In the contemporary post-media landscape re-assemblage has become a memory practice that is omnipresent in amateur media and also within experimental art projects. In ‘the new post-historical reign of the technical image’ (Ruchel- Stockmans 2015: 40) found footage films have become generic templates to rethink or narrate past events. Contemporary filmmakers mine the audio-visual archives in order to shape and explore world-memory, thus they become ‘metallurgists’ ‘bending the material images and sounds that contribute to our political consciousness’ (Pisters 2016: 150). Meanwhile in documentary cinema firstperson narratives and home-made images have become powerful political tools, methods of reclaiming collective memory or history (see Renov 2004).

This essay investigates the re-shaping of audio-visual material and the reassembling of history in a group of recent Eastern European non-fiction films (or more precisely, what could be called ‘memory films’) that resort to personal memory to revitalise past cultural experiences by bringing together archival photographs and film footage with painterly artifice in visually stimulating ways. Some of them belong to the genre of animated documentary, like Anca Damian’s Crulic. The Path to Beyond (Crulic – drumul spre dincolo, 2011), Vladislava Plančíková Felvidék. Caught in Between (Felvidék. Horná zem, 2014) or the short film I Made You, I Kill You (2016) by Alexandru Petru Bădeliță. These films renegotiate the way photographs can point to past experiences. In a similar experimental vein, Zbigniew Czapla meditates upon the fading of the photographic memory in Paperbox (Papierowe pudełko, 2011). Radu Jude, on the other hand, constructs his film exclusively from archival photographs and experiments with the boundaries of cinema in Dead Nation (Țara moartă, 2017).

These films remediate photographs as ‘prostheses of memory’ in hyper-mediated contexts in order to meditate upon history and time, personal and collective identity, so as to give voice to the unheard, to unearth repressed traumas or to produce an alternative version of Eastern European history. But the ways in which photography is inserted in the first-person narrative of these films displays a heterogeneity that goes far beyond the ‘indexical verifier’ (Rozenkrantz 2011) or the evidentiary status associated most commonly with repurposed photographs in a documentary. These found footage films that combine photographs, films and videos or other type of visual documents can be understood as a dialogical form between ‘competing, unstable signs’ (Dalle Vacche 1996: 6), of media that are being in the process of being defined in their interaction with other media.