City Symphony Malmö: the spatial politics of non-institutional memory

ABSTRACT

City Symphony Malmö was a collaborative documentary that engaged citizens of Malmö in recording short film sequences. The Symphony’ video material was also performed at the art and performance centre Inkonst where electronic musicians improvised to VJ’s digital and analogue live mixing of the material. A remediation of the performance was streamed live on the Internet with live footage from the performance. All clips were released under the creative commons licence and made available for remixing through The Pirate Bay. This article explores what it can imply to hand over the means of film production to citizens. The discussion concentrates on participatory and spatially distributed filmmaking and screening of non-institutional memories, produced in the symphony. The analysis merges influence from silent cinema and Soviet Montage [Vertov, Dziga. 1929. A Man with a Movie Camera. Documentary/City Symphony Film], theories of public memory [e.g. Casey, Edward. 2004. “Public Memory in Place and Time.” In Framing Public Memory, edited by Kendall R. Phillips, 17–46. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press; Young, David E. 2000. At Memory’s Edge. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Bodnar, John. 1992. Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press], new media [Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press; Manovich, Lew. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.] and place [Appadurai, Arjan. 1996. Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Lefebvre, Henri. (1974) 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers; Harvey, David. 1993. “From Space to Place and Back Again.” In Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Exchange, edited by Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson, and Lisa Tickner, 3–29. London: Routledge]. It describes the complexities of creating non-institutional memory and archiving practices and argues that such citizen-driven and non-institutional memories may challenge official history and societal memory production, yet also reproduce typical and iconic images which reveal spatio-material hierarchies. Such complexities demonstrate the value of an analysis of participation and spatio-material dimensions of public memory as unfolded in the article.

KEYWORDS:

• Co-production
• public memory
• film
• the city
• montage
• non-institutional

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Erling Björgvinsson is a Professor of Design at Platform for Artistic Research Sweden (PARSE) at School of Design & Crafts, University of Gothenburg, which he joined in 2015. He has a background in Fine Art (USA) and Interaction Design (Sweden). He is also a researcher in the Living Archives as well as the City Fables projects at Malmö University.

Anders Høg Hansen is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University, Sweden, where he is primarily involved in the MA in Communication for Development and the Living Archives project. He has a background in Cultural Studies from the UK.

ORCID

Erling Björgvinsson http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1077-4766

Notes

1 Vertov created a range of works between 1924 and 1934 belonging to a movement and working group named Kino-Eye. Their goal was to ‘surprise reality and life’. Kino-Eye (a next of kin to contemporary 1920s German and French avant-garde as well as the observational mode of later Cinéma Vérité) aimed to ‘play with abstract patterns or image mosaic’ as well as ‘image-symphonic works which with pace and rhythm visualized the pulse of the big city’. It throws away established views, literally, about what film should show and how they should be composed. Vertov said himself about Man with a Movie Camera that it is about a man with a camera where ‘life throws him like a leaf from place to place, like a boat leaking on a stormy sea’. The idea was that the camera turns towards life, not as in the film factories where life is planned in front of the camera (authors translations of quotes, in Jensen 1970, 252–253).

2 Besides, Man with a Movie Camera, Manhatta (Strand and Sheeler 1921) and Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (Ruttman 1927) are the two famous city symphonies.

3 In relation to the work of the Popular Memory group, Samuel (1994) noted the importance of a people’s or social history not just the history of the scholar historian (1994). History is not the historian’s invention, Samuel writes. ‘It is rather, a social form of knowledge; the work, in any given instance, of a thousand different hands’. It is ‘the ensemble of activities and practices in which ideas of history are embedded or a dialectic of past-present relations are rehearsed’ (Samuel 1994, 8).

4 The term was coined by the Popular Memory group, based at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, at University of Birmingham during the 1970s and early 1980s. The group addressed how citizen can be collectors and archivists and participate in the writing of history and amplification of hidden histories. In their work they were concerned with popular reactions and productions, hidden and counter-histories to threats of cultural domination (Johnson and Dawson (Popular Memory Group) 1982, 228).

5 James E. Young researched memorial culture in Germany and elsewhere, particularly in relation to the Holocaust, in The Texture of Memory (1993) and At Memory’s Edge (2000). The plurality of memory practices, varying from one context to another, leads to the notion of collected memory. Young mentions the Holocaust Memorial of Murdered Jews in Berlin (at the time of Young’s writing used here it was only a model) as an example of collected memory at work. In their multiple and varied size, he writes, the ‘pillars are both individuated and collected: the very idea of “collective memory” is broken down and replaced with collected memories of individuals murdered, the terrible meanings of their deaths now multiplied and not merely unified’. Later he continues, ‘we are not reassured by such memory, not reconciled to the mass murder of millions but now disoriented by it’ (Young 2000, 210–211).

6 Montage literally, from French, means ‘assembly’ or ‘editing’. Eisenstein defined Montage as ‘the collision of two independent shots – shots even opposite to another’ (Eisenstein, Film Form, 1949, 4). This rudimentary definition, concerned with how meanings are extracted or assembled from sequences, does not reveal the complexity of his theory (including the five forms of montage). An extensive engagement with montage falls out of the scope of this article.

7 As a related example of collective and interactive citizen memorialization Monument Against Fascism, War and Violence in Harburg (mentioned earlier in the article) just outside Hamburg, were created by artists Jochen and Esther Shalev Gerz in the mid-1980s. It attempted to hand over dominance or interpretations of the material and spatial to the public by inviting citizens to inscribe a gradually lowered grey column. However, they also acknowledged ephemerality and forgetting by letting the column sink into the ground (reversing the usual elevation of memorials) with its multitude of public memory scribble and notes, and in this sense burying the collected and collective memory slowly (Björgvinsson and Høg Hansen 2011; Young 2000).