Camcorder Childhood

Read on The Gargoyle, volume 70, issue 7

Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun (2022) opens with a shot of a man. The quality of the shot is terrible as the camerawork is skewed and shaking. During this shot, we hear a girl’s voice, grainy and slightly distorted. It’s nothing like the 4K screens and the filtered voices of the films that we watch now, and yet, because of this, this shot is inherently nostalgic. It shows a moment you can never walk back to.

Aftersun depicts the protagonist Sophie’s memories of a vacation with her dad, Calum, when she was eleven years old. The film captures the muddy bittersweetness of a memory: a childhood outgrown and a dad no longer here. Remembering an event will never be the same as living through one, in this film, both you and the characters are always looking through something: water, the reflection of a mirror, a TV screen, a low-resolution miniDV footage…

As a person born in the early 2000s, these aspects of Aftersun make it feel like the director plucked my life experiences straight from my brain. I have a distinct memory from when I was twelve of watching a miniDV footage that my mom shot. I was maybe three or five in the video, and we were getting ready to go swimming. My whole family was there, even a family member who is now long dead. On the computer screen, they are all going swimming with me. I have no recollection of the actual event. Only the miniDV remembers this distant moment, and I in turn only remember this miniDV, though I don’t even know where it is anymore. But who else remembers miniDVs anymore? Not the market, not the technology we use now. If somebody handed me an aged disk of me on vacation with my family years ago, I would have nothing to play the video with.

Lately, there has been an increase in demand for analog devices. Perhaps the rekindled popularity is due to people like me, trying to reenact childhood memories. Although it’s impossible now to take pictures of your parents when they were twenty years younger, at least we get to experience what it might feel like as we feel the small digicam in our hands and press the shutter. Last year, my friends and I brought a camcorder to the beach and shot videos of us swimming and playing in the sand. The device was rusty but it fit snugly in my hands, the digital zoom was pixelated but it zoomed so far that I felt like it could have travelled to the other side of the lake, or even, time. We gave up trying to export these videos after learning that we don’t have the equipment to do it, because lingering is a waste of time for things that are gone indefinitely.

It is safe to say that our videos exist comfortably as ghosts. Despite technically being tangible media, miniDVs and camcorder videos that we cannot access have become intangible. Much like how you can touch a printed film photo of your parents as young adults, but that version of them has long been outgrown, the idea of this ghostly existence is reminiscent of Calum’s presence in Aftersun. Having watched the movie, we understand that the story we have experienced is merely fragments of a memory from a woman remembering times with her father who is now either dead or no longer in her life. And the distant childhood looks so good, the weather always sunny and the sky always blue, maybe except for the quiet nights where you can’t sleep and cigarette smoke seeps through the door to the balcony. But it’s hard to remember when it’s pixelated and all full of grain.

In the last shot of the movie, we’re ripped away from Sophie and Calum’s vacation as an adult Sophie turns off the TV. The camera slowly pans toward her, who is gazing at the black screen with tired eyes. Then it reverts to where the TV was…but in place of it is Calum: he’s not a minute older, still standing in the airport where they left each other many years ago, holding his camcorder and looking in Sophie’s direction. We see him slowly setting down the camera.  He then walks down an empty hallway, all the way to a door that opens to a dimly lit dance floor — an interdimensional space where he can keep on existing as a ghost in Sophie’s memories.