A New York Artist Commits to Memory

Viviane Silvera’s film “See Memory” begins with the dark silhouette of a boat floating across a body of water. But for the gentle rippling of the water and the slow progress of the boat itself across the frame, the image would read as a painting, which, in fact, it is. “See Memory” is composed of about 30,000 painted images, all done by Ms. Silvera over the course of several years, photographed using a stop-motion technique, creating a luminous, dreamlike, sometimes eerie series of animated scenes. The paintings tell their own tale — the story of a young woman struggling to bear the emotional weight of her memory alone — while the accompanying narration is drawn directly from interviews conducted by Ms. Silvera with neuroscientists and therapists musing on the cognitive science behind memory itself. The painted story unfolds like a series of memories — elusive, sensory, shapeshifting, fraught with emotional significance — while the narration sheds light on the psychological processes the subject may be undergoing in real time.“See Memory,” Ms. Silvera’s first film, is an artistic interrogation of cognition and memory, closely informed by neuroscience. It debuted in 2016, and is now airing, in an expanded form, on PBS nationwide, as well as through their streaming service, having also been shown in cinemas. Medical professionals and professors have used it in their own practices to deepen their understanding, and that of their patients, of the scientific nature of traumatic memory. It has screened at more than fifty institutions worldwide. From the success of her first film project, it’s clear Ms. Silvera has discovered a line of artistic inquiry that will keep her busy as a filmmaker for years to come. She has, she told the Sun, “found a subject that I could work on for the rest of my life.”Various threads in her life have woven together to help her create “See Memory.” Hearing her discuss her childhood, I understand why memory became a professional lodestone: her family’s relationship with trauma and memory loomed large in her imagination, if not in the family consciousness. Her father was a Jewish refugee from Aleppo, whose own father was held as a political prisoner in Syria for a few months. Far from being oppressed by stories of her family’s struggles, Ms. Silvera remembered that “my father really survived by looking forward.” Her sense of her family’s tribulations came from fragmented glimpses into their history: snippets caught from conversations with her grandmother, references to antisemitism dropped by her mother. “I think I was the only one in my family who wanted to explore memory,” she recalled.Ms. Silvera spent the first ten years of her life in Hong Kong — the opening boat scene of “See Memory” is painted from her own memories of the junk floating in front of the Hong Kong skyline. After she turned ten, her family moved to Brazil, before settling in America five years later. Ms. Silvera has resided in New York City for the past few decades, previously running a series of popular art tours exploring the city’s galleries.Reflecting on her youth, Ms. Silvera said, “I became very fascinated with memory and looking at my own childhood in Hong Kong, and the strange kind of memories I have…I was very interested in the different qualities of memory. Why are they [memories] different? Does it have to do with the age that you form the memory?”For Ms. Silvera, film was the most natural medium through which to explore these questions. Although she earned her Masters in sculpture (tellingly, her undergraduate degree was in psychology) film was her first love: “If I had a bad day, if I was stressed, my go-to was, what movies are playing? I’m going to sit in a dark theater and going to be completely absorbed in a story.” While making still images, many of which can be seen in prominent public collections, including Vanderbilt University and the Clinton Presidential Library, Ms. Silvera began to tiptoe towards her career as a filmmaker.Her first experiments in cross-pollination between still and moving images began with large scale drawings she made in response to her viewing a close-up of Kate Winslet’s face in “Titanic.” She did not initially recognize the actress and it made her think of the face as a landscape. “I rendered seven foot by five foot drawings,” she said, “exploring how an indie film would render the face, a studio film…all the different styles, a noir film, and I made them out of thousands and thousands of pencil hatch marks. The idea for me was to show the hand of the artist in an image that otherwise seems very cinematic…like photography, film looks real, and it’s easy as a viewer to get sucked into the idea of this reality, even though it’s as artificial as sculpture – it’s just as handmade.” Initially, film itself was the subject that interested her or, more precisely, “human perception and cognition in relation to film.”‘See Memory.’ Viviane Silvera.These questions led Ms. Silvera to film, not merely as a subject for exploration, but as the medium through which to propel her creative exploration of memory, a continual professional preoccupation for her. She described her decision to finally make a film as one of “pure frustration” with the limitations of painting and drawing in conveying the protean nature of memory: “For me, memory is very much about time passing and movement. [I thought] ‘Oh no, I think I have to learn how to make a film now, because I want to figure out how to really convey what memory is to me.’”The resulting film, “See Memory,” was the product of years of painting, editing, technical experimentation, revision, and collaboration. First came the visual story: a young woman who starts out struggling and isolated, yet who, over time, can develop a trusting relationship with her therapist and becomes transformed through sharing her memories. (This story arc is based loosely on Robert Redford’s 1980 drama “Ordinary People,” a film Ms. Silvera cites as a major influence.) Initially she had hired actors to improvise dialogue over this scene, but during the filmmaking process she circled back to an earlier idea and interviewed neuroscientists and therapists dealing with the same issues from a clinical perspective.As Ms. Silvera conducted these interviews, her painting style metamorphosed based on observations that the experts she spoke to would make, becoming more dreamlike in a Surrealist sense: “It made me be much less realistic in a way… [I would] try to get into these waking dream states while I was painting so that I wasn’t quite sure what was going to happen next.” In this way, the sights and sounds of “See Memory” wove together organically, creating an integrated story told from not one, but two perspectives, the artistic and the clinical, engaging both sides of the brain. In the second half of the film, expanded for its streaming contract with PBS, Ms. Silvera hosts several of the neuroscientists, who contributed to the film’s narration. They further elaborate on the collaboration process, and the symbiotic relationship between art and science in interrogating traumatic memory.There is one fundamental, unanswered question in “See Memory.” What memory is haunting the subject? As the movie itself inquires (in painted words, that disappear as quickly as they appear), what happened? There are recurring images — a horse, a hot-air ballon, windows, snow — that tease at possible events, yet do not themselves provide any clear answers. This fundamental question is left intentionally unanswered.On the subject of collective memory, we discussed Ms. Silvera’s Jewish identity, including its role in both her family life and creative practice. Although she takes a direct, curious approach to suffering in her film, when discussing her own experience with antisemitism, her perspective bears the imprint of her family’s characteristic stoicism. “I don’t think I ever grew up thinking there was no antisemitism,” she said. “In the schools I went to in Hong Kong and Brazil – we went to these British Catholic schools – we were the only Jewish kids, and they were quite antisemitic, even the teachers. I remember being teased, and more.” Reflecting on her parents’ perspective on persecution, Ms. Silvera observed, “I think [my father] and his family and his circle from Aleppo felt like they hadn’t really suffered, if you juxtapose it next to the Holocaust.”When describing working with her father on a forthcoming film project, Ms. Silvera recalled, “I kept saying, ‘How come you describe escaping from Aleppo without sadness or emotion, only optimism?’….that’s why the Jews of Aleppo have actually been so successful, because they are builders. They’re not sitting there lamenting what they’ve lost.” In this context, “See Memory” could be seen as Ms. Silvera’s own method of subverting pain. She, like her parents, takes a positivist, creative approach to trauma as opposed to a plaintive one. Continuing in the family tradition, Ms. Silvera’s daughter Lila has her own podcast, “Jewish Actually” on the subject of Judaism today. “It’s incredible,” Ms. Silvera said, “her level of composure and willingness to talk about things that most adults would be scared to broach right now.”Although her Jewish identity plays a role in her creative practice, Ms. Silvera observes that “there are many aspects to identity” and she’s eager to tell different stories as a filmmaker: “I’m interested in humanity and the human experience, and what we have in common.” Memory, and our relationship to our memories, is at the heart of that human experience for her. As part of a current film project, Ms. Silvera interviewed people whose parents had died, and recalled, “I would say, ‘Is this painful?’ I remember one person saying to me, ‘No it’s such a gift…being able to talk to you about my parent, it’s like they’re back here with me while we’re speaking about them.”This film, titled “The Memory Loophole,” is one of several projects Ms. Silvera is working on. She plans to use a combination of live action and paintings, and she describes her approach to the story, about a (real life) young woman in search of clues about her deceased father’s past, as “creative nonfiction.” Another project in the works is her aforementioned collaboration with her own father, entitled “Projecting Aleppo,” in which she projects footage from Aleppo from the 1930s and 1940s onto her studio wall, while her father stands in the midst of these scenes, as though present in them.Ms. Silvera, presently an artist-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is continuing to refine her stop-motion animation using paintings. A new project was recently shown at Art Week Berlin, imagining escapes over the Berlin Wall – a hot air balloon, a trapeze artist – rendered in her signature moving painting style. She is now refining it for future screenings and exhibitions.Imagination, cognition, memory and dreams are all the animating forces behind these projects. As with “See Memory,” Ms. Silvera hews close to personal, intimate, individual histories, yet in her particular creative approach, she emphasizes their universality, inviting her audience to participate in the story: to experience, to endure, and to be healed.

A New York Artist Commits to Memory

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