Should We Always Treat Memories the Same Way?

The great Italian director Federico Fellini once said that memory can’t be objective, and each time we remember something, it’s a bit different than the last time… We add our feelings, we imagine it all anew, and we shape the memory however we want, so every part of it can be truly ours.

So if two people share the same memory and both were present at the time,  each will remember it differently in time.

That leads us to the questions asked in the film And there was evening, and there was morning–the first day by director Youhanna Nagy—the film that won the FIPRESCI prize at Ismailia International Film Festival—What happens when a memory dies? Where does it go?
What keeps a memory from vanishing?

“And God said, let there be light, and there was light”
Nagy keeps his story tight with the words of the Bible, more precisely with the story of Creation. That’s how he wants to understand everything, by going on a trip to discover how memory works, how it was created, and the ways in which it has affected his life, making him the person he is now.

The film starts with sound only, and there was picture, the first image.
A camera perspective pointed at nothing; his very own process of creation at its first steps.
“And there was Light,” the light that creates images.
That’s when he finds this connection between the camera and the human brain, and how they both keep memories. One keeps very clear memories, and the other keeps them with complications and doubts.

And since nowadays the machine has a brain of its own, he asked for help to create more memories, to maybe place himself in the memories of another, if possible.
He has a camera to keep track of new memories, but it’s the past that shapes the future, and he wants to know more about it, to recall some moments.

What makes this film unique is that it goes the other way around.
Filmmaking is about creating images as well as the stories behind them, but here the pictures are already created, and they are in need of a story.
And involving what looks like “ChatGPT” in the process made it more contemporary. We live in an era where everything changes so fast, and the ways of creating films evolve as well, taking new shapes.
Youhanna’s film is not about the story as much as it’s about the process, it asks more questions than it answers. It brings confusion to the screen, it’s like images that you will not understand completely, but you will have something in common with, a feeling usually.   
It’s not traditional storytelling, even if he shaped the story in a classic way, creating three chapters: a beginning, a middle, and an end, before then viewing three stories through images and videotapes mostly unrelated to him.
He kept the structure related to the Christian part, by choosing three voices to tell the stories, a man, a woman and a child which gets along – only in shape – with the holy family of Saint Joseph, the Virgin Mary, and the child Jesus.

Before getting to the stories, Nagy made sure to create this common base between him and the machine (ChatGPT) and their bond was based on loneliness and sharing the same feeling of having no images or memories.

And I can relate the film’s title with the three parts, as every word of it may represent a story.

“And there was night”
The first story was named “Mountains and Roses” It was narrated by the voice of a man, and it featured images of a husband and a wife during what looks like a honeymoon. And as he continued: “The Camera became their first child, became the language of showing love.”
The story was created to show how, in real life, time passes more quickly than the time caught on camera, where you can freeze the moments and keep them forever.
“Youhanna” was trying to beat the fear through this story, where the man gets old, but he didn’t have enough footage, he didn’t have enough memories. You can see it as a reflection of Youhanna’s fear that his future might be similar.

“And there was morning”
The second story was named “The Four Seasons.” It was narrated by the voice of a woman. And that’s when Youhanna needed some reassurance, a warm voice, a mother figure. That part was more related to what he really needed, his mother.
It kept unfolding through seasons with what seemed like her voice in the background.
It’s a part where the thoughts are about how we always run, how seasons pass and we don’t feel the time passing. He described it in his imagination as chasing gold non-stop while a huge clock in the street always warns you that you are late, you haven’t collected enough. So every once in a while, someone just annihilates the clock so time stops and he takes a rest and thinks about the past, and what he’s missed.
This bomb is probably what made Nagy make his film before he reaches the autumn of his life, and things come to an end. It’s a bomb that awakes everything, and makes you take stock of the past, so you can understand how the future could be.  

“The First Day”
The third story was narrated by a young boy, and it represents going back to the origins, the first day, and how things started.
This time the voice reflects Nagy himself and his deep desire to exist, and to recognize his memories, and connect with this child in the photos.
He asked, in a childlike way: “Why do we resurrect something that is destined to die?”

The answer comes from the purpose of making this film, and that he can keep his mother forever, the acceptance of this tiny real memory that he had with her can make him move forward with the future.

In the middle of viewing the irrelevant images that represent the created stories, there were those moments where you see true images of his mother. ChatGPT called them “The Fake Memories” because they are irrelevant to his stories, but they were the only real ones related to his creator Nagy.
They just represented a picture that he can’t completely restore, or we can say a memory he couldn’t recall.

Ahmed Zakaria Badawi
Edited by Savina Petkova
©FIPRESCI