Abstract

Based on the experiences of the University of Lincoln’s ‘Looking Back for the Future’ research team, the first part of this paper theorizes collaborative work undertaken with regional community groups. Under the auspices of the Heritage Lottery ‘All Our Stories’ programme, these groups have sought to produce filmic documents which explore local heritage and cultures. Here, following the broader concerns of the groups, we situate the practice of community filmmaking in the context of new media ecologies (Fuller, 2005) and the promise of what Félix Guattari (2013) has called a ‘post-media era’.

For Guattari, the transformation from a regime of mass-mediatization, based on hegemonic consensus, to a decentralized post-mediatic era, based on diverse modes of enunciation, initiates the formation of a newly self-organized collective subjectivity. In this sense, certain modes of community filmmaking can be understood to provide escape routes from the apparatuses of power and knowledge which dominate representation, and the means for individuals and groups to fully take on their ‘processual potentialities’. Indeed, despite being concerned with issues of cultural history and diversity, these processes of mediation do not simply present an ‘actual’ – already existing – community. They are, instead, explorations of the common as virtual realm, immanent with real variations and excesses, a realm of collective power through which cultural diversity can be generated.

In the second part of this paper, as way of suggesting that mediated heritage can become a practice of the imagination, a catalyst for pasts to produce fissures in the present, these ideas will be explored in a short video essay, produced in collaboration with several community groups.