Screen Memories is a short split-screen video that began as a piece of free-associational audiovisual exploration. Rather than an explicit work of scholarly exposition, explication or argumentation, it is an instance of creative practice as a mode of enquiry: a concise compilation made to perform or frame a new audiovisual encounter – in this case turning on a technique of gentle defamiliarisation (Ostranenie) – in order to engender new material thinking and feeling. As film historian and theorist Pam Cook has noted, in relation to her own practical exploration of videographic film and television studies, audiovisual forms like this

Given this open-endedness, what follows is a written exegesis and contextualisation of the video that aim to expand on its central topic and to make more manifest its audiovisual methodology. I provide this in order to situate the video even more clearly as practice-led research, that is as a work attempting to produce new knowledge, both through its particular form and through the reflections generated by this.

Screen Memories is one of a number of videographic works of spatial montage that I made about Ingmar Bergman's films to be screened at events to mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the Swedish director's birth on 14 July 1918. Each of these works uses its multiple-screen form in the service of a poetic analysis through synchronous performance, a playing together of cinematic motifs, similarities, repetitions or variations that would otherwise only be meaningfully apprehended as such sequentially in the audiovisual time-based medium. In their double unfolding, across screens, of the already ‘profuse simultaneity of signifiers’ (Burch 1981: 29) in any single collection of frames from Bergman's cinematic sequences, these videos also explore, as a compositional principle, art historian and theorist Roger Cardinal's notions of the ‘haptic mosaic’ in pictorial culture (Cardinal 1986: 127).