Anthea Kennedy and Ian Wiblin
What We Saw: A small history of Berlin-Tempelhof as site and image.
We will discuss a film we are currently making that is concerned with the representation of place, history and memory. Although we refer to a range of thinkers and critics, it is perhaps the writings of Walter Benjamin that inform our ideas the most. We strive to operate a sort of cinematic equivalent of his critiques on history and its representation. We are aware of the mechanics by which we might organise image and sound to encourage the viewer to actively consider the past in the present – the use of montage, the blurring of borders between fiction and documentary, taking a tangential approach to subject matter etc. In bringing the past into the present, our intention is to break, in an oppositional sense, the mainstream linear representation of history that, as Benjamin wrote, denies the possibility for change.
Our project has a strong personal element and is at least partly based on family connections to the location of the film, Tempelhof, a suburb of Berlin. Thus the film also challenges us with how to represent post-memory and inherited memory – in ways that fit with Benjamin’s contention that nothing should be lost to history.