Journey to the South (57 min)
- Submitting institution
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University of East London
- Unit of assessment
- 34 - Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management
- Output identifier
- 5
- Type
- Q - Digital or visual media
- Publisher
- -
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2017
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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2 - Moving Image Research Centre (MIRC)
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Journey to the South revolves around the 1991 unresolved murder of an idealistic outsider, the village shepherd in Castellar, a small historic mountain village near the French Riviera. The dispersal of people from villages threatens collective memory and may lead to “idyllic re-inscriptions” of a lost way of life (Bakhtin, 1981), but nostalgia for a lost past can also lead to violence. Despite arrests among the population and three trials, nobody is convicted, leaving Castellar enwrapped in a wall of silence. Based on a durational approach and direct, ethnographic engagement with the local population, Journey to the South asks how collective memories and identities are constructed and contested.
The film delves into the effects of the silence hanging over Castellar through observational footage of daily lives, archive footage, interviews and (since memory itself cannot be brought to the camera) cinematic strategies to evoke the past as a continuing present. These include a layered use of the voice-over by three semi-fictionalised characters: the writer Katherine Mansfield, the murdered shepherd, and the film-maker. Journey to the South borrows from layered and non-linear poetic structures to convey the reality of Castellar as a “corridor of voices” (Bakhtin 1981), multiple, coexisting and contradictory. Probing through its own hybrid experimental strategies the essay film’s capacity to engage with memory, place and subjectivity, the film reflexively explores the limits of the genre, and calls attention to the dual nature of an enunciating self that is simultaneously investigative and confessional (Rascaroli, 2009).
Festivals:
East End Film Festival, 2017.
Reviewed by Filmoforia, 2017.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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