Creative Statement:

At first sight Grieving Trees is the story of the “missing” tree where my father’s ashes lie, and my searching for it in films that feature trees in their narratives of grief. Yet, the process of making this video essay during the Middlebury Videographic Criticism Workshop started with a very different intention, which was to critically engage with the representation of trees in cinema in a more conventionally academic video essay. But when collecting, selecting, and assembling these images of trees, I suddenly thought of “my” missing tree, and I thus saw my own grief in a new light. The tree literally appeared to me, as if the gathered footage were making visible something which had previously been invisible, and this gesture of relocating the grieving trees of other people — or rather, fictional characters — allowed me not only to “find” my tree, but more importantly, to let it go.

When Michel Foucault analyzes the act of appropriation and “care of oneself” at play in the ancient Greek writing exercise hypomnèmata, he explains that “through the interplay of selected readings and assimilative writing, one should be able to form an identity through which a whole spiritual genealogy can be read” (“Self-writing,” 214). This resonates uncannily with the process I experienced while making this video essay. Indeed, I feel that more than adapting the curated clips into the video essay form, I let the trees look at me and even, in a curative sense, look after me. I attempted to inhabit the clips and approach the trees slowly, by introducing personal archives, but first by concentrating on movement, light, and the sound of the leaves in the wind. The presence and the force of the trees remain intact, and their “spiritual genealogy” certainly transforms my own grieving journey.

This is why I chose not to add any captions identifying the films I cite; I wanted to maintain some distance from the background of the various stories they tell and allow for a moment of calm not only for myself, but also for the viewer. Moreover, not adding the titles enabled me to borrow the trees and make them mine, re-appropriating the material, and using the clips as “found footage.” This is similar to what Su Friedrich and Frank Beauvais are doing respectively in Sink or Swim (1990) and Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream (2019), except that they add their narrating voice to create a tension between the collective and the personal, whereas I let my father’s photographs interact visually with the filmic trees.1 But the double movement of “assimilating” the collective into the personal, and (trans)forming the personal through the collective, is at play in the same way, and for me this double process of adaptation and appropriation was key.

Nevertheless, even if I use them freely, the films I chose to cite do form a coherent corpus.2 They are all feature-length fiction films, which tell the story of a death (past, present or imminent) and of grieving characters. The central clip is the scene in Still the Water between the dying mother, Isa, who is also a shaman, the daughter Kyoko, and the 400-year-old banyan tree. I replay this sequence because it transports me to the moment of death I missed; I was not there when my father died, and this sequence allows me to hold on to this absence, to give it a form. From there, the video essay focuses on gestures of mourning: hands on trees as a recurrent pattern (The Mourning Forest, Tropical Malady, Still the Water, 1917); texture and sound of bark (The Tree, Vagabond); movement of leaves and trunk (No Home Movie, Still the Water); and finally, sky, branches and illuminated trees (Evil Does Not Exist, Tropical Malady). My father’s photographs appear with these gestures of mourning, and I would like to believe that, made visible and powerful, his images of trees encapsulate his soul, if not his spirit, in the same way that Isa and the banyan tree become one.

From the late 1960s until the mid-1990s my father took, developed, and printed thousands of photographs, mainly of his growing family, but also of his surroundings, including architecture, landscapes, flowers, and trees. For this video essay I scanned the photos from his own prints, which have been handled by various people, exposed to dust and time, before being kept in boxes for years: hence their uneven but beautiful texture. Opening these boxes is an on-going project for me, a task which is closely tied to my love of cinema, as I came to understand more deeply while making this video essay. My father supported and encouraged my cinephilia from a very young age, and I realise now that it is no surprise if, when I started to engage with videographic criticism, his own images, albeit still rather than moving, should have found their way into my timeline, since they have also informed my way of seeing.

This video essay sits in the context of what could be called the “personal video essay,” given that I use the first person singular and refer to my personal history. However, as opposed to, for example, the two series of “Once Upon a Screen” edited by Ariel Avissar and Evelyn Kreutzer, this essay is not about personal memories of films that influenced or marked me. Here the personal is indirect and poses, I think, a different set of questions: how do the photos compare with these representations of trees? Can we identify some shared motifs? Indeed, beyond my missing tree, Grieving Trees might also contribute, I hope, to a critical study of the co-presence – or co-representation – of trees and grief in cinema.

My father’s photos stand still but they resonate emotionally with the camera movements, the framing, the light, the feel, as well as the motifs of my chosen films, and eventually the photos and the fictional trees merge for an instant. Cinema is holding my father’s missing tree.