ENGRAM OF RETURNING

Transforming anonymous found footage into powerful, expressive and painterly imagery, Engram of Returning (“engram,” also called “memory-trace”) is a film about memory and recollection. The film sets out to give form to a constellation of the introspective mirages left behind by the filmmaker, reconstructed through interwoven backward glances at the real, the imagined and the remembered.

“The figure of the jig-saw / that is of picture, / the representation of a world as ours / in a complex patterning of color in light and shadows, / masses with hints of densities and distances, / cut across by a second, discrete pattern / in which we perceive on qualities of fitting and not fitting / and suggestions of rhyme / in ways of fitting and not fitting – / this jig-saw conformation of patterns / of different orders, / of a pattern of apparent reality / in which the picture we are working to bring out appears / and of a pattern of loss and of finding / that so compels us that we are entirely engrossed in working it out, / this picture that must be put together / takes over mere seeing.”
– from "Kopoltus" Robert Duncan

Engram of Returning (“engram,” also called “memory-trace,” is a physical alteration thought to occur in living neural tissue in response to stimuli, postulated to account for the persistence of memory) is a film about memory and recollection. A metaphysical travelogue, the film explores visual expression that invokes emotional situations through formal and aesthetic approaches akin to collage and semi-abstract painting. Transforming anonymous found footage into powerful, expressive and painterly imagery, Engram of Returning attempts to give form to a constellation of the introspective mirages of what the filmmaker left behind, reconstructed through interwoven backward glances at the real, the imagined and the remembered.