Lost in History
Mike Mills’ film assembles an array of outsider characters – loosely associated with a range of epochs and social movements – and places them in the bygone milieu of late 1970s California. Exploring what the film has to say about history and the individual’s place within it, ELLA DONALD considers the stories we tell and the human desire to assign meaning.
The creation of recorded history often prompts an unspoken question: where were you? That is, what was your location – both physical and otherwise – at the time of an event, and how does it relate to what happened? Were you a part of this moment that forever changed the world, a part of history being made, or not?
What qualifies as history is subjective, with events held up to the scrutiny of mass memories and dominant culture to ultimately be deemed a part of it or not, and with deviating strands smoothed into a narrative that is easy to tell again and again. And what we wish to do here, of course, is place ourselves in the dominant narrative, or make those narratives ourselves. History is remembered in stories, photographs, objects and, more recently, films. But even in this kaleidoscope of memories, there is a generalisation, a removal of the finer details. This is a hegemonic process in which many things scratch the surface, but don’t tell
