Digital Memoria and Aftersun (feat. ALVVAYS)

I recently happened into the most personally stirring double feature I’d ever seen: Charlotte Wells’s directorial debut Aftersun and a homemade short film put together by my grandfather Michael “Michaelpa” Hendrickson. On the one-year anniversary of my mother’s passing this year, my family and I were gathered and shown a 20-minute short with hundreds of documented moments of her strung together on video. This was three days before bawling in “Aftersun.” Both remarkably utilize scrappy home video footage to construct a DNA of what’s recorded and remembered, obscuring those lines. In these experiences I found myself in disbelief of the warmth radiating through the imagery while searching for something underneath its current, something I missed, a part of life I never recognized before. If I’m going to be honest, this piece is very difficult for me to write. In part because of how so much of these experiences elude my words in a critical sense, but also because of both subjects of physical remembrance, loss, warmth. Because I feel it necessary to convey the sensations that were pulled out of me by their combined collection of imagery beyond just my own words, I’m going to cite video and lyrics from Alvvays, a band I’ve adored for a long time. The Canadian band’s work have come to echo the same feeling of the two films I connect so well with but am only reaching to describe - to an audience and myself. 

MICHAELPA’S SHORT 

There’s something about new millennium digital imagery and its possession of nostalgia. A lot of people relate capturing nostalgia to analog film—and I’m right there with you—but I believe digital holds that power in its own way. Michaelpa’s short was just over twenty minutes in length, a collective of handheld video footage starring my late Mother, Christy, recorded over the last 25 years. There’s no strict chronological order of what moment plays, just one digital memory bleeding into the next, sometimes jumping 10 years at a time. The film contained footage anywhere from my mother in the late ‘90s just before I was born until my college graduation of last year’s late spring. In moments I’d see her with me as a kid, in another, her talking directly into the camera at just 30 years old. Most of this footage I’d never seen before; most of it I didn’t remember. Not that I’d recollect what it was like being like, eight, but you know? You get glimpses sometimes, and it’s daunting seeing glimpses from somebody else’s perspective. What I remember the most vividly during this time: Michaelpa pointing his camcorder at life happening in front of the lens. 

AFTERSUN

Aftersun is the only full-length film I’ve ever seen come close to capturing a sliver of what I felt watching our home video. The story of the film is a young, divorced father Calum (lovely Paul Mescal) takes his 11-year-old daughter Sophie (Frankie Coro) on holiday to a resort in Turkey. Now-adult Sophie attempts to reconcile *something* during their shared holiday by replaying footage she recorded herself then on a small DV camcorder. It’s clear Sophie knew there to be something significant to look back on later, insisting on little interviews with her then 32-year-old father. When he eventually asks her to stop recording the questions, she responds with what’s probably the line of the film “Fine, I’ll just record it with my little mind camera.” 

There’s a tension between what’s recorded and remembered, how it ties together in our fucked up little brains as new, expanded, narrative we’re creating in real time. What Wells does in her directorial debut is a wonder to me, capturing somehow both the perspective of both child and adult via the same lens. At the opening of the film, we see a faint silhouette faintly visible on a television screen as old digital footage comes to view. We immediately know someone’s watching, observing, searching. There’s a striking difference between the DV-cam footage we see and the memory that she fills in between each.

There’s something about how Sophie is recording these moments, like she knows these moments hold some deeper significance, something she knows she isn’t grasping yet. Wells has this talent for putting the audience in a world they never experienced, not really. What now-adult Sophie is doing by watching this footage is what I found myself doing, attempting to piece together a scrambled puzzle of memory. As Sophie comes to close to her father’s age during that vacation, she comes to compare the two, meeting on the dancefloor.

ALVVAYS FOREVER

Even in the weeks since my viewing, I’m still having serious trouble putting together the words to describe such delicately captured and constructed memories. Regardless, I knew it meant something special to me and wanted to write about it, someway, somehow. Since words escape me to describe what I’ve experienced, I’m going to use the sound and lyricism of Alvvays in an attempt to do so. Beyond their punch-pop melancholy sound, I want to point out how their videos specifically use colorful, faint, dreamy, sometimes hyper-digital imagery in their projects to support the lyrics that reach at something past. Something out of reach but lived in. I think that’s the crux of what I’m saying. Some lines from their track “In Undertow,” which encapsulates everything (everything) I could try to say about what’s radiating from “Aftersun.”

You find a wave and try to hold on for as long as you can
You made a mistake you'd like to erase and I understand
"What's left for you and me?"
I ask that question rhetorically
Can't buy into astrology, and won't rely on the moon for anything

We were sitting there on the couch with my family, remembering together through our own view of her. Mother, daughter, lover. Both audiences, Sophie and the literal audience, are spending each moment deciphering these sunbaked images—examining every frame looking for some clue. Something we missed when we lived in the moment, searching for some new truth under new eyes. Hoping to find what’s eluded us in memory in our personal story.