Sticky

Sticky combines the investigative point of view of the desktop documentary with horror elements from recent screenlife films such as Unfriended (2014), Cam (2018), and Host (2020); using two documentary films about the highly mediated remembrance of societal disasters as a point of departure, it addresses the problems that arise when medial representation paradoxically prevents meaningful engagement. In Philip Scheffner's Havarie (2016), a 3.5-minute amateur video recording of a refugee ship in the Mediterranean is extended to last 93 minutes. The focus on an event that lacks drama, suspense, and tragedy contrasts conventional coverage that exclusively concentrates on these components. The artifice of the film disrupts empathy thereby forcing the viewer into a state of self-reflection. Harun Farocki's Respite (2007) relies exclusively on archival footage from a Nazi transit camp in the Netherlands and reveals the impossibility of watching these ostensibly innocuous images without the knowledge of the atrocities of the Holocaust. Both films return to well-known images whose repeated reproduction has stripped them of their significance, recontextualize them, and force the viewer to reevaluate the evidentiary power of the individual image. While Sticky takes up the questions these films raise, it expands on the discourse by introducing fictional elements of haunting into its investigation, mirroring both the instant obsolescence as well as the elusive and lingering impact of the image. Focusing on films that themselves rely visually exclusively on found footage further interrogates the conditions and makings of the video essay. Sticky reflects on spectatorship, (post)memory, and the impact of media consumption.