The Image You Missed

THE IMAGE YOU MISSED   ***1/2

Donal Foreman and Arthur MacCaig

2018

IDEA:  Filmmaker Donal Foreman reflects on both his estranged father and his Irish heritage through archival footage his father shot of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

BLURB:  A film “between” Donal Foreman and Arthur MacCaig, The Image You Missed is a dialogically dual-authored memoir and a dynamic record of national memories negotiated across generations. In montage by turns contemplative and propulsive, Foreman absorbs, interprets, and recontextualizes his father’s documentary footage alongside his own, simultaneously bridging their distinct personal and politico-historical experiences and exposing the irreconcilable gulfs in between. The film demonstrates, lucidly, the intersection of individual and collective identity with practices of image-making and consuming, but it would perhaps be more accurate to say it exemplifies these things as being always already entwined. By recognizing his father’s archive as not merely evidence of a cultural past he never experienced but as a necessarily provisional and ongoing site for historical writing, Foreman realizes Gregory Paschalidis’ maxim that “photographs do not represent history, they represent in history… are part of the way we make sense of and give form to history.” Much of The Image You Missed can be understood in this way, as a testament to how images frame and generate historically and culturally situated knowledge about ourselves. The vastly different Irelands that separate Foreman and his father’s lives – not to mention all the other temporal distances keeping them apart – may speak to inevitable epochal changes and epistemological gaps, but in dialoguing with his father’s past in the present, Foreman is able to create the sense of fissures symbolically overcome. One comes away from The Image You Missed with the feeling of the image’s partiality, certainly, but also with an intensified awareness of its exorbitance, of its power to create meaningful new connections.