Below, we publish a few questions addressed to director Kumjana Novakova about her competition film Silence of Reason.
The film won the Official Jury Prize for the Best Feature Film at Archivio Aperto XVII.
Archivio Aperto explores the theme of memory and archives. How does your film intercept this theme? What elements of the film highlight this exploration of memory?
I make films from a feminist position, researching relationships and concepts related to power, war, memories and (un)belonging in the context of feminist image-making. My film practice is based on long in-depth process-oriented research, focusing on new methodologies and visual strategies in filmmaking.
Silence of Reason proposea strategies for activating the archival forensic image in a way that transforms patriarchal paradigms of traumatically repressed personal and collective memories.
How do archive images influence the construction of the narrative? Can you tell us about a sequence in your film where archive images transformed or enriched the message you intended to communicate?
My work on and with collective memories and remembrance, and the relationships between geographies and historicities contrast factography and archives with speculative poetic narratives and imagery. I collect, assemble and rearrange archives – images, fragments, text, sounds, glimpses of memories that later become something else. Working only with what I find, I intuitively rearrange time, spaces and relationships, so to introduce temporal entanglement – past, present and future as not separated from each other, so as to feel closer to the lived experience of times from the political and personal space I inhabit.
What found footage or experimental films have played an important role in your education?
Feminist filmmakers proposing non-linear ways of thinking and making cinema, and free to introduce the multitemporal, thus disrupting the hierarchical within the image, are the ones that formed my practice and way of thinking about film. Some of them used found footage, others proposed radical methodologies and proposed film as a research space.
Some of these filmmakers are Trinh T. Minh-ha, Maya Deren, Barbara Hammer, Vukica Djilas, Forough Farokhzad, Esfir Shub, Cecilia Mangini, John Akomfrah, Chantal Akerman, Harun Farocki, Pedro Costa, Lyudmila Stanukinas, but also Black Audio Film Collective, Collettivo Femminista di Cinema di Roma, The Otolith Group, Karrabing Film Collective, and many more!