An Emotional Hangover: Searching for Presence in Repetition

“It makes me wonder if I can ever experience any media with that degree of emotional involvement again; if I’m just getting old; and all that’s left is an emotional hangover.”

Maria Hofmann

In this issue of our videographic film and moving image studies journal [in]Transition, we present the follow-up to the fall 2022 publication of Once Upon a Screen Vol. 2, part 1 with its more somber and serious conclusion, part 2. In this second installment, guest co-edited by our two associate editors, Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer, nine standalone videographic works continue to explore how traumatic screen experiences shape and reshape shared memories. As with part one of this collection, makers were invited to respond to a personal written cinematic memory through their own personal videographic remediation. Without knowledge of the original inspiration for the memory encounter, makers were invited to substitute, reimagine, and populate the screen memory with moving images, sounds, and texts from their own cinematic souvenirs. In this act of communal translation, a new videographic work emerges alongside a rich intertextual exchange of accompanying conversations between the co-makers. Echoing Catherine Grant’s introduction to part one of this collection, this part two contribution to practice-research methodologies in film and moving image studies continues to elevate the performance and processes of collaborative making. It does this through an intimate encounter with the artistic material, and, I would argue, by engaging deeply with the material’s constitutive resonances within bodies and memories outside the text.

Such an encounter, as the collection demonstrates so thoughtfully, is not simply how these screen memories cohere, but precisely in where they depart or chafe against one another. Indeed, some of the most resonant entries in this collection are moments when the co-makers' intentions, desires, and screen triggers move in opposing or contradictory directions. The discordant nature of these collaborations reveals instead what cannot be shared in memory and experience through written text, screen image, or sonic reverberation alone. These mistranslations repeat across this collection to produce an important mismatch, unreconcilable through the accompanying written texts or videographic works. This “in-betweenness” points to the nature of both memory misrecollection and even personal trauma itself, what gets left in the gaps between what can and cannot be expressed about what happened, how it happened, how one felt, and what might be impossible to recall even decades later. Many of the makers in part two describe this “emotional hangover” as it were as one of time and distance., i.e. what one felt in youth or adolescence vs. what one feels now with time and separation. The videos and texts suggest a deep yearning to share a present, or better yet, a presence across bodies and texts. However, some of the co-makers reflect on the sourness or bitterness at having their specific and contextual feelings fizzle out in their text's remediation by another. While couched in generosity and openness to the other’s interpretation, we as viewers/readers sense, at times, the co-makers’ disappointment at what is missing, a profound feeling of loss at what their words failed to inspire or elucidate. We sense a missed connection along the way, and in the initial memory author’s response an acceptance that such reconciliation might be impossible in the hands of another. This scar has left an itch that can’t be scratched, not by oneself, nor, it seems, by anyone. Despite this, the co-makers in their receptivity to the possibilities of what has been made are then invited to consider how this new screen memory in its diffused approximation reconfigures their own memories anew, a reconfigured ghostly encounter from the past. This longing for something more, or something else, is present across this collection, a bittersweet edge of wanting. 

What perhaps is most important for me, personally, in reading/watching part two of this collection was not merely in its new knowledge production (its making-process-methodology), as Catherine Grant already noted so powerfully in their introduction to part one. Instead, I was discomforted by how this collection hails us to perform at certain moments a puzzling retrospection and at other times to test a traumatic experiment alongside the co-makers and editors. In these intermedial exchanges throughout this collection, the co-makers unconsciously involve the viewer/reader in engaging their own personal reflections about both screen trauma and screen memory. We are invited to perform, but also implicated as interlocutors as personally (and sometimes painfully) as the co-makers. Maria Hofmann's inquiry about the emotional impermanence of screen memory brought words to a quiet ache I’ve felt for some time: will I ever feel any cinematic experience as deeply as I did when I was young? younger? when I felt more? when I had the capacity to feel more? before I got hurt? Am I stuck in ever-dwindling conditions for an emotional screen experience from now on? Have I lost the capacity to be moved, triggered, awakened, shocked? What of my personal scar tissue is no longer sensitive to cinematic rupture? As a video essayist myself, I feel these questions as a spectator, but more deeply as a maker caught between these lines increasingly more often as I move into more personal territory in my own creative work. This collection brings a published account of the anecdotal and often hushed aspects of our conversations amongst the video essay community. What happens at the edge of myself and my making, what happens when I bring myself to the making and expose it to others, what reticence or revulsion do I feel with drawing this all up to the surface and for what and for whom? Is the loss felt only in translation, not just our own distance? Or, does the act of handing the memory anonymously to another in fact absolve us of something we’ve long been unable to do ourselves, work out that memory through our own practice? Trauma can manifest not simply as a loss of words to describe, but also a loss of sensation (of recall), to never experience that particular presence again despite remediated repetition after remediated repetition. Is all that’s left an emotional hangover, the gap between us and another or is it really between me and myself?