André Bonzel
2021
An epic, lyrical ode to videographers who raise the quotidian to the highest levels of art, André Bonzel’s Flickering Ghosts of Loves Gone By (2021) is a personal and historical exploration of the home movie in all its unvarnished glory. Upon inheriting an enormous collection of amateur films Bonzel incorporated the work of complete strangers into a narrated montage of his own family’s century-long moving-image scrapbook. Many of Bonzel’s ancestors were aspiring cineastes, including his great-great-grandfather Maurice Expedit—a patent mogul, friend of the Lumière brothers, camera inventor, and rampant womanizer. In tracing his own conflation of sex and cinema back to its source, Bonzel plumbs his—as well as hundreds of others’—attempts to both preserve and reshape reality on celluloid, while in the process uncovering buried secrets, forgotten legacies, and some of the deepest motivations for capturing fleeting, everyday moments through the magic of a camera.