I thought this very short
five-minute experimental film is only about the past
memory.
The reason why is that it’s
the visualization about how bad memories from way back come across one’s mind
now and how to escape from them.
However, as the time passed
after completing this film, I came to be convinced that ultimately it’s a film
about ‘self-esteem’.
Besides, it is a film about
the present and the future rather than about the past.
It says how my past ‘records’ come
up to me with a new meaning and give a self-healing function, providing me with
salvation and recovery and making me go forward the future.
There are times when my mood
is so complex so the only thing I can do is to write something I can’t know
exactly, going with the flow of my ideas and feelings. They were my own sentences
nobody read except me so maybe they could be imperfect. However, they were the
things even closer to my unconsciousness and containing the then myself
properly, which never went through a circuit of the excessive thinking. Since
young, I’ve been often keeping a diary. During my high school days, I quitted
it for a moment but began to write again in my 20s and it became the regular
work after the spring of 2016. The pause in my records sometimes resulted from my obsession
that I had to arrange things handwritten via word processing on Google Drive.
But writing down was helpful when I was distressed because I had a lot on my
mind. Furthermore, such a ‘process’ was established as the ‘time’ I could talk
with myself.
However, there was little time
I could read or review my diary. Perhaps the process of writing itself was more
important than the result of the diary.
I would encounter my diary
when it came into my mind or I wondered what I wrote in those days.
When I read it over again
after a long time, things I wrote about often felt strange to me.
There were
times when I could not agree to things kept in my diary anymore but it was astonishing that the sentences I wrote may be read from a different manner now and give
me certain consolation and strength.
Ultimately this film deals
with the power of the recording.
Moreover, in my opinion, such
power of the recording has something to do with self-esteem, or a sense of
trusting myself from the depth of my mind.
Of course, it is necessary to
share my troubles with people around me and be helped by the ones who
understand me better than I do.
However, everyone has her own
self she can understand only.
And I think
problems can’t be solved well until I can attentively soothe and precisely understand myself so reach self-healing. In the film, I would like to show the
power owned by what I said to myself and wrote a long, long time ago, that is,
the power of the time for recording. It is a very personal film starting from
my experience but I think it is also a very universal story empathic to anyone
who has ever kept a diary.
It is maybe
easier to offer words of comfort or easy-on-the-ear things to others. It’s
difficult to do that to myself. It’s a Herculean task. However, I will make
efforts to force myself to do that from now on. Eventually, it is we ourselves who can know
and understand ourselves the best.
- Written by Ji-Yoon Park, Apr 2021