those signifiers to the exclusion of the original memory. When viewed through the lens of trauma, that remembrance is distorted and replaced by a reconstructed truth.
Recommended Citation
Elder, Neville Pullar, "Anamnesis: A Film about Forgetting" (2022). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_sas_etds/902