Smartphone film, memory’s connective turn and the aesthetics of embodiment in Do You Remember That Year? (2020)

Do You Remember That Year? (DYRTY?) is a short film about anxiety, privilege, and the difficulty of reconciling the internal and external stimuli that bombard us daily. DYRTY? probes the need to narrativize experiences that are recorded but not necessarily remembered in what Hoskins (2011) calls the memorial ‘connective turn.’ This submission examines the potential aesthetic and narrative responses to the ‘connective turn,’ defined asan ‘ontological shift in what memory is and what it does’ in response to the proliferation of digital technologies (Hoskins and Halstead 2021:675). In particular, it addresses Hoskins’ question about the use of mobile devices to capture images: ‘What is our capacity to actually mobilise the archive of our experiences so that we come to comprehend our past […] in a meaningful and functional way (ibid, p. 678). In discussing the approaches employed in DYRTY?, I propose a meaningful deployment of what surrounds the image; its ecology. In particular, I argue for an engagement with ‘the aesthetics of embodiment’ (Rutherford 2003). This approach allows for the exploration of the openly subjective ‘metonymic slippage between vision, the image, the eye and the ‘I’ of subjectivity’ (Doane 1985:61) and, consequently, the location of this subjectivity within the wider ecology where ‘the perceiver constantly locates him or herself in the environment, that what we perceive is not data about the environment out there, but “the significance of surfaces in relation to our body”’ (Cataldi 1993:112 ). I argue that Smartphone recording and story-telling technology and aesthetics are uniquely placed to explore the complexities of openly subjective representation rooted both in and outside its immediate environment.DYRTY? is currently on the festival circuit. So far it has won the Best International Premiere Video Award at the Avanca Film and Video Festival (Portugal) and the Best Smartphone Film Award at the South Coast Film Festival (U.K.). It also screened as part of the Film Geographies panel at the 2021 Royal Geographical Society conference.