{"id":57038,"date":"2025-11-08T23:24:48","date_gmt":"2025-11-08T16:24:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ffd.or.id\/?p=57038"},"modified":"2025-11-08T23:24:48","modified_gmt":"2025-11-08T16:24:48","slug":"miren-felder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ffd.or.id\/en\/film-review-en\/miren-felder\/","title":{"rendered":"Like Longing, Photographs Linger Between Now and Then"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the emergence of time travel as a literary theme at the fin de si\u00e8cle<\/em> is a phenomenon one may suspect to be linked to the simultaneous emergence of cinema (and by extension, photography), with its capacity to manipulate the illusion of time. Chris Marker\u2019s La Jet\u00e9e<\/em> (1962), in its radical experimentation of form, mostly uses still photographs to tell the entirety of its story. That method doesn\u2019t only function as a Kuleshovian proof-of-concept, though. By using photographs, the film utilizes the defining characteristics of it to its narrative\u2019s advantage\u2014which acts as a representation of memory, suspended between presence and absence, the now and the then\u2014manifesting into a feeling of longing.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014 Milan Kundera, in his 1979 novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

It is with this quote that I think La Jet\u00e9e<\/em> operates. Every political regime, especially of the authoritarian kind, uses \u201cforgetting\u201d as a tool for domination against the history that they don\u2019t want anyone to remember. This manifests in the form of \u201cfuture cops\u201d that hunts for the protagonist, a prisoner of war of the fictional World War III, ultimately killing him as he travels back in time to fulfil his obsession to relive a particular pre-war childhood experience he was enamored by. By this logic, \u201cremembering\u201d, then, becomes a form of resistance against the dominating power\u2019s tendencies to erase certain pasts. Like Kundera\u2019s quote, the protagonist\u2019s desperate moment to preserve a moment against the authoritative annihilation is a struggle of a memory against \u201cforgetting\u201d\u2014and thus, against power itself.<\/p>\n

Miren Felder <\/em>(Malen Ota\u00f1o, 2024) is a retelling of director Ota\u00f1o\u2019s journey to reach for her late grandmother through the means of mediumship. In her journey, however, she also saw glimpses of her family\u2019s past\u2014revealing their collaboration with Brazil\u2019s dictatorship regime after the military coup in 1964. The short film uses still photography as its narrative method too\u2014using her grandfather\u2019s old photographs as its mode of narrative. Unlike it though, which utilizes the method in a science fiction context, Miren Felder<\/em> uses it to tell Ota\u00f1o\u2019s real life (sensorial) experience in the form of a documentary. As our episteme grows less suspicious of non-Western or precolonial spiritual practices\u2014including the art of mediumship, Miren Felder <\/em>\u00a0uses it as La Jet\u00e9e-<\/em>an time machine to confront the past and as a mnemonic device to long for said past\u2019s intimacies.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

As Miren Felder<\/em> documents the director\u2019s journey through mediumship, we too explore themes of national trauma, intergenerational guilt, memory, and death through a poetic essay in the film\u2019s voiceover. The film, in its contradicting tension to cling unto past\u2019s intimacies and to detach from military violence, serves as thought-provoking personal (and familial) discoveries. As it resists forgetting and succumbs to the dominating power\u2019s tendencies to \u201cerase\u201d certain memories, it also serves as a mystical force of longing for lost loved ones. Miren Felder,<\/em> then, is an evolution of concept in which La Jet\u00e9e<\/em> uses\u2014beyond (science) fiction<\/em>, documenting the real<\/em>. (Timmie) (Ed. Vanis)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Film Details <\/strong>
\nMIREN FELDER
\nMalen Ota\u00f1o | 20 min | 2024 | Argentina
\nIn Competition for Short Documentary<\/strong>
\nFestival Film Dokumenter 2025<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the emergence of time travel as a literary theme at the fin de si\u00e8cle is a phenomenon one may suspect to be linked to the simultaneous emergence of cinema (and by extension, photography), with its capacity to manipulate the illusion of time. Chris Marker\u2019s La Jet\u00e9e (1962), in its radical experimentation of form, mostly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":788,"featured_media":54953,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"edition":[781],"class_list":["post-57038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-film-review-en","edition-ffd-2025-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ffd.or.id\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ffd.or.id\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ffd.or.id\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ffd.or.id\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/788"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ffd.or.id\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57038"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ffd.or.id\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57038\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ffd.or.id\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ffd.or.id\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ffd.or.id\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ffd.or.id\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57038"},{"taxonomy":"edition","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ffd.or.id\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/edition?post=57038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}