Rituals, Modernization and Pride
J’ai la mémoire qui tourne is a television series of 12 documentary programs of 46 minutes, made from «family films», that is to say, shot in Quebec families between the 1920s and 1980s, collected and shaped by Productions de la Ruelle. Rituals and modernity in motion are two of the series’ main strengths; a third narrative line is the pride arising from the construction of modernity through hazards and difficulties of all kinds. To build such a collective memory, it is not enough to scroll images. Family films most often have technical flaws: the image jumps, it is sometimes overexposed, the framing is approximate; speech compensates for these defects and explains the interest of the image despite these defects. The strategies of memory construction as well as the mechanisms allowing the passage from the family memory to the collective memory are here analyzed.