A Family and its Phantoms: Sweetblood

A Film by Steve Sanguedolce

by Nicole Gingras

Self-Portrait, or Portrait of a Family...

When I first saw Sweetblood *, I thought I was seeing a portrait of Steve Sanguedolce's father in this series of evocations of distant memories, in the filmmaker's investigation of the frequent moments of silence between the two of them. Upon second viewing several months later, a portrait of the filmmaker himself was what imposes itself upon me ñ a self-portrait that resurfaces, though still bearing traits of his father and his twin brother. Whether the first or second interpretation is more to the point, the viewer is faced here with a work that reconstitutes an identity at odds with the family. Watching Sanguedolce's 1993 film, we wonder how the history of one family differs from another... How does the process of memory preserve the images that become individual memories? How do these images function in association with each other, and how do they make each other vanish?

Taking the form of self-portraiture, this film disrupts identities and mixes temporalities. The filmmaker defines himself without storytelling, without description. He proceeds by allusions, vanishing points, impressions, leaving images in suspension. The scenes he evokes overlap and interrupt each other without cutting each other off; the stories are to be continued. We find an Italian family, replete with anecdotes, stories, destinies that are similar from one generation to the next: accounts of ruptures, travels, friends and relatives unfold. At the heart of the film's structure is collage: it cancels out temporalities, and blurs even our reading of filmed images, the short duration of which facilitates an interpenetration of multiple atmospheres and experiences. "Self-portraiture is distinguished from autobiography by the absence of any followed storyline." The self-portrait is thus located on the side of analogy, more metaphorical and poetic than narrative. It "attempts to constitute its coherence through a system of recall, recapitulation, superimposition and correspondence of homologous and substitutable elements, so that its primary appearance is that of discontinuity, anachronistic juxtaposition, montage." (Raymond Bellour, L'Entre-Images)

In Sweetblood, images succeed one another and recollections resurface. They are superimposed and cancelled out, each one dissolving into the next. The camera is mobile, moving very freely as it films photomontages that convey several eras and events : childhood, adolescence and adult life. The chaotic aspect of the story is accentuated by the rapid succession of photographs, and the overlapping of different temporalities and experiences (traumatism, dreams, memories...). Friends and various members of the family are called upon here. Faces in succession become familiar, then unfamiliar by their resemblance to each other. Though they look alike, the images change meaning according to their context, due to the incredible flux of associations inherent to photography, and its power to generate multiple fictions. The power of the screen and the call for incessant investigation make photography what it is: an inexhaustible source of projections.

Casting a retrospective look over family records and his own archive, the son attempts to retrace and investigate his kinship ties, his affinities with his father, in order to know him/self. "Every face has its own story. There is nothing romantic about a nude confrontation," the filmmaker confides to us in the voiceover. Evoked memories, recounted dreams, filmed stills all appear like a series of discrete events that are repeated over the years, that pass from one generation to the next. The stories, memories seem interchangeable. Everything about the film confirms the impossibility of linear narration. It is a question of facets, fragmented identities, images refusing to be fixed, transformations determined by the narrator or the angle from which photographs are approached.

broken images

Steve Sanguedolce disrupts images while inviting us to take a look at them. He points to those blurry zones that make one person different from another, those moments when individuals detach themselves from their family and travel, or simply dream of being someone else. The stories we tell, the memories we invent, constitute identity as much as they preserve it. Between father and son, between son and twin brother is woven a relationship based on phantom presences. Individual particularities become hazy, only the signs of an era remain: hairstyles, clothing... Photography as recycled here by film becomes an incredible site of passage where investigations and projections intersect. By definition, the family photographer works to reduce alterity, minimize otherness. Between father and son there is a gap of thirty-five years, and yet we want to recognize in their respective photos the same smile, the same way of posing for the camera. Photography and the way it conspires with the past has been talked about at length, yet too little has been said about the presence of the future in photography. Steve Sanguedolce approaches the latter in his own way.

Sanguedolce's camera lingers on photographic montages where family photographs jostle each other according to a mode of association that seems anarchistic at first. Group pictures; pictures in groups; images en famille. We trace wedding photographs, children, babies, family portraits, souvenirs of adolescence, memorable parties. These images are sometimes shot in fast pans, but they are also frequently isolated from the mass in extreme close-up. Then we notice travel photos of France, Italy, Mexico, a car crash, Sanguedolce's first experiments with film, a hockey game... Photographs of the father taken at different times in his life emerge from this frenetic storm of images. All these close-ups are very short, creating a rhythm that sometimes lets us think certain of the images are moving.

This skillful packing of identities, eras and temporalities generated by filming photographs exclusively, is also sustained by the presence of different voices (masculine, feminine, young, old...) from various sources (interviews, improvisation, radio clips...). There are several "narrators" in the film, as though these stories/these images belonged to everyone. Bits of text are then added, projected onto the images. This terse, enigmatic text is made up of phrases that have no endings. It permits the images it evokes to be superimposed over those in the film, and thus contributes to the overall dreamy quality.

In its overloading of recalled memories, Sweetblood can be associated with a Proustian mode of investigation that validates the power fiction has to infiltrate images stemming from autobiographical experience. The freeze-frame, taken out of context, out of its continuum, is handled, looked at and scrutinized as a catalyst of meaning, revelation and fiction. The whole film revolves around the arrested moments (often interpreted as a condensation of events) that photography represents. Two sequences of super 8 film blown up to 16 mm ó a shot of a coffin, evoking the grandfather's death, and a family portrait grouping at least three generations of Sanguedolce's that appears during the credits ó are the only times we get to see images in motion, since almost all the visual material Sanguedolce uses is comprised of photographs.

The work of Steve Sanguedolce corresponds to the urgency of delineating an identity and investigating it; using a 16 mm camera to zero in on family photographs, it is located somewhere between past and present. To look alike, or look like someone? The urgency of arresting images, or looking at images stilled, to put them back into motion. Beyond the inevitable anecdotes of these photographs, death is also at the rendez-vous. It is perhaps what unites all of us in this fascination for dÈj‡-vu that fuels the family album.

Nicole Gingras

21 04 1995

translated from the French by Kathleen Fleming

* sangue (blood), dolce (sweet). Sweetblood, more than the lyrical title of a film about the search for identity through several generations of a family, more than a coincidence that the filmmaker's name leads him back to his family, to a fascination with bloodlines.

Sweetblood, Steve Sanguedolce, Canada, 1993, 13 minutes.