Out of Placeness: Remembered Childhood in a Divided City

This paper reflects on our short essay film, Father-land (2018), which uses unrehearsed narration recorded on location in the divided city of Nicosia, in response to childhood memories. Created by the authors during an artists’ residency hosted by Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre (NiMAC, associated with the Pierides Foundation), the film tests methods of ‘spontaneous remembering’ and ‘speaking in place’, without reference to archive footage or mementos to ‘anchor’ the remembering process. The memories of the two unseen protagonists and the ruined landscape of the Nicosia Buffer Zone, with its shadows of the bloody conflict that took place here in 1974, entangle to form a layering of material archive.

Janet Walker uses the term, ‘trauma cinema’, to refer both to works that “deal with traumatic events in a non-realistic mode characterized by disturbance and fragmentation of the films’ narrative and stylistic regimes”, and films that portray “world shattering” events (2005). This feeling of ‘out of placeness’, embodied in Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), can be recognised in the disembodied narrative voiceover in Father-land. Edward Relph’s concept ‘out of placeness’ (1976) refers to this as an existential outsideness, when people feel a separation between themselves the place they are in, a sense of strangeness and alienation.

The presentation looks back on childhoods shaped by the sometimes unseen forces of British colonialism and the Cold War that mixed our ‘forces families’ with the island of Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean. The visual entropy of the ruptured cityscape of the Buffer Zone onscreen becomes a site of displacement in which the fragmented ‘conversation of memory’ that forms the film’s narration intertwines with cultural and biographical registers and political and social histories.

Paper delivered in the Archives, Movement, Borders panel convened by Dr Angela Piccini, University of Plymouth.