History Cannot Be Compressed, They Are No Longer Absent: Embedding Polyphonic Signals into the Encoding of Memory
Translated by Mei-hsuan HSU
In October 1975, something remarkable happened in Iceland. Over 90% of women chose to stop working—not only in paid employment, but also in unpaid domestic and caregiving labor. This unprecedented nationwide “day off” by women allowed society, for the first time, to realize that what we call everyday life was built upon their silent yet unyielding support.
Fifty years later, director Pamela HOGAN picked up her camera and completed The Day Iceland Stood Still. Her lens leads us to revisit just how challenging this seemingly unified strike action was. It wasn’t just about an individual choosing not to work; it was about bearing the risk of being fired, going against the collective inertia of society, and making a radical decision that had to be explained to family and even to oneself. As the camera zooms in, returning to the historical scene through the memories of those who participated, it becomes clear that each person’s position and choice were different. In the images, these women in their youth hold onto their beliefs, not simplified by grand historical narratives, creating a massive presence by being absent. Today, this film gives Icelandic women a second chance to be present.
This is not just a retelling of history; it is an addendum, a question posed to memory and historical narratives: If I don’t speak up, who will remember? If I remember, do I bear a certain responsibility? Such responsibility is powerfully demonstrated in There Was, There Was Not by Emily MKRTICHIAN.
The title of this movie may sound like the opening of an ancient myth, but what it tells is the most brutal reality of the present: How does a country disappear from the map, from the memory of the world?
On January 1, 2024, due to the longstanding territorial dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Republic of Artsakh was invaded by Azerbaijan and officially wiped out from the world map ever since. The protagonist in the film also faces persecution and exile. This film became a visual testament to the nation’s destruction. The director does not depict trauma through screaming and loud visuals; instead, she focuses the camera on hands kneading dough, a figure listening to the radio, the moment a mother picks up her child. What she films is not the battlefield, but the daily lives of four women from Artsakh, entangled by war—evidence of a life that is constantly disappearing, and the strongest form of resistance.
This resistance also comes from the director’s own family history. Her great-grandparents were victims of genocide, and her parents immigrated to the United States. Now, pregnant, she is relearning her native language during the filming, just to pass on this culture to her unborn child. The camera becomes a tool for preserving memory and a political act, asking: If no one remembers, did it all ever happen?
This is a dialectic about “how we are seen and remembered.” When history is not written by a single heroic individual but layered through the anonymous choices of thousands, how do we see and remember? When memory is no longer linear but consists of multiple layers of sediment, can we find an entry point to connect with ourselves within the fissures of those layers? Sometimes, the starting point of memory and history is not a specific year or treaty, but in someone seeing their mother’s youthful face in a photograph or hearing a familiar yet estranged melody in a faded VHS tape.
In Chinatown Cha-Cha, director Luka Yuanyuan YANG does not search through national archives, but through the dance costumes left behind in her mother’s closet. This joyful film is a cultural journey of self-discovery, as well as a playful cha-cha step through audiovisual archives. She follows in the footsteps of Hollywood’s female pioneer, Esther Eng, traveling to San Francisco’s Chinatown, where she finds a group of Chinese-American women swaying between chasing dreams and making a living. Behind the laughter on stage is the silence on racial boundaries; the marginalized female body is the easiest image to be cut out of the city’s memory. Thus, the director uses her lens to capture the unspoken ripples of history.
Sally!, a collaboration between Deborah CRAIG, Ondine RAREY and Jörg FOCKELE, is an activist movement carried through the medium of documentary. Sally Gearhart was a pioneering figure in the feminist and queer movements of the 1970s and 80s in the U.S. While she fought alongside Harvey Milk for LGBTQ+ rights, she remains lesser-known. The film does not reduce Sally to a fixed image of a martyr, but rather, her multifaceted character becomes the core of the film’s most authentic portrayal. Through interviews with several women who participated in gender movements at the time, the film paints a private and intimate portrait of Sally—full of vitality, humor, and warmth. This is a history they all shared together, and the film’s production shows how unfinished histories can continue to relay their narrative. The production of Sally! relied almost entirely on small-scale crowdfunding, demonstrating the enduring power of her spirit in contemporary communities, continuing to inspire a new generation of activists.
In addition to revisiting marginalized histories through film creation, we also see the intervention of cinema in audiovisual archives, exploring what it means to occupy a narrative position as a woman and as someone existing at multiple margins—where and how can these stories be told?
Dominique CABRERA’s moving work, La Jetée, the Fifth Shot, begins with the fifth shot of the iconic film La Jetée by Chris Marker. The director’s cousin sees herself and her family members in this 1962 film, sparking a journey that is both an exploration of film history and a family film. Together, the family watches La Jetée projected, reflecting on those days, digging into the emotions and dynamics hidden within that tiny frame. This is not just a rewrite of visual archives or historical interpretations; it is not just deconstruction—it is a deep cross-temporal gaze and encounter, loosening the original one-way gaze, and constructing a dialogue that unfolds in multiple dimensions and voices.
Visual artist Dora GARCÍA’s (Revolution, Fulfil Your Promise) Red Love is a direct summons to historical politics and female subjectivity. She begins with the ideological trajectory of the Marxist revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai, using her writings and archival documents to reveal the potential of queer and feminist movements across time and space, forming alliances in different places. GARCÍA does not attempt to recreate the already-passed golden era of the left; rather, through intimate gatherings and street political rallies, from the perspectives of contemporary readers, performers, and political activists, she brings those unfinished ideals into the bodies and voices of today’s stormy and turbulent Latin American feminist movements. This film is like a revolutionary love letter picked up from the archives or a delayed political summoning ritual.
These collective forces of multiple voices turn the film itself into an experimental dialectical space rather than a closed historical narrative. These works re-summon and loosen the narrative spaces that were nearly forgotten or solidified, opening up more dialogues and perceptions in multiple temporal and spatial directions. Through the creation of the film, the deployment of sound and images, we are able to collectively see the bodies and experiences that were once forgotten or excluded, and experience a reoccupation of the position of viewing. It is precisely because of those nonlinear, fractured, and blurred bodily experiences that another historical perspective and another form of presence manage to find their way in.
HSIEH I-Hsuan
A film curator and researcher focusing on Taiwanese and Southeast Asian cinema. She programs for WMWIFF and SGIFF. Trained as an anthropologist, she views the cinematic practices of making, screening, discussing, and archiving film as a relational socio-technical process of collective agency.
