Amid Flowers, Crowns, and Tears, digitized film , 11:20
Amid Flowers, Crowns, and Tears is one of ten films commissioned by G. William Jones Film & Video Collection, Hamon Arts Library, Southern Methodist University for the curated screening, Ghosts of Lost Futures, which debuted at the Dallas Museum of Art.
For this program, 10 artists selected by curator Michael A. Morris were given access to the same cache of footage from the WFAA News Film Collection shot in Dallas, Texas in the year 1970, the year of the archive’s founding. The program was intended to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the archive in 2020, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdowns, the program was not completed until the Spring of 2021. The artists were given complete freedom in how they re-interpreted the footage and its historical context. The resulting works are profound meditations on mourning, melancholy, disaster, and various reinterpretations of the events of 2020 and 2021 through images of Dallas’ past.
Is a spectre haunting the archive? Do the films collected there proclaim a history that is no longer or a future that is not yet here? Is there something to reclaim in the bits of visual history that have been rescued in the archive? Have you felt the horizon closing before your eyes, the promise of the future you’ve been waiting for becoming a perpetual, timeless present? Cultural theorist Mark Fisher describes a tendency in contemporary culture he refers to as “hauntological” that refuses to give up on a lost future that no longer seems possible. “This refusal gives the melancholia a political dimension, because it amounts to a failure to accommodate to the closed horizons of capitalist realism.” — Glasstire