Yesterday my Mum got out our video camera along with bits of older and more recent video footage sorted onto different tapes. I was watching a couple of them on the camera and I marvelled at how these moments which I thought I'd forgotten completely, were handed back to me and I remembered being there. I was very aware of how tangible they seemed, just because I was there watching them and hearing them, and for a little while I could be transported back into those times; at least whenever I kept my focus on the video - by holding it in my hands I acquired a closeness and the scenes enveloped my mind. But it also hit home how different things are in the present moment. It was hard for me to accept that the events (and one of the people) on the footage, had passed and were no longer, even though the distance between myself and the video scenes was physically very little.
There was the notion of not being able to see all that was going on at once relating to 'fragments and borders' of time, although I could always hear mine and my family's voices outside of the camera's view; also the typical format of a video camera stopping and starting at different points - we choose what we want to have recorded, and then there are the periods of black or blank footage in amongst those recordings.
I've suddenly become very interested in the ability to pause, fast-forward and rewind the time on a video after my doing this last night. I kept rewinding parts that I wanted to see over and over again, and pausing at certain moments to see how I or one of my family members had looked during that time, or fast-forwarding parts that I didn't feel were interesting or just saw as monotonous. I had control over the timing, the occurrences and the order of the scenes. My intervening only finished when there was no more video footage to be viewed on the tape, as I obviously could not play, pause, rewind and fast-forward something that hadn't happened.
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