Remote Intimacy
Ferne Intimität
Length: 14:30 mins
Year of production: 2007/2008
Exhibition Format: Quicktime file
Source Format: 16mm archival footage
Language: German or English versions available
Selected Music by: Violet
Synopsis: Stream of consciousness with fictitious and found stories and a personal reference.
Short statement: Remote Intimacy is an allegorical collage about history, memory, and dislocation—a cine-poem weaving a recurring dream with fragments from various texts. After creating a short film from family photographs that reflected only my view of memory’s failures, I wanted to include my mother’s story. Yet she refused to share her past, leaving her history a secret between my parents. This led me to a fictionalized approach: the voice-over consists mostly of imagined words, except for a single line she speaks herself. The film is not about her or me, but about the impossibility of accessing a story or history—about disconnection from singular narratives and identification with multiple, overlapping ones. Using only found “documentary” footage, it unfolds as an associative stream of consciousness. The film’s Japanese-American thread resonates obliquely with my German-Japanese background, dissolving fixed geographies and unfolding in the drifting, associative logic of dreams.
Long Statement: Remote Intimacy is an allegorical collage about history and memory, a cine-poem, in which my own personal experiences (the account of the recurring dream) and my own fictionalized writing (that involves slightly modified biographical elements about my mother) are interwoven with quotes from different text sources.
A few years ago I made a short film, which consisted almost entirely of photographs taken from the family archive. It was a meditation on memory and the failures of it, and since it only included my version of the family history, I was tempted to make a film that would include my mother's voice and her story. But interviewing her failed quickly because she did not want to reveal anything about her personal history, not to me, or to anyone else. Her history is a secret that she shares with my father, and at one point I realized that it would remain a secret...and so decided to use a fictionalized approach.
For the most part, the words in the voice-over are not her words, except the part in which she speaks her own voice-over line. The film is not about her, or about me, but rather about the impossibility of accessing a story or history: it is about describing a feeling of dislocation, of disconnection to singular national historical narratives, and of relating to/identifying with a plurality/synchronicity of histories.
None of the (home movie) footage is personal, or from my family archive. I exclusively used sound and film material that was made for a ‘documentary' purpose in the broadest sense, to construct an associative stream of consciousness that borrows from other histories and narratives.
In Remote Intimacy, the bi-national subplot is in fact Japanese-American, (which of course has little to do with my own cultural background, which is German-Japanese). Most footage is American: half of it takes place in Northern California, the beaches, the children playing in the forest, the sequence that quotes Japanese-American internment; and most of the other material in the film was shot in Japan.
This may only be recognizable to those who know the history of the trans-Pacific cultural landscape of California/Japan, for others, the images are more abstract and dislocated, thus making it harder to localize the geography of the footage. Often people relate the film to my own background and see it in a metaphorical light, and that's fine by me, because the film follows the rhetoric of a dream, and in dreams of course, nothing is logical, narratives unfold in a seemingly arbitrary manner. (Berlin, July 30, 2008. Sylvia Schedelbauer)
"The word secret has an erotic edge, as if in hiding everything, a story, a weapon, a piece of candy still wet from the mouth and clinging to the flannel lining of a pocket, one moves closer to a sequestered sexual body at the core of being." Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones
"Perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung." Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones
–––In (...) Remote Intimacy (2007), words and images are no longer in direct relation, meanings are often hidden and the rhetorics of dreams take control. The film relinquishes the confessional commentary of Memories and embraces a multilayered narrative composed of personal experiences, fictionalised writing and literary quotes. Schedelbauer’s early preoccupation with the unreliability of memory here morphs into a grander discourse about cultural dislocation and the impossibility of identifying with a monolithic national historical narrative. Various types of archival documentary footage are used in the film, including home movies, newsreels and educational films, most of which were shot in the United States and Japan. However, locations remain unidentified in the credits, meaning they are recognisable only to those potentially familiar with the trans-Pacific landscape of postwar American–Japanese relations. To all others, these images are abstract and unplaceable, and yet they seem to be drawn from a collective consciousness of shared media, the recollection of which resurges as in a hazy dream. Thanks to this pervasive use of found footage, Remote Intimacy gestures towards a subconscious realm, a primordial soup of intertwined memories and experiential connections that lulls the viewer into an oneiric torpor. (Ren Scateni, Art Review)
–––Remote Intimacy–filed away intimacy. Filed away in the sense of stored away or of dismissed. Again, a female voice accompanies us. She speaks about someone whose recurring dream is about someone on a ship, about the open sea that turns into a nightmare. This is accompanied by black and white images of the sea, the sky above the waves, of underwater images, of storms and capsizing ships, of seagulls, airplanes, battleships, and guns. A second dream has to do with forests; there are images of breeding birds, hatching animals, fishermen, and of field workers. A violent counter-world constantly opposes the seemingly peaceful: the military, the churning sea, a shipwreck, a blazing conflagration. As in "Memories," there is something in the past from which the subject feels disconnected. Every image she makes (for herself) is an attempt to grasp the intangible. She is under a spell, and has the compulsion to reflect, to lift the weight from the unconscious, to face what has been (which may relate to parents), and to detach herself from it. Virginia Woolf writes in The Waves: And time lets fall its drop. The drop that has formed on the roof of the soul falls. On the roof of my mind time, forming, lets fall its drop. (Andreas Wilink, kultur.west)
–––Similarly, with both [Remote] Intimacy (2007) and Way Fare (2009), she repurposes found footage – which she describes as, ‘an archive of impressions registered for no specific purpose but as reminders for later use’ – to invent a brilliant memoria composed of events one was never a witness to, places one has never visited, and people one may never meet (but which still seem familiar). In this, she crafts a deliberate conflation of personal memory with the cultural memory of specific media – films or shows that seem like we may have seen them, but whose name will slip us forever. There is however a grander purpose to this design than a mere observation of how the media we engage with can infuse itself in our veins; it is also to recognise and then declare our collective ownership of an archive of the eternal: we may not be sure of which films these are, but we know the sorrow that is their definition; we may not dress like the characters in them, but we mourn alike. In this, Schedelbauer institutes a monument to the fundamentally uncanny – material akin to our own lives, but not quite. (Anuj Malhotra, Senses of Cinema)
Remote Intimacy continues her exploration of relationships and the distances between people – the distances between shots also. A form of digressive rather than attractive montage is practiced in this piece. Connections are refuted and abstract dream logic governs the design. Her we see Schedelbauer begin to engage with images of nature, primarily water, also trees and birds. It becomes apparent that the intimacy referenced in the title is man’s disconnect with the natural world. (Greg de Cuir, Jr., program notes, Academic Film Center, Belgrade)
–––From found footage and text fragments, Sylvia Schedelbauer puts together a diving expedition into the subconscious in her film “Ferne Intimität” (Remote Intimacy). Individual and collective traumas of suffering and loss conjoin in a narrative that irresistibly pulls us in, one that can be read as a metaphor for the catastrophes of the past century. Rather than drawing on well-known media imagery, (...) the artist makes her own discoveries of moments of high visual poetry, to which she adds a sensitive and insightful soundtrack. (Jury statement by Marcel Odenbach, Gabriele Horn, Daniel Kothenschulte, Stephan-Flint Müller, Elmar Zorn. VG BILD-KUNST Award, KunstFilmBiennale 2007)
–––A montage of impressive, metaphorically charged black and white archival footage from the 1920s to the 1970s – of fishing boats, marine ships, sea birds, forest workers and playing kids––are combined with text fragments to form an associative stream of consciousness, that revolves around the connection between the collective and individual, war and peace, family and autobiography. In Remote Intimacy, Schedelbauer creates a dialogue between fictitious and found stories, “Found Footage”, as well as personal texts and other authors' texts. She continues her engagement with the repercussions of World War II on her Japanese mother and her German father, that was the basis of her film Memories. (program notes, 3Sat)
Awards:
2008 Third prize at Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, USA
2007 KunstFilmBiennale, Bild-Kunst Promotional Award