The work Attraction combines a montage of found 8 mm footage from the Attraction category of the archive with three carousel slide-projectors, each of which projects a text in a different language. The projected texts refer to the use of intertitles in the silent film era, an early narration method that also appears in home movies. I see each of the three languages as representing a different facet of my somewhat schizophrenic role as an artist/archivist/researcher. The Dutch text is the most personal (Dutch being my mother tongue), the French text represents the haut culture of the contemplative language of philosophy, and the English text stands for the language of internationality and objective science. Each of the three languages addresses, in its own way, the notion of institutionalization. The Dutch version narrates my recall of my first find of 8 mm films, an anecdote which I have recounted and reconstructed so often that it now leads a life of its own. The French text recites passages from les Lieux de Mémoire by the French historian Pierre Nora, in which he writes of the difference between history (as mediated reconstruction) and memory (the unmediated experience). The English text presents fragments from Tom Gunning’s article The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde (1986). Gunning argues that the appeal of early cinema lay mainly in the fascination of the new medium: the apparatus itself played as much a part as the projected content. As the medium of film matured, its technical appeal became increasingly subordinate to the narrative and dramatic aspects. The home movie never seems to have gone beyond that initial phase, either in its form or content. People film only things or events which they found important or special. They are not intent on telling a story but on displaying something which they consider worth memorializing.