Reading the Memories in Glenn D’cruz’s Film Vanitas (2022)
Abstract
Vanitas, a documentary film by Glenn D’Cruz, a Melbourne based Anglo-Indian, is a tribute to his late father Antonie Joseph ‘Anto’ D’Cruz. It falls into the corpus of Anglo-Indian works dealing with colonial nostalgia and postcolonial identity. One of the striking features of this film is its thematic focus on presenting a father-son narrative, wherein Glenn narrates his father Anto D’Cruz hardships and disillusionments as an Anglo-Indian immigrant in London in the 1960s and thereafter in Australia where he died in 1983. This film is an experimental cultural text that uses animation technology, old photographs and select objects of the dead father to present a memory narrative. This article examines their significance through a close reading of the film.
Keywords: colonial nostalgia, transgenerational memory, collective memory, hauntology, memorabilia, mourning
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