VERDICT: Tying together disparate locations in Northern England and Jamaica, Hope Strickland’s evocative boat ride explores the interrelations between labour, memory and rivers.
Past and present coalesce in the tides of Hope Strickland’s a river holds a perfect memory.
A combination of archival material, new 16mm footage, and hi-tech LIDAR scans, the film is a reflection on the nature of waterways and their manipulation by trade. Old information films detail the celebratory progress of industry in Northern England, while Strickland captures, on woozy celluloid, leisure cruises as far apart as the Falmouth Estuary in the UK and the Martha Brae River in Jamaica. The idea of water retaining memory is a widespread one and Strickland here uses it create an affinity between those – human and non-human – forced into labour by the market.
Strickland’s treatment of the river here is to embrace its mutability as both an embodiment of nature’s lazy drift and as the frame imposed upon by the economic forces of control and exploitation. Her title references a quote by Toni Morrison, the substantive idea of which is also echoed by one of the voices heard in the film: “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” Here the water in question becomes the river, shaped and straightened as a trade or to harness its energy for powering our machines. But the river never forgets its true course, and left to its own devices would stray back to its natural path.
The places featured in a river holds a perfect memory are inherently linked by the commercialising of oceans in the Transatlantic slave trade, and the imposition onto rivers by the man of the archival footage evidently echoes the colonial impositions onto Jamaica and countless other places. In this marriage of forms and stories, Strickland compresses time, holding before us both the misconduct of the past and the liberties of the present. The water doesn’t forget but offers some respite.
Director, cinematography: Hope Strickland
Producers: Nuria Lopez de la Oliva Mena, Elizabeth Benjamin
Editing: Hope Strickland, Jennifer Lauren Martin
Music, sound: felix taylor Production companies: Film and Video Umbrella (UK) Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Harbour) In English 17 minutes