Notes from meeting with David Archibald

I arranged to have a meeting with David Archibald to discuss my film in relation to some of the texts we had read in the first block of Advanced Topics in Film – mostly Debord’s ‘Theory of the Dérive‘ and Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History‘. Both of these texts seem to provide some academic background for the concepts of the past, childhood memories, and drifting.

Following the meeting I intend to read David Archibald and Carl Lavery’s ‘From Street To Screen‘ and Carl Lavery’s ‘Rethinking the Dérive‘ to better understand the concept and how I can relate it to my film in a more integral way than it currently appears to be linked – at the moment my main relation with Debord is that I have stumbled across a visual style that drifts from room to room without cutting, but I think there is much more to unpack with Debord.

Another text which I think will prove particularly revealing is Benjamin’s ‘Berlin Childhood‘ where he writes about his own childhood and childhood memories, as well as further writing Benjamin did about childhood – David gave me a quote from Benjamin’s writing on childhood which seems particularly fitting;

‘Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium. It is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. Above all, he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil’.

Walter Benjamin

I feel that this was a successful meeting and I have lots of much-needed reading to do over the coming weeks to provide more of an academic grounding for my film and the research question that my film is tied to.