Living Memory - Anne Rees-Mogg, 1980

Living Memory is a physical journey (by light aircraft, car and foot), circling the landscape of the Rees-Mogg family home at Temple Cloud in Somerset. It is built, in the filmmaker’s own words, around ‘a ragbag of quotations’, another threading of beads on a string, borrowing words from T. S. Eliot’s poem Ash Wednesday, Collinson’s History of Somerset, A. J Ayer Goethe, Pevsner and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. According to Anne Rees-Mogg, the title is a cliché revisited: it refers to the layers of her own and other people’s memory of the place where she grew up. Living Memory closes a trilogy with Real Time and Sentimental Journey in which the filmmaker explores the landscape where she spent her early life, and to some extent the people who helped her to inhabit it.