Flee and the Reconstruction of Memory
By Micah Slater, Edited by Ben Glickman
The work of remembering in Flee (2021, Rasmussen) is predicated upon a previously self-imposed tide of forgetting. Throughout this unusual documentary, under the pseudonym Amin Nawabi, an anonymous Afghan man—through voice-over, limited frame animation, and the occasional interjection of photo/video—relays at first the story he has often told of his refugee childhood and adolescence, and then his drastically different memory of the same events. The memory here is what ostensibly constitutes the truth. The labor of this remembering, of shedding a falsehood and laying bare the recollection of his youth, is what is at the core of this film. However, what makes Flee so compelling is not its relationship to truth, but its depiction of that labor requisite in transitioning between narrative and memory. In its variety of animation styles, including sketchwork and limited frame rate, as well as infrequent reference to reality through video, Flee closes in on a particularly marked overture—the act of remembrance as a reconstruction, and the act of forgetting—of reinvention—as the infinitely preferable alternative to utter neglect.
The decision to animate Flee is as practical as it is artistic. An intertitle at [00:01:32] declares the story’s veracity, followed by a statement well known throughout the biopic-documentary-historical fiction host: “Some names and locations have been altered… .” Here, the choice is more than understandable. Even the narrator of the film, the most consistent element in a vast menagerie of narrative and visual style, is never identified. Animation instantly anonymizes the constituents of remembrance, including the rememberer himself. Salman Rushdie, in a piece titled Imaginary Homelands, describes memory as the projection in a cinema: once the details are examined, it “becomes clear that the illusion itself is the memory” (Rushdie 13). The anonymous illusion in Flee created by the animated medium itself is inherently asserted to be true, on the basis that the story Nawabi is telling is an exposé—the revealed truth after decades of conveying a fabrication. These animated individuals, with made-up names and professional voice actors, become the memory: the labor of fabricating that visage is tributary to the labor of memory itself.
For the most part, Flee is animated in a relatively stylized 2-dimensional composition. The style, upon first examination, appears to have been chosen for feasibility; minimal rendering, limited movement, and (for the most part) conventional human subjects and settings all allow for a smaller creative team and tighter budget restrictions. However, a deep intentionality underscores what initially appears to be an election of convenience. This is most clearly exhibited by the limited, ‘choppy’ frame rate of the animation itself. Reflective of the way Nawabi narrates, this component of Flee’s visual presence is not fluid in the moments where its story is conventional—consistent. It is reflective of what Rushdie calls the “broken pots of antiquity,” from which memory can “sometimes, but always provisionally, be reconstructed” (Rushdie 12). These jerky, static frames are a reconstruction, a broken pot, an approximate collage of remembering. They originate from moments in the narration where Nawabi is expressing clarity, be it in falsehood or veracity. They are not necessarily the picture in entirety, but they are the elements that have been least-marred by logical fallacies such as emotion, impresence, or memory itself. This stylistic choice communicates that these moments of the film, where this animation is used, are the midground between truth and memory: where the narrative, although remaining subjective, is clear.
However, a second style of animation pervades this film, and contributes heavily to Flee’s structural validity as a document of truth. Author Robert A. Rosenstone, in a piece titled History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film explores at length the potential (and possible pitfalls) of film as a historical document. He writes that films can present “... the possibility of more than one interpretation of events […] they render the world as multiple, complex, and indeterminate” (Rosenstone 1182). The very inclusion of the second style of animation in Flee demonstrates a heightened awareness of multiplicity, but the style itself is the most exhibitive. In moments where Nawabi becomes audibly afraid, confused, or is speaking to events he doesn’t detail (either by virtue of limited content of memory or lack of personal experience) the animation becomes fluid; “sketchy.” These segments are not a fragmented reconstruction of the other style, but instead abandon the work of reconstruction for reinterpretation—for forgetting. The question fostered by this choice is as such: why depict this forgetting at all, if it inherently lacks any real degree of veracity? Best (and perhaps only) described as the “urge to reclaim [...] even at the risk of being mutated,” this depiction is in itself the labor of forgetting. (Rushdie 10). Even in only partially remembered spaces, delineated by the drastic morph of its visual style, Flee clings to diligence in its work by depicting forgetfulness: by accepting mutation as the only alternative to exclusion.
The other remarkable visual component of Flee’s labor of memory is its incorporation of real-life video footage. From a variety of sources, and mostly on small-gauge film, these clips serve to gild the broken-pot reconstruction of memory, and to ground the fluid and abstract reinterpretation of forgetting. They remind the audience of the documented, factual reality circumventing memory—a comparatively neutral space inherently unapproachable through the lens of an individual narrator. Clips show Kabul prior to a regime change [00:04:22], Moscow in a food crisis [00:25:56], refugees on boats and in a camp in Estonia [00:52:10; 00:53:12], the interior of an airport [01:07:15], and other locations. This heightens the multiplicity created by disparate animation styles, but also lends to Flee’s audience components of the real otherwise left out by animation. These clips “[let] us see landscapes, hear sounds, witness [...] body and face, or view physical conflict between individuals and groups,” as Rosenstone prescribes film’s unique representative forté. This grounding provides for the very believability of Nawabi’s narrative: the context of the events he details, the visual and auditory components of the locations they took place, and in the last shot of the film, the believability of memory itself.
The final image of Flee is its most striking, in terms of the film’s relationship to memory and truth. Though video clips are a presence of reality throughout the film, none of the clips are sourced, and none of them show Nawabi—or any mentioned individuals, for that matter—in any capacity. This naturally, gradually contributes to a suspicion in the viewer’s mind: how much of this is ‘real’? How much of it could possibly be trusted, if all of its story could be deferred to “fallible memory, compounded by quirks of character and of circumstance” (Rushdie 10)? All the labor in this film, the effort towards remembering and towards forgetting, could be meaningless—and all of its content could simply be false. The hammer of truth could dismantle all of the distinction created by this film’s visual and structural elements—and then, in its final moment, does something it does not venture towards at any other point: it blends animation and video, memory and reality together. Flee ends on a single match cut, between an animated frame of Nawabi’s garden and a real-life video clip of the same. This seamlessly marries reality and narrative at the last possible second—glossing over the work it has done towards remembrance, true, but also emphasizing that reality itself is subjective: that stories need only touchpoints to be considered “real.”.
Works Cited
Rosenstone, Robert A. “History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film.” The American Historical Review, vol. 93, no. 5, 1988, pp. 1173–85. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1873532. Accessed 3 Mar. 2023.
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991. 1st American ed. Granta Books ; In association with Viking, 1991.
Flee. Directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen. Neon, 2021.