A Collaborative Filmmaking Approach to Identity Formation on Social Media

One can consider today, the pandemic, as the breaking point which has changed our interpersonal relations and the ways in which we communicate with others while simultaneously flattening time-space connection. The concept of “place” continues to liquify, all while our risks and fears become more solidified than ever. However, throughout the pandemic, society has been able to break through the limitations of the home by means of digital resources for communication. As freedom of movement was troubled and restricted, social media channels, with their high speed and volume of information, became new agoras through which individuals could connect to the collective memory.

Individual remembrance, collective memory, and history interact in highly complicated ways; therefore, I aim to understand and unveil these invisible connections by using a collaborative approach, in which participants answer research questions by documenting their everyday life offline and online. In addition, there is an extra layer of autobiographical information which relates to these same questions. By adding these extra layers and utilizing a montage style which includes footage of participants mixed with a non-sync sound, the accompanying film questions existing dualities, such as researcher/participant, outside/inside, offline/online, time/space, and past/present/ future. This film/research can be summed up as Laura U. Marks (2000) puts it; as an attempt to understand and translate the knowledges of memory including the unrecordable memories of the senses to an audiovisual medium. Memory and identity include complex layers of testimonies and silence. By utilizing a collaborative approach to filmmaking, I intend not to tell stories but rather to relate these fragments and nuances to one another.