“Accidental” Postproduction and Acts of Remembering in Stand By For Tape Back-up, by Ross Sutherland

Abstract

The essay analyses the film Stand By For Tape Back-up, by Ross Sutherland, which presents a “double gesture of postproduction”. On the one hand, there is Sutherland’s grandfather random, accidental recording on a videotape of several televisual fragments, that become the remainders through which the author reconstructs not only the traces of the processes of selection and consumption of his beloved grandfather, but also his own spectatorial experience. On the other hand, there is the performative gesture of Sutherland himself: as I aim to demonstrate, through the repetition, the reuse and the repurposing of those fragments Sutherland obsessively rewrites his history and redefines his own identity. Through the analysis of this case study, the essay challenges well-established categories such as compilation and found footage film and addresses the connection between recycled images, memory and identity.