Filmoteka Muzeum

Film and Memory forms part of a cycle of photographic exercises by Tomasz Konart, comprising such works as The Walk (Spacer, 1977) and Photography and Memory (Fotografia i pamięć, 1978). This film invites the camera to play a game with the mind and the body. What emerges in the course of the game is a field of observation of phenomena that occur between time, memory, and a record of space.

The goal of this experiment is to develop reflection on the relation between the human being and the photographic apparatus. Film and Memory consists of three parts, each of them composed of two shots. The second shot results from an attempt to recreate the first one from memory. Trying to remember the first view of a given fragment of reality, the artist moves away in order to return later to the very same place.

Film and Memory depicts the time of changing one’s location, while demonstrating at the same time the loss of one’s sense of place. This exercise corresponds in an interesting way to the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea by highlighting the fact that the psychological time – however linear it may appear in our perception – adopts the form of scattered phenomena upon attempts at recording its passage.

Excerpt from: materials of the ARTon Foundation