Intentions Part 1 - GENTLE OBLIVION

Is it possible that the loss of memory can in some way be a kind of blessing?  Or to put it differently, does dementia have to be hell?


A person living without the support of recent memory is constantly on a knife edge of acute vulnerability, at risk of spiraling into confusion and disorientation at any moment as the world makes demands that the mind has no way of responding to.


But where there is an absence of memory there can also be an absence of practical worries about the mundane details of life, a liberation from painful memories and an inability to fear the future.  The result is an existential state floating on feelings in which everything is in flux, but which with help and the right environment can be guided to remain in some kind of balance.  


There is an interesting new theory for caring for those with dementia called Specal, designed by a 60 year old grandmother Penny Garner who has helped write a book called Contented Dementia. Her idea is a simple one, that people with dementia can often still reason, its just they don't have the facts available, yet meanwhile their emotions remain intense and very real, as do their sensations.  The idea of her care approach is to avoid correcting the factual inaccuracies of those with dementia, and instead focus on their positive emotions as a way of getting through the day.  "Their fuel is feelings,” she explains “It’s abundantly clear that feelings are more important than facts to the person with dementia.”


For Tarkovsky, the world of feelings is the only reality of any significance and with his films he attempted to conjure up something of this world.  He laid down the gauntlet that film is an art form that should aspire to penetrate and express this other world, and to watch his films is willfully to subject oneself to a deeply disorientating experience.  


From the following statement of intent I propose to embark on an experimental documentary project in which I will explore my sister's experience of living with Alzheimer's.  Her life has become like a never-ending Tarkovsky film, in which memories surface and fade, overlapping freely with the intensely perceived present.   I want to avoid the conventional conservative documentary position of the 'sane' outsider, and using the logic of the Specal approach, create a film which drifts in and with the fluid emotional landscape of my sister's world.