Le Regard du Roi

[languages: French, with English subtitles]

Part of the Official Selection of CROYDON INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL croydoniff.com

This short film explores the narratives around Alzheimer's disease and ageing, crystallised around a granddaughter-grandfather relationship

In the short piece Le Regard du Roi, I wanted to portray my grandfather in a dignifying and loving way, while taking into account and embracing his perception of reality. His memories of the last 10 to 15 years have faded and his everyday life has no continuity. I decided to break my sequences with black screens in order to put the spectator in his position, where no moment of the recent past is linked to the present or the immediate. The continuity of the soundscape reminds us that life has not stopped, and that there are other ways to feel the interconnection between past and present. 

The majoritarian view on ageing tends to focus on the loss and the lack. It was for me important to depict ageing by showing the change, but not the loss. There are two patterns in the film that reflect on this change of perception, for him, my grand- father, as well as for us, his family: love and humour. These are defence mechanisms, in front of the illness and the forgetfulness that both parts raised in this specific situation, facing the changes brought by the illness. Ten years ago, it would have been impossible and absolutely disrespectful to make a joke about the number of missing teeth of my grandfather. Even more impossible would have been him to laugh at this very same joke.

As Fernyhough stated: “We are all natural storytellers: we engage in acts of fiction-making every time we recount an event from our pasts. We are constantly editing and remaking our memory stories as our knowledge and emotions change” (2012). With this film, I didn’t want to make a statement about my grandfather memories, but rather to create new narratives between him and me and my family. In the editing process I screened different version of the film to my family, and we chose together which version was depicting him the way we wanted him to be portrayed: in a warm, humorous and dignified way. Warmth and humour are the qualities he gained along with the illness. Dignity is the quality that remains my most powerful memory of him before the illness, and is in the film even crystallised around the cardboard crown and the title of the film. By creating an artefact that produces new forms of collective memory on the forgetful family member, I tried to create a memory that “fits in with the demands of the present as much as it tries to remain faithful to the facts of what happened” (Fernyhough, 2012). By doing this, I am reflecting on the idea of personhood. The question is not What remains from the Self? But rather What is the Self? And I am asking; do we really need to confine ourselves to a succession of events, to a continuity in our personalities, our memories?

On a wider scale I hope that my film contributes to the illustration of old age in a more honest, genuine and heartfelt way, where illness and ageing are not seen as a loss of personhood, but rather as a realm where love, memory, narrations, relationships and personalities merge their boundaries. 

References:
Fernyhough, Charles (2012) Pieces of Light: The new science of memory, London: Profile Books