Still Processing (Sophy Romvari, 2020) (Patreon)

In French, the word for photographic developer -- the chemical itself -- is révélateur, which is a reminder of the power contained within what we now call "analog images." The body leaves a physical trace on a photosensitive surface, and that surface is then reverse-transferred onto paper as a reminder of that physical presence, the exact moment when light of a certain intensity kissed the side of a face, or extended itself into the landscape, or walled off some random, haphazard moment with the absolute boundary of the shutter and frame.

Sophy Romvari's latest film is about the arrival of an old box of family photos, an archive that has been keep out of sight for many years. It consists of pictures from her childhood, shots of her and her three brothers playing, singing, goofing around, just existing. But these include traces of people who no longer exist. Two of Romvari's older brothers, David and Jonathan, are now deceased.

Still Processing is an open wound of a film; it is often uncomfortable to watch, organized in a way that, paradoxically, invites the viewer to intrude on moments we are not at all certain we should see. Sophy is present before the camera, and she has herself filmed as she opens the box of pictures for what is obviously the first time. Seeing images of her brothers, she breaks down in tears several times. (We do not know exactly what happened to David or Jonathan, nor do we need to. But Romvari's use of onscreen text subtly indicates that they were troubled young men, and that the circumstances of their early deaths were most likely not natural.)

After opening the box and engaging with the images taken by her parents, Romvari begins the process of working to print certain negatives, digitizing some super-8 film, and eventually uploading all the images to her hard drive for a digital slide show. That is to say, much of Still Processing depicts Romvari's actual tactile engagement with these memories as media, traces that must be worked on, worked over, manipulated into a manageable form. It is not enough to simply let them out of the box. They must be (literally) handled.

Romvari's short films have consistently been about mitigating the intensely personal through comprehensible social forms, whether that be the use of Skype as a conduit for a long-distance friendship (Pumpkin Movie), the insinuation of capitalism into the grieving process (Norman Norman), or, in the case of Still Processing, attempting to stare at one's own loss with the aim of molding it into public memory. As we see the filmmaker moving her own experiences through various forms and different media, she extends the link to the past, even as she necessarily moves us further from those once-radiant bodies that reflected all that innocent light. They are pixels now, sent to find their place in the bigger universe. And we are able to finish the process with the vast multiplicity of our own losses, those borne in our looking.