The human fascination with the recorded image runs deep. Inherently linked to the past by its very nature of capturing a fleeting moment, the medium enacts the earthly desire of holding on to the ephemeral. 3hd’s “Spirit Pictures” evokes themes around its titular 19th-century ghost photography to summon the specters of time and memory through film. Screening online at 3hdTV and IRL at Berlinische Galerie, the moving-image program beams into multiple bygones via narratives around the social and political, physical and metaphorical spirits that haunt our every day.
The sum of these five artists capture the poignancy of temporary existence by sharing a snapshot of their own unique world views. Abdessamad El Montassir’s “Galb’Echaouf” wanders the Sahara to uncover the truth of an event that profoundly changed its landscape. Haunted by a history its human inhabitants are unable to tell, the artist-storyteller and “researcher without archives” brings form to the silence surrounding this unspoken account by giving agency to the vast desert’s plants, rocks, and other inanimate entities. Meanwhile, Cihad Caner explores these silences and amplifies the narratives of the marginalized via a CGI-animated version of the serpentine slab that sits behind the podium at the UN General Assembly. A deep melancholy pervades as this sad stone describes the events that compose the collective memory from his spatially restricted, though temporally expansive perspective. A rumination on the psychological and emotional impact of structural violence, “I, The Green Marble; The (Hi)story Of My Witness and Memory” contemplates the unending cycle of forgetting and tyranny.
These omnipresent architectures of oppression and control carry further into Micaela Durand & Daniel Chew’s “38,” the last of a trilogy of short films navigating the entanglement of desire, sexuality, race, and class, filtered through the distracted, overloaded, and constantly-documented reality of hypermediation. But rather than representing the internet on screen, this invisible other world only exists through its impact and implication. The theme of technology as a ghostly presence, or shadow that lingers on the periphery also comes through in Stephanie Comilang’s “Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me Paradise),” a sci-fi documentary that considers social connections in this age of economic migration and modern technology. An all-seeing drone spirit is summoned every Sunday into the heart of Hong Kong as an intermediary between Filipina workers and their place of origin. Another speculative documentary from April Lin 林森 imagines a near-future of climate catastrophe and a new species of tree—engineered as a solutionist approach to the harsh conditions—that survives through its intricate ancestry and ecological memory, stored deep in its enduring roots. “TR333” creates a new framework of collective storytelling and mythmaking, offering a living narrative that invites us to see our capacity for reinvention, both in our relationship with the environment and in how we envision our place within it.
Whether in early photography’s “fixing the shadows” or the “ghost boxes” of mid-20th-century television’s faint, static-filled broadcasts, film and its visual records are inherently connected to memory, loss, and, ultimately, death. Time’s transient nature and the futile human compulsion to hold on to it meet where the relics of bygone eras remain.
