Epoca

How is history made?, the Swiss directors Andreas Hoessli and Isabella Huser wonder in this kaleidoscopic film essay. They merge miscellaneous historical footage into a new history by linking up events, thoughts and images that at first sight are incongruous. Man is inclined to distil a lucid story from everything, particularly in historiography. In an open but non-committal collage structure, the two Swiss demonstrate this principle. They pose the question ‘what enters our collective memory and what does not?’, and to answer it they have gathered heterogeneous, sometimes forgotten fragments of important historical events: the making of the atom bomb, a Russian show trial in World War II, memories of the war in former Yugoslavia. We see how the films about the leading scientists who worked on the atom bomb have been staged, before a sniper from Sarajevo tells his story. Images of a lie-detector test are alternated with the life story of a Russian spy. The pilot of the aeroplane that dropped the atom bomb on Nagasaki is also introduced: he got his biggest kick when the cloud cover opened up, the target became visible and he released the bomb. In the sophisticated montage, a Croatian journalist seems to concur with him: "My memory starts with the war; life before that seems to be a part of my imagination, something unreal that I have not really experienced, but watched as a spectator."