“If These Lands Could Speak:” Dislocating Archives Through Process Cinema

Examining experimental films and cinematic performances devoted to traumatic intergenerational memories, this essay looks to the methods of process cinema to create counter histories, and to fill absent memories of traumatic events. By using personal documents and situated found footage practices, the works discussed use analogue and digital media archives as well as projection and performance tactics to dislocate colonial histories. Each of the histories examined reveals the violence of colonialism, and traumatic moments in the founding of nations as seen through the forced movements of people and the military occupation of land. Site specificity, land (soil, earth, property), hand-processed celluloid, and embodied projections are tools that expand the spatial confines of the photographic frame. These elements provide a methodology for creating counter-archives and collaborative utterances. While the artists that are the focus of this study (Francisca Duran, Philip Hoffman and Lindsay McIntyre) are working in Canada, their ways of working with media materiality, hand processing, emulsion creation, and projection performance belong to a global movement that is employing media materiality not as a nostalgic return to legacy or pure cinema but as a means to reimagine collective memory.