Please Hold screened to a rapt and engaged audience of about 30 participants of the Visible Evidence Documentary conference in Philadelphia: scholars, filmmakers, friends. Here are two beautiful responses from Marty Lucas and Jeffrey Skoller, scholar/artists who, like many in this crowd, are my very esteemed colleagues and contemporaries: people I learn from, respect, and love to engage with.
How do the living lie with the dead?
For me there were two big reactions to seeing “Please Hold.” One was just to cast my mind back to the AIDS crisis era and the friends who died during that period, and how key the struggle around AIDS was for defining what struggle and resistance can mean. In general remembering those who’ve passed is cause for feelings of pain, of guilt and regret. But what is key for me is the way that the film offers a space for feelings and memories of the dead to re-animate the relationship “not because they are ghosts, but because they transformed you.”
A couple of years ago I found a set of “Twelve Theses on the Economy of the Dead” by John Berger that has really stayed with me. This is No. 12:
How do the living lie with the dead? Until the dehumanization of society by capitalism, all the living awaited the experience of the dead. It was their ultimate future. By themselves the living were incomplete. Thus living and dead were interdependent. Always. Only a uniquely modern form of egotism has broken this interdependence. With disastrous results for the living, who now think of the dead as eliminated.
A really great work.
The homemade video/phone approach inserts the whole project, a project in a way of collaboration with the dead, into the space of the everyday, and of the doable. I think you mentioned “place as a technology of memory.” The idea of a return to a location as a route to learning, or of transforming memory into a way to the future. And of course it works because it can’t really work.
The thought that came to me in the night after watching the film was how we live in a world where the opposite technologies exists as well. We watched the film on August 6, the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, a day when an entire city was not just bombed, but erased, obliterated. And of course today, the same thing is being done in Gaza. Those memories and those dead will have to find other homes.
Warm regards,
Marty (Lucas), Professor Emeritus, Hunter College, Film & Media
Notes from watching Please Hold in the context of the Visible Evidence a film/media studies conference:
I am thinking about the ways Alex’s formal, cinematic strategies in the video activate and reignites her images and sounds that were made in one moment in history, now seen in another. The video raises questions about how to understand the AIDS crisis—personally and collectively–as something that is ongoing, across time and into the present. How do the meanings of images change over time? The images/sounds in Please Hold, become iterations of themselves—starting from 1990s to early 2000’s and in the present. They appear as at once repetitions and as thoroughly new, as if seen for the first time, since they become surrounded by the world of each moment they are seen. The structuring formal element of the piece is the tracking shot, used in the footage from each time period expertly and movingly woven together. They become a lattice work allowing us to see one moment in time into and through another–not simply as chronology, but as simultaneity–recalling, revivifying, placing. Insights and sites in the present are seen and felt together with the mystery, uncertainty, fears and grief of an earlier time. Attorney Street on the Lower Eastside becomes a temporal journey from past to present and back again. The street, always changing, transforming—the repetitions of the street filmed between 1990 and 2024 seem at once the same and different. The constantly moving camera–mobile composition–always changing, always in flux, a constantly changing composition–never fixed—makes us conscious of being in time, always in transition. The camera, an interface rather than simply a recording device, creates awareness that one is moving through space as a perceiving body. Always a series of partial views, the tracking shot is never a totality, always a piece of something larger. The filmmaker, walking through space, part of the camera apparatus, as a seeing body walking across time. Alex’s out of frame voice moving with the camera, self conscious and participatory. Between the tracking shots are portraits of people, also lattice of intersecting histories. These are also time images as we see the shift from youth to middle age for those who survived as well as the reverberating images of those who didn’t–changing hair styles, clothes worn, and ability to articulate insight, political commitment and grief. Awareness of photographic perception: the very technology of video is also part of this temporal lattice, from analogue VHS, Hi-8 video Super 8mm film, of the 90’s with it’s inky colors and low res images, to digital crispness of HS camera, iPhone cameras–cold, and analytic but clear. The material image quality is also historical document tracing the ways the technology shapes what can be seen and said. Please Hold is a time machine that connects me with our own collective and personal histories, and with a past that is still present, always in flux, always reaching for the deeper meanings of experience and struggle.
—Jeffrey Skoller, Professor Emeritus, Film & Media, UC Berkeley, 8/2025