On a River of Memory

The Bessarabian Germans mourned the loss of their homeland and possessions. The Jews danced and rejoiced; they lost everything but their lives had been saved. Still, the uncanny parallelism is a matter of record. These Jews and Germans were both transported to safety and documented on film by the same river captain, who ferried them into historical memory.

That brief paragraph, printed in an exhibition brochure, sums up the story line that wends its way through “The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River,” an interactive documentary by Hungarian filmmaker Peter Forgacs that opens Saturday at the Getty Research Institute. Based on Forgacs’ 1997 film, “The Danube Exodus”--which grew out of 1939-40 footage shot by ship captain and amateur photographer Nandor Andrasovits--the new work surrounds the audience with sights and sounds of two groups of people fleeing World War II in opposite directions on the Danube River.

Navigating a small touch screen and scanning moving images that wrap around three walls, viewers can follow the refugees’ journeys and the river itself--or venture into various tributaries. There are no battle scenes or Holocaust images, but those horrors provide an invisible background for the human warmth and natural beauty that flicker across the screens.

“It’s an infinite pool of memory in the shadow of the war,” Forgacs says of his new work, which was realized in collaboration with the Getty and the Labyrinth Project at USC’s Annenberg Center for Communication. Unlike the 60-minute film he made five years ago, which tells “a linear story,” he says, the interactive piece--which takes about four hours to view in its entirety--is like a grid. “Everything is instantly there for your choice, so you can make a journey within a journey. You travel on a river of memory.”

Poetically convoluted as that may sound, it’s typical of Forgacs’ sensibility. A collector of home movies and found footage who calls himself a “forensic coroner” rather than a documentary filmmaker, he delights in building layers of meaning that reflect intertwining and sometimes conflicting accounts of history.

But he’s quick to say that this new work is not a one-man show--and that the tale of its conception and evolution is not a short story.

The saga begins in Budapest with a tip from a friend about the Hungarian ship captain’s footage of two voyages on the Danube. One film, shot in 1939, tells of Eastern European Jews headed for the Black Sea and a second ship that would transport them to a new home in Palestine. The other, taken the following year, after the Soviet re-annexation of Bessarabia, recounts the flight of German emigres who left their adopted homeland and returned to Germany.

Forgacs acquired the footage from Capt. Andrasovits’ widow and combined it with outtakes from the film of the Jewish voyage, donated by historian-archivist Janos Varga, who had inherited the material from a friend of the captain. After the film was aired on European television, some of the refugees and their relatives contacted the filmmaker and gave him additional information, in taped interviews and diaries.

Listening to divergent accounts of the two journeys, Forgacs was confronted with “the problem of memory,” he says. But he was also inspired to make use of the new material. In 2000, when he came to Los Angeles as a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute, he hoped to make a CD-ROM that would expand the film.

As he settled into Los Angeles and began to make contacts, Marsha Kinder, who directs the Labyrinth Project and is chairwoman of the division of critical studies at USC’s School of Cinema-Television, got wind of his aspirations.

Kinder says she was impressed by Forgacs’ ability to bring new meanings to found footage. She was also struck by the emotional impact of his work and the “mesmerizing music” of his longtime collaborator, composer Tibor Szemzo.

As for Forgacs, finding Labyrinth in Los Angeles was “like walking on a seashore and suddenly finding a golden ring,” he says. “It was a miracle.”

The Labyrinth Project was born in 1997 with “an offer I couldn’t refuse,” Kinder says. Elizabeth Daley, executive director of the Annenberg Center, asked her to “develop a research initiative that would somehow create a productive dialogue between cinema and new media.” She saw an exciting opportunity “to create a space where we could produce experimental interactive narratives that were not market-driven,” she says. “I firmly believe in working at the pressure point between theory and practice. People talk about that in the abstract; I thought it would be exciting to really do it.”

One of Labyrinth’s first ventures, staged in 1999, was “Interactive Frictions,” a conference and exhibition at USC’s Fisher Gallery. The program focused on hybrid forms of new and traditional media, with an emphasis on experimental approaches. But it also made the point that Labyrinth “was not going to be exaggerating the claims for the newness of new media,” Kinder says. “One of the key interactive frictions was between prior, non-digital media and the new. I thought that was a way of expanding the possibilities of interactive narratives. Most of the games I had seen at that point seemed pretty boring for people who are really engaged in narrative experimentation and the whole history of cinema.”

At the same time, Kinder was looking for established artists who might be enticed to produce new work at the laboratory. Her first three choices were novelist John Rechy and filmmakers Nina Menkes and Pat O’Neill.

“All of them are wonderful artists, and yet none of them was working with new media,” Kinder says. “We provided access to this new world with equipment, a budget, our core team of multimedia artists and a group of talented students. It was a very good learning experience for all of us. We collaborated on interface design and had workshops with scholars and artists. Then we set about making their projects.”

Rechy’s CD-ROM, “Mysteries and Desire: Searching the Worlds of John Rechy,” sets a network of personal memories and family documents against collective histories of Chicano culture and the gay world. Building on his literary autobiography-in-process, the writer has assembled images in three interrelated realms: Memories, Bodies and Cruising. Menkes’ CD-ROM, “The Crazy Bloody Female Center,” draws on five feature films she made with her sister Tinka Menkes, including “Magdalena Viraga,” “Queen of Diamonds” and “The Bloody Child.” O’Neill’s DVD-ROM, “Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters With a Film by Pat O’Neill,” explores the colorful, star-studded history of the Ambassador Hotel.

The Labyrinth Project was founded as a three-year initiative, but it continues to receive funding from the Annenberg Center. In addition to Kinder, there are three full-time staff members: Rosemary Comella, interface designer and software developer; JoAnn Hanley, program coordinator; and Kristy H.A. Kang, graphics designer and art director.

A $100,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation has provided funding for Forgacs’ project, and soon-to-be-released works by filmmaker Carroll Parrott Blue and cultural theorist Norman Klein. In addition, a Labyrinth-produced Web site, Dream Waves, is in the works. Conceived as an exhibition space for dream-based art and a place to explore dreams as a model for interactive narrative, it will make its debut this fall at L.A. Freewaves’ eighth festival of experimental media arts.

Forgacs’ project, which began as an idea for a CD-ROM but evolved into what Kinder calls “an immersive installation,” was a big challenge for the Labyrinth team. “But we are only interested in taking pieces that expand our reach,” she says. “We had never done a museum installation of this scale, with five screens and surround sound. That was very exciting. At the same time, this gave Peter a chance to re-edit his material on a scale that he had never experienced before. He became totally obsessed with it.”

Readily confessing his obsession, Forgacs says he immersed himself in the process of creating “parallel narratives.”

As the exhibition shaped up, it called for the development of three story lines in adjacent spaces. In a small room on one side of the central screening room, visitors encounter the story of the Jewish exodus in silent footage, interviews and other background materials; on the opposite side of the screening room, a similar display is devoted to the Bessarabian Germans. In the central space, stories of the two groups, the captain and the river itself merge in a panoramic flow of imagery. Here, Forgacs’ task was to create five interrelated streams of pictures, composed of three- to five-minute segments.

Visitors who enter the screening room when no one is directing the action see a pre-programmed sampling of moving pictures. Those who step up to the touch screen can choose from a menu that includes specific segments of the voyages, life along the river and an appreciative view of women who fled to safety on the Danube. As Forgacs says, “The captain had an eye for women.”

To accommodate the show--organized by Kinder and Zaia Alexander of the Getty--a lecture hall next to the research institute’s small galleries has been temporarily converted into a screening room. A display in the galleries provides an introduction and historical context. There are photographs, a timeline and filmmaking equipment. An early 18th century encyclopedia of the Danube region, compiled by an Italian nobleman, Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, provides historic maps and drawings of flora and fauna.

Working feverishly with technicians to finish the installation, Forgacs calls his work “music of images,” rather like thematic variations in a musical score. Viewers create their own compositions by selecting particular parts of the story and putting them in the order they prefer. They also add personal meanings to the piece by viewing it in terms of their own memories and experiences, he says.

For Kinder, the project is one more indication that Labyrinth has grown beyond her original vision. “When we started, we thought we were making electronic fictions,” she says. “But along the way we discovered that we are making interactive documentaries.” Some of them are personal memoirs; others, like “The Danube Exodus,” are “archeological explorations of a particular place through layers of time,” she says. But just as Forgacs’ work deals with far more than a river, each genre inevitably incorporates aspects of the other.

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“The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River,” Getty Research Institute, 1200 Getty Center Drive, L.A. Opens Saturday. Tuesdays-Thursdays and Sundays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Fridays-Saturdays, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Closes Sept. 29. Free, but parking reservations, at $5 per car, are required on weekdays before 4 p.m. (310) 440-7300.

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Suzanne Muchnic is a Times staff writer.