Color Video

I was sent a video of a lazy Sunday afternoon in Germany, 1937: carnival rides and wheat fields, men drinking beer at the picnic table, couples waltzing outdoors.

We've all seen the images of National Socialism in black and white: the videos of Hitler's speeches before lit torches, Leni Riefenstahl's rapturous shots of parades crossing the Brandenburg Gate.

But it was only when I saw them in color that they really took on a human shape. The swastika flag banners billow in the wind as buses cross in front of them. Those ordinary people heiling cease to look like fascist automatons, and start to look like the Midwesterners I grew up with. It is in this color-soaked reality in real time that fascism becomes apparent for what it is: an ideology that ordinary people willingly took into their hearts. While we've all been told that the potential for evil lies within all of us, it takes a striking image for us to really feel that. Roland Barthes said that the existence of slavery was never real to him until he saw a snapshot of a slave market. There is no veil of history, there is only shocking immediacy.

You don't even necessarily have to see the evidence of a historical event to feel the reality of it in a video artifact. Seang Dy sings in the wedding, a warbling voice from a lost world. You stare into the faces of dozens of people who were almost certainly murdered a few years later. They sip their champagne, blissfully unaware of their fates.

The Internet makes it so much easier to sort through odd pieces of audio and video from other worlds: Syrian pop music, North Korean propaganda, Nigerian cinema, old photos of a long-dead '80s Lower East Side Bohemia, home movies from Mississippi in the '50s. These fragments and ephemera-- memories of individual people, memories of families, memories of towns, memories of whole cultures-- have found some kind of new life, or at least a stay on their execution, on the web.

You find these things through links from websites, links from friends, links from other videos, links from Google searches, links from Youtube searches, intentional searches, accidental searches, misspellings, serendipity. You wade through countless awful viral videos and talentless hacks' terrible covers of songs you like and trollish comments to find gems scattered in the trash heap of the collective consciousness.

I've always had that tendency to pore through the volumes of cultural history, hunting down the weird, the arcane, the baffling, and the shocking. I don't especially care about most new books that come out, I have no desire to keep up with the latest raved-about writer--  all I wanna do is find something transcendent. Fuck Jonathan Safran Foer and Dave Eggers. I wanna read about people selling human body parts on the Russian steppes during the reign of Czar Nicholas I. Each found piece of media isn't just a pop song or a snapshot. It's a portal to another world, another set of lives, another set of mores, a radically different experience connected to you by a thin thread of common humanity.

It follows then, that our cultures, our lives, our memories have the potential to leave this kind of imprint after they're gone, with wildly different effects on different people. When someone finds a picture of me in a box in 50 years, what will they see? What meanings, what connections lie in the notes I scribble on bookmarks? And at what date will the last vestige of my being be an unremembered image?