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.