ATMITW + Final Thoughts

Since we focused on a lot of narrative metacinema in this class, it is nice to end with a big experimental piece, to show metacinema in a different mode of filmmaking. Mike Olenick’s All The Memory In The World is a fantastical ode to image making and images themselves. Olenick focuses on using a lot of popular cinema to do the heavy lifting, editing hundreds of movies together into a cohesive piece focusing on the camera’s ability to capture life. The narrator uses a creepy drawl to relate a hundred years worth of image making in the hour and fifteen minutes of ATMITW.

The film focuses heavily on photography for most of its runtime, showing us darkrooms, studios, framed photographs, and photobooks full of memories. The narrator muses over the nature of memory and captured images with thick vignetted scenes from movies. The vingettes focus us onto certain aspects of the moving images, usually photographs, while emulating a spotlight, or the circle of the lens.

Many of the films are recognizable, a few are ones we viewed for this class (Peeping Tom makes a couple of appearances). This serves to take context away from the films, reveling in their artifice. We are viewing photographs on a screen, from a movies, cut into another movie, vignetted and with voice over. However, even while removing them from context, a lot of the film are about memory and loss, so it works double.

I found Olenick’s Travolta piece to be a bit more fun, really examining an actor and using his roles to tell a completely different existential story. Both of them remind me a lot of the curators and editors over at Everything Is Terrible (www.everythingisterrible.com) who similarly re-edit and re-purpose old footage to different ends. Olenick feels like Everything is Terrible with a thesis.

• As for the class, I thought that all the films we watched were pretty essential. I am now a big fan of Wim Wenders. However, I thought the works that spoke to me most and were doing the most interesting things were the experimental works, like the television pieces and especially The Eternal Frame. While narrative meta-cinema is great, I thought the experimental meta-cinema was much more fascinating (I’m including Holy Motors in the experimental category). The readings were a bit dense, but also fascinating once their codes were cracked, LARGELY due to the online meetings we had. While those are hard to coordinate, I think they offer an extremely helpful resource for an online class, and an invaluable amount of help for dissecting these films.