This is a segment from a longer piece I made while I was at the Art Institute. The whole video, called Echoes: A Video Poem in Three Parts, was almost half an hour long.
My dad’s little brother was killed in the Vietnam War when he was only 18. My dad was in in the Navy at the time, still basically a kid himself. My dad didn’t talk about his brother much when I was young, so he was always kind of a sad mystery to me. One summer when I was home from college, my dad announced that he wanted to attend a reunion of some of the men who had served with my would-have-been uncle during the war. I felt I needed to document the experience.
Drive is the middle section of the video. The footage is from the actual drive to the reunion, which took place in Killeen, Texas. The text is from an interview with my father.
Originally I had audio with this segment, but it was under copyright. My professors at the time didn’t talk to us much about using copyrighted material, and when they did it was kind of like, “no one’s going to come after you because you’re just poor students”. Which kind of makes sense, but I wish I had known about other alternatives because I’d still like to show the piece but with original audio. So I’m showing it here, silent. I think it still works.
I always felt like this was the most successful part of the video because it encompasses, I think, this kind of haunted feeling. I struggled for a long time over exactly how to deal with my father’s interview. I actually had a video of him doing the interview, but somehow watching it was just too… specific. For me it was painful to watch because my dad was so honest and so emotionally raw- he was very openly talking about emotions he hadn’t dealt with in a very long time. It was powerful stuff, and I knew I had to handle it delicately. I felt that showing the interview by itself would be almost too much for people- the rawness of it might somehow prevent people from really thinking about the more universal issues of what my father was dealing with. So I felt that I needed to remove the viewer from the immediacy of what my dad was saying and how he was saying it. I did this by literally taking my dad out of it, leaving only his words. Then, for visuals, I played around with the footage from the drive, slowing it down and altering the color and texture, in an attempt to create a kind of dream-like, thoughtful space in which to reflect on what my dad had said.
This project is the hardest thing I have ever done. Not just art-wise, either. It was hard to ask my dad questions about something I knew was painful for him, it was hard to go on that trip and to tape people I didn’t know talking about a dark and difficult shared history, it was hard to witness my dad dealing with a ghost from his past, and it was hard to put something together that I thought would do justice to the memory of my dad’s little brother. But because of those things I also think it’s one of the most honest things I’ve made.
Making things, for me, is about trying to translate something internal into something external. It’s about trying to process your experiences and put them into some kind of shape that you can meditate and reflect on. And that, I think, is inherently difficult. It’s difficult because life has no natural shape or order- life is chaos, and making sense from chaos is quite a task. But it’s what we do, as humans. We take our messy experiences and our messy emotions and spread them out like tea leaves and try with all our might to divine some kind of meaning. Whatever shape this takes for people, this meaning-making, whether it takes the shape of religion, or art, or science, or a career, or a family, or love, or addiction, or rebellion- we need something to anchor us amidst the chaos. Otherwise, we’re lost.
