I’ve finally begun my massive film project. I even came up with a pretentious name! Cinemanesis is a portmanteau of cinema and anamnesis. Anamnesis has a couple different definitions:
- the recollection or remembrance of the past; reminiscence.
- recollection of the Ideas, which the soul had known in a previous existence, esp. by means of reasoning.
- the medical history of a patient.
- Immunology a prompt immune response to a previously encountered antigen, characterized by more rapid onset and greater effectiveness of antibody and T cell reaction than during the first encounter, as after a booster shot in a previously immunized person.
- (often initial capital letter) prayer in a Eucharistic service, recalling the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Christ.
I’m intending cinemanesis to be an imperfect cinematic recounting of the past, a damaged celluloid reminiscence.
This was a quickie experiment. The videos can be enormously boring if you follow the narrative which you can do in numerous videos on my new Cinemanesis channel. I’ll be uploading new videos as I transfer them. My dad made one to three videos every Christmas from 1979 or 80 until probably 1998. They are mostly my sister, my cousins, and myself jumping around in an assortment of Halloween masks with the vague assumption of recreating a popular movie. The children, in various states of undress and myself in drag, then must face a monster figure most often played by my father or an uncle in an assortment of masks and costumes.
I think doing an overly pretentious psychological analysis of the videos would be awesome. I’m also going to look into collaborating with some friends to score some mashups of the footage so that I don’t always resort to Xiu Xiu, Animal Collective, and Sigur Ros.* At this very beginning point, I’m open to artistic direction/suggestion/damnation.
*Just so you know, it’s impossible to take me seriously