Showing Rushes

While in Newcastle I spent a few hours at Yipp HQ showing Patrick Collerton the footage from my recent stay with my sister.  Its one thing to write this blog and waffle on about theories and intentions, and another thing to show the footage itself, and to look at it with a critical eye. 

Patrick was very quick to see what I had done and more importantly what was missing.  I had only filmed when alone with J, and as a result of the way I try to be very calm with her, everything I had filmed of J was somehow similar.  By not filming her interactions with anyone other than my polite self, I hadn't given her a chance to fully be herself on screen.  As a result I ran the risk of objectifying her in her 'illness', precisely the thing I had set out to avoid. 

  

When filming someone and somewhere you know so well it's often hard to gauge if it would interest an outside viewer as it does yourself, which is ultimately an important consideration. It's difficult to get that distance. But Patrick seemed to find J very intriguing and agreed that where she lives is remarkably beautiful, and his general encouragement was reassuring.

Institute of Ageing and Health: A Newcastle Suprise

I travelled to Newcastle yesterday to meet Professor Kirkwood, who runs the Institute of Ageing and Health at Newcastle University.  He explained that it has become the biggest research centre for age related issues in Europe:  Below the meeting room where we sat were over 1000 deep-frozen brains in the Brain Bank, and in the various buildings around the Campus for Ageing and Vitality, a huge range of interdisciplinary research was being carried out, some of unprecedented scale, such as the 85+ Project, for which 75% of the population of Newcastle aged 85 in 2007 is being assessed in incredible detail in an attempt to gain data about a poorly understood, but rapidly growing part of the population.  Prof. Kirkwood explained that the average life expectancy for people in the UK is increasing by 5 hours every day, and that globally it is increasing even faster.  In his opinion, the Aging of the world's population poses a problem of equal, if not greater magnitude to that of Global Warming.  

He expressed a great interest in my project and hopefully will be able to help open some doors for my research as well as joining forces with Northern Lights to create a special event for the festival in March.

What is the good life?

Usually when I am with my sister I encourage her to do things with me that she might not do if she's on her own (as she wouldn't know where to start) like gardening, cooking, and going to the market. On this recent visit I still did quite a lot of that, but I also made an effort at times to be less proactive, to see what she might do as if she were alone. I had originally imagined that being around with my camera would disrupt things, but it turned out that if she thought I was busy doing something else she would very quickly get on with her usual life, and didnt seem to mind if I filmed her.
She spent her time doing one of the following: looking after certain plants in the garden, picking leaves for the rabbits, working on her patchwork while half watching M3 TV channel, making expresso coffee and enjoying it while smoking and looking at the view, looking at the sheep through binoculars, feeding Max the cat, letting Max in and out of the house, glancing through the Herald Tribune (delivered daily by the postman) and cutting out the Calvin and Hobbs one.
I write this list in an attempt to get to the fact that despite her lack of memory she is able to pass the majority of a day doing a variety of things that she has always enjoyed in her life. The fact that she does the same things every day doesn't seem to matter to her because she doesn't feel that kind of boredom. 
At the same time I think the visits she recieves from the three ladies which our family has arranged, are incredibly important. They take her out shopping in the market and for meals in cafes, or just visit for tea.  She doesn't seem to remember these trips or visits at all, but I am sure that her body and spirit remembers the stimulation she gets and as a result she feels like she's living a fuller life.
I think because she has this combination of routine and variety means she genuinely feels she's living a good life even though she knows things are not all right in her head and she is not independent. Despite know that, her stable set-up means she feels calm enough to be able to really enjoy the simple things that make up her day without worrying that something is wrong.

Methodology

Sounds as if there's a lot of undercurrents running beneath the day to day life. I was just wondering if you've tried having or filming a conversation where try to follow the stream of your sister's memories. If you have, how has that has turned out?

Notes From France

I am in France with my sister for a week, working out how I might make some part of this film talk of her life.  It is just the two of us in her beautiful house on the side of mountain in Provence.

She is in very good spirits and physically very well.  Her short term memory is very bad but some things do still stick for a few hours and very important things remain for over a week. 

Longer term memories come and go, usually they are quite blurry and mix into each other.  Her childhood memories of being on a farm while evacuated from London during the war are the strongest and clearest.

She is living a very simple life with a routine in which she is very comfortable. 

She sleeps very well, late until the sun has risen over the mountains at the end of the valley. 

Breakfast takes a while. Toast and tea. Today we ate some Quince jam that we made together yesterday.

Then she might wander around in the garden collecting leaves to feed the neighbour's rabbits, knife in hand to pick flowers, and later take the rubbish down to the bin on the street at the corner of her garden.

Then after lunch she might spend several hours sewing the latest of her incredible patchwork quilts.  This one she says will be huge.

Max, her white cat takes up much of her time demanding to be let in and out of doors (he prefers doors to windows) and asking for food.

During the day at some point if I wasnt here, one of the 3 ladies we have organised to visit her will come and either sit for a tea or take her for a drive or a walk, or to the market and a bar in town for lunch.

Now one of them is going to move into a little self-contained flat at one end of the house for the winter at least, after splitting with her husband and selling their house.  So J will no longer be living alone which is great news. 

So I come into this peaceful and ordered world with my camera and my ideas and it feels slightly ridiculous to bring it into the situation and point it in her direction, even though she doesn't object to what I am doing.

Meanwhile, I make as tasty meals as I can to give her a change from the slightly bland meals-on-wheels food they bring her. We go for walks and drives and have picnics on the side of mountains with chicken sandwiches. We sit and look at the view and listen to the wind and birds for ages at a time.

When we are together I try to be as calm and slow as possible. She is like a mirror; highly sensitive to my mood and behaviour.

We can talk about anything together, and she is often very funny and insightful as long as we stick to things in the immediate present. In general I don't try to talk about very complicated matters.

Its hard to know how this film might start or stop. Where it will begin, what a single scene will feel like. I suppose its because I am used to being able to build an image of a film as I think about in advance it but with this I dont know how it will be. Im probably used to being too controlling with my ideas and am keen to keep this one open ended. So on this trip I am pushing myself to take samples of different moments of the day without attempting to answer any big questions.

Creating Worlds

Very exciting methodology Martin and it'll be fascinating to see how you create what's at heart a documentary that has it's own parameters and own specific world. People are used to going into altered states in other genres, especially film and animation, but documentary, due in part to its focus on real experiences, and in part due to the innate conservatism of the genre, tends to shy away from such an approach. Much to its loss, in my opinion.

SPECAL CARE / SPECAL SENSE

Reading 'Contented Dementia' by Oliver James, I was very impressed by his description of the SPECAL approach to the care of people suffering from dementia, developed by his mother in law.  The main idea is not to ask questions of and never to contradict someone with dementia. The point is that their emotional reality is as real and intense as any normal healthy person, its just that it is continually undermined by a lack of information about their present situation, therefore they need help to live the present through what they do still retain from the past.

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Penny learned that you cannot succeed with someone with dementia unless you protect them from all the disastrous experiential roads down which they can so easily travel.

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"Pennys great insight was that building upon a real memory is completely different from the encouragement of a delusion... Penny's unique clinical innovation was to spot the benign potential of systematically supporting the re-experience of long term memories."

The result of these perceptions is a very thorough care approach which makes a lot of sense while requiring a complete switch in how one relates to another person.  Might it be possible for a film to demand the same switch in the mind of the viewer?