Abstract

Abstract
Holding Time: Archive, Body and Cinema: WHAT MY FATHER SAW
Tamás Wormser

This research-creation project examines how archival still photography is transformed through cinema, focusing on the photographic work of my father, Antal Wormser, a photojournalist who documented life in socialist Hungary alongside our family. Through the production and analysis of four film sketches, I explore how still images can generate duration, movement, and historical consciousness without relying on motion. Combining still photographs with cinéma vérité footage, montage, voice, sound, and intergenerational dialogue, the project treats the photograph not as static evidence but as an unstable temporal site where public history and private memory intersect.
The written thesis accompanies these four sketches, which function as experimental laboratories toward a planned feature film, What My Father Saw. Each sketch approaches the archive differently: through present-day encounters with my father, reconstructions of his childhood shaped by historical trauma, reflections on my own early years through his photographs that precede memory, and an exploration of life’s thresholds through ritual and birth.
Engaging the archive as both historical record and familial inheritance, the project investigates how identity is formed across generations within broader political and historical frameworks. It reflects on the ethical complexities of filming within one’s own family, where the roles of filmmaker and son overlap, and where care, consent, and representation must be continually negotiated. It proposes cinema as a temporal practice that reactivates archival images as events unfolding in the present.
The thesis contributes to discussions on archival cinema and autobiographical documentary, advancing a research-creation approach to filming memory, trauma, and intergenerational experience.