Abstract
This chapter examines the gestation of a film/performance multimedia project entitled The Birds That Wouldn’t Sing (2017) that draws on the experiences of Joan Prior, who served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), through war-torn Europe between 1944 and 1946. Working with a personal archive of photographs, letters and handed-down memories, the authors filmed a field trip (a ‘rejourn’) through France and Germany in 2011, this account of which is informed by and contributes to a body of work on war, memory and intermediality by Marianne Hirsch (Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA: The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. Columbia University Press, New York, 2012), Michael Rothberg (Multidirectional Memory. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 2009), Rebecca Schneider (Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. Routledge, London and New York, 2011) and Diana Taylor (The Archive and the Repertoire. Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2003). It culminates in an account of an interactive installation that models new ways in which family history and personal testimony of war might coalesce into performance of, and as (manifestations of) commemoration.
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Notes
- 1.
Of the 5000 Canadian troops landed at Dieppe in what was a raid designed to assess the German defences of the French coast and trial the strategy for a large-scale amphibious assault, 907 were killed, 2460 were wounded and 1874 were taken prisoner. ‘Looking back’, Churchill later reflected, ‘the casualties of this memorable action may seem out of proportion to the results’. But, he judged, ‘it was a costly but not unfruitful reconnaissance in force’ (Churchill 1951, p. 7968).
- 2.
British Military slang for ‘best friend’.
- 3.
For our purposes, we are making a noun of the verb to ‘rejourn’, which has itself three related meanings as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary: (i) to postpone, defer; (ii) to return (to a place); and (iii) to refer (a person) to something. ‘rejourn, v.’. OED Online. March 2018. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/161756?redirectedFrom=rejourn. Accessed 20 April 2018.
- 4.
‘Following the pogroms in the early part of this century, a Jewish memorial tradition developed among diasporic communities…The yizker bikher, or memorial books, prepared in exile by survivors of Pogroms were meant to preserve the memory of their destroyed cultures’ (Hirsch 2012a, p. 246). Hirsch goes on to explain that the Nazi genocide survivors continued this practice.
- 5.
As a performative act, similar to the way that Janet Cardiff’s photographic interventions in landscape transform the surroundings. Works with recollections, using ‘photographs as a device to convey a sense of both history and memory’. http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/walks/takingpictures.html. Accessed 17 December 2017.
- 6.
All extracts from the letters of Joan Prior are published here with the permission of the estate of Joan Halverson Smith, © Malcolm Smith and Justin Smith.
- 7.
Chris Marker’s complex and dazzling film essay, a pseudo-documentary on the subject of memory that crosses continents and time zones and combines an array of visual styles and textures, is narrated by a female voice-over, purportedly reading from the letters of an anthropologist, one Sandor Krasna. Burlin Barr’s analysis of Marker’s film dissects what he calls its ‘most provocative section’ which ‘has its setting in no particular location or time, but in another film – Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The sequence … is decidedly intertextual and its qualities of “mise-en-abyme” constitute only one of many ways that this film ponders its own motives and design. … Sandor Krasna visits San Francisco where he follows the trail of Scottie (Jimmy Stewart’s character in Vertigo). Krasna’s detective work, an attempt to visit the empirical origins of the film Vertigo, inevitably reminds us of Scottie’s frenetic detective work to uncover the concrete origins of his own fantasies (fantasies of the character Madeleine, played by Kim Novak)’ (Barr 2004, p. 173).
- 8.
For example, the BBC’s BAFTA award-winning celebrity family history show Who Do You Think You Are? (Wall to Wall [a Warner Bros Television Production UK Ltd. Company], 2004–) is, at the time of writing, in its 15th series and regularly attracts an audience in excess of 6 million. Since the late 1990s, Ancestry.com has established itself as the leading international family history website with over 2 million users worldwide. It has spawned many rivals (such as the British site Findmypast.co.uk), including those specialising in military service like forces-war-records.co.uk.
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Savage, K., Smith, J. (2018). Deference, Deferred: Rejourn as Practice in Familial War Commemoration. In: Pinchbeck, M., Westerside, A. (eds) Staging Loss. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97970-0_3
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