In working with these archival film elements and fragments, I devised the term, “posthumous cinema,” which was useful to explore the implications of what an unfinished film offers upon practical engagement, theoretical reflection and actual projection. With posthumous cinema, we could say, that the film never underwent the last hand, or edit of the filmmaker, and given the complexity of the filmmaking process, the living are left with fragments, intentions, ideas, images, perhaps sound elements, that the filmmaker intended to become part of a final film work. While I have explored this working concept in greater detail elsewhere, suffice it to say here that these fragments are left to the hand of the archivist/scholar/viewer, to engage, recompose and reanimate. Posthumous cinema requires a thinking through of the specificity of cinema in its temporality, in the importance of its actual projection, but also in its capacity to evoke multiple times and spaces; the spectre of the departed looms close by. Cha’s moving image installations, Passages Paysages (1978) and Exilée (1980) demonstrate her preoccupation with evoking multiple times and spaces simultaneously.

Comment on this page