Reflections on Uncle Honker
A little over a year ago, I received a box containing dozens of hours of footage filmed on consumer recording devices. Some of this material consisted of illegally recorded films and local news segments, which were pulled both intentionally and unintentionally by my grandmother’s VCR. However, the bulk of this footage consisted of hours and hours of home videos captured on VHS and Hi8 cameras. Though I eventually appear in this footage, the majority of it takes place years before my life, featuring those who either now have passed on or otherwise were at stages of life entirely unrecognizable to me. Eventually, I took some of this footage and constructed what I would consider the first film of my own to hold true emotional significance. The film, called Doodlebug (one of my nicknames as a child), consisted largely of whatever minutiae that happened to be in front of the camera as it was being used by various members of my family. Most of the footage in the film features me since, being the newest-born member of the family, I was given increased attention by the camera and its users. Additionally, this part of my life happened at the beginning of a very particular point in our culture, which was in-between the transition from the tape to the flip-phone camera and, as a result, these images of me are some of the last recorded on those specific cameras until I received them and began to use them again.
Doodlebug only really captures an assortment of routine activities during my first three years of life: birthdays, Christmas, and weekly trips to my grand-or-great-grandparents’ house. However, in viewing the footage, I was, for the first time, hit with an immense wave of appreciation and emotion over the vaguest details of these events. Many memories and members of my family had been lost since these tapes were recorded, and, in a way, these moments seemed locked away in a reality entirely separate from our own. My appreciation of this often under-emphasized “minutia,” of which our true lives actually consist, was somewhat lacking until this point. This was not because everyday life held no passion or appeal, but instead, I had simply never considered moments such as these worthy of being filmed. By virtue of their own existence, however, these tapes obliged a feeling of importance and utmost necessity. Our eyes have been trained in a somewhat intellectual manner in order to discern which images are worthy or not, often being ignorant entirely of whatever passions drove their capture of them in the first place. Because of this, I have come to believe that images captured with the heart of an amateur are the most powerful, the word amateur being used here for its original meaning as one who loves and has a great passion. It is the passion of the amateur which must persist outside of any training should any artist hope to make art that holds meaning; at the same time, it is this passion for life that drives us to capture it, whether we know it or not, and which led to the capture of so many hours of birthday parties, holidays, and nondescript get-togethers.
Because of Doodlebug and the tapes which allowed for its creation, I started to reflect further on consumer-level recording methods, much like (and in reverence to) my irreplaceable, brilliant, deeply loved friends and as evidenced by the Scrawls on Cinema corpus itself. It seems to me that a very particular set of circumstances has been evolving until this point. Liberalism has expedited the stratification of our identities; as we continue into America’s early late stage, every aspect of our being becomes a new way to feel individual. Rather than being allowed to truly feel as though we are all a part of a collective experience, individualism has left us as a row of pickling jars, sealed away with our own juices with nothing but the comfort of knowing we occupy the shelf. We have been forced to look further inward due to the fact that outward conditions only worsen. At the same time, the interiority we have found is often one of sickness first; we continue to find new ways to explain why we feel as we do. We are denied a wholeness of being by conditions that cannot allow for it in one way or another, the connection between our souls and our bodies severed so procedurally by our extremely western and liberal upbringing. We collect prognoses to no effect, gathering conditions that may allow us to explain ourselves but which nevertheless lead to no positive end.
While this has been taking place, consumer film technology has facilitated an ever-growing collection of reels and tapes, sometimes tucked away and forgotten, which would serve as evidence of a certain collective self. In viewing these hours and hours of footage, we would no doubt discover the same fixations and tendencies largely due to the very nature of these devices and their marketing. Consumer filming technologies were for the moments that count, the unspoken part of this being either that one will document everything (fiscally, logistically, and realistically impossible) or that one’s life is less a continuum of importance and is, instead, comprised of innumerable hours of irrelevance with a handful of jewels thrown in to allow for just enough of a sense of narrative for one’s own life to form. It is precisely the second point that I felt so strongly about when reflecting on those home videos. With both the past and the future being impossible to access, we have only the current moment available for experience. It seems that we act as the documenters of our own lives simply to evidence our existence in the world regardless of whether or not we intend to revisit them. When combined with the growing collective need for identity, for something to be able to hold onto, a collage of an America that exists only in the tapes begins to arise. This is the America of the consumer archivist and the liminal family home, rendered in lo-fi like our own memories, shapes, and feelings, leaving impressions that somehow are less clear than reality but which are felt all the more resonant emotionally. Here, one’s identity is, in a way, revealed for what it has been all along: a series of fleeting impressions.
It is impossible to divorce, at least in my mind, the strange poetry of the situation from the films we’ve made themselves. I feel in some way as though these muddy renderings are not unlike our own conceptions of ourselves and the country we occupy. The total collective environment of many of our films is one that can only exist on videotape: gray, distant, pervasively perverse, and Filthy. Yet somehow, despite the coat of cynical grime, the sincerity of the connective tissue cannot be ignored. This is a world where the genuine seeps through in spite of the disconnection, any attempts we made to obfuscate the truth rendered it all the more honest against the aesthetic degradation.
Though I cannot pretend that most of these thoughts were on the front-end of Uncle Honker, I find them somehow useful in trying to place the film in my own life. Uncle Honker was made using some of the same cameras which filmed my own birth, those who came before me, and some who have since moved on. I find this fitting for the film, although I am not entirely sure how much of it is present in the text. Still, some level of artistic satisfaction persists in trying to make sense of what essentially began as a gag. Those most closely involved in this production know that, before anything else, the words “Uncle Honker” were a miscorrection of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Uncle Boonmee.” But being so tickled by this nonsensical word coupling, I then tried to imagine what a film with the title Uncle Honker might look like. I think it’s safe to say that, thanks to the irreplaceable work of so many, we got about as close as we could get to giving the words some kind of meaning. Yet again, an attempt to reject what was taught as the proper convention by following the trail of nothing more than an auto-correct error has sincerely become one of the most important experiences in my life so far. At its core, this film is about the very same search for identity that I think is present in some capacity in our collective works, rendered in formats that in some measure allow our identities to persist, and has the fingerprints of some of those whom I love most in the world all over it.
