All the World’s Memories brings together a collection of celebrated documentaries, film-essays and artist videos that present cinema as a repository of past knowledge. The program features works that reflect on humanity’s engagement with the natural world and built environment; portraits of public and private personalities made from home recordings; visual essays and compilations that mine material appropriated from news agencies, advertising and popular cinema; and pioneering collage films that juxtapose found footage from disparate sources. Connecting the various works is a desire to understand the world through poetic forms of montage.

The program takes its inspiration from Alain Resnais’s short film Toute la mémoire du monde 1957 that explores the limits of human memory through the rigorous cataloguing and organising of collections at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The program is presented in four overlapping thematic sections: ‘Travelogues’, ‘Home movies’, ‘Hijacked media’ and ‘Ready-made cinema’. Each grouping sees artists and filmmakers move deftly through visual and political histories, cultures and environments, and map a deeply personal view of the human condition.

Image credit: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Edley ODowd by Drew Weidemann