bensdorp

FAMILY PLOT (2013-2014, 25')
Thomas Bensdorp

Family Plot is a work for dual screen video, automated music boxes, voice-over and electronics. It builds a narrative out of the process of trying to remember something – an old movie – and blends documentary material with elements of fiction and abstraction. It also takes a look at our efforts to control the technologies we rely on to preserve our memories for us.
The video material consists of 8mm footage of my mother from the 1960s, and a low quality digital recording of two men (one being my father and the other a former boyfriend of my mother’s) attempting to play that same 8mm movie, after my mother’s death, on a projector that refuses to function properly. These two videos are shown simultaneously on two screens, creating a ‘mise en abyme’ effect where one image is repeated inside the other. The original 8mm footage is re-edited and extended to about 25 minutes. Its course is directed by a voice-over of the two men trying to remember and describe the movie from memory, slowly progressing through it, continuously omitting things, making mistakes, retracing their steps, correcting and rephrasing themselves. On the second screen we see the men’s growing frustration as they struggle to get the projector to work and unlock the film from its technological cage. As we get to see more and more of the original 8mm film, slowly the thinnest contours emerge of a story that might refer to the men themselves and their relationship to the woman in the picture.