Angelos’ Film (2000) του Péter Forgács: από τις home movies στην Ιστορία του μέλλοντος

Abstract

Peter Forgacs is a modern “ragpicker”, a scavenger of home movies. Just like Baudelaire’s ragpicker, though, he is the one who breathes new life into and finds a new place for the cinematic scraps left behind by the affluent European families of the 1930s and the 1940s. By reusing images which were never made for this purpose, Forgacs suggests a new form of cinematic historical narrative, one that merges with the principles of micro-history where the quotidian, the historically inconsequential, meets and measures itself against historical significance. In Angelos’ Film (2000), Forgacs finds 26 minutes of footage rescued from the material of Greek businessman Angelos Papanastasiou, shot before and during the German occupation. The safe and pleasant shots of the family alternate with the “other” shots, the ones about the horror of war for which Papanastasiou risked his life, essentially shielding them, protecting them within the same reel. By interfering with the material in every possible way, Forgacs attempts – as he does throughout his work – to discern that which even the most mundane image can hide right before the viewer’s eyes.