13.03.25, 19:30, Rebecca Jane Arthur

We invite you to join the public lecture by Rebecca Jane Arthur on Thursday 13th of March 2025 at the Netherlands Film Academy.

Anyway autobiography is easy like it or not autobiography is easy for
any one and so it is to be everybody’s autobiography.

• Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography.

Opening the pages of a personal memoir project, Rebecca Jane Arthur will present her film Hit Him on the Head with a Hard, Heavy Hammer and her cinematic exploration of how autobiographical writing can transform into ‘everybody’s autobiography’—an account of a life that speaks to others and is spoken by others. From the space of the personal, the film loops outward, travels to sites of memory, meets and engages with strangers along the way, and returns to the notion of the personal becoming public.

Hit Him on the Head with a Hard, Heavy Hammer (2023)

Hit Him on the Head with a Hard, Heavy Hammer departs from the handwritten memoir of the filmmaker’s father and his experience of displacement during wartime. Referring to the notion Thomas Hardy termed ‘The Self-Unseeing’ in his eponymous 1901 poem, the film returns to childhood and the matters that harden us: upbringing, social status, education, labour, and familial bonds. The memoir weaves into the film as both a contemplation on mortality and an illustration of fading memory, reflecting on how we pen our pasts and how they can be re-told.