Extract from my memoir Portrait of Noni.
from Ginger Liu
11:17
I produced two short films for my Master of Fine Arts in 2017 about living with dementia while I was caring for my mother Noni. The first short Give Me the Keyportrays an earlier and significant account of my mother’s dementia and I Have Lost Myself is an experimental film about blurred identities. Noni was in the advanced stages of the disease by this time and her illness was a little easier to handle because of her limited mobility and loss of any real conversation.
I wanted to move away from photography and try something new. I don’t remember the aha moment of making a film about a particular stressful time in my mother’s disease, I think it just rose out my subconscious because the repeated phrase was distressing to experience first hand and heartbreaking in hindsight. I wanted to show how hard it was to live with someone you love who had gone completely nuts seemingly over night and how that person could never be reasoned with until the dementia episode surpassed and the real Noni returned. In some ways it was a little like living with someone with dissociative identity disorder. Stress, anxiety and fear triggered her dementia episodes and they could go on for hours until I desperately succeeded in occupying her some other way. The more memory she lost, the easier it became to distract her and calm her. I can’t begin to imagine how frightening it must have been for her at the beginning. To think you are going mad must be the scariest thing in the world.
Give Me the Key was important on another level. It represented the loss of independence and identity of Noni. We were in her apartment living among her belongings. This was her home and I was denying her the key to her home. Why? Because that damn cat of hers Charlie would go outside to do its business and mum would be anxious all day that Charlie had been run over. Mum would accuse me of killing the cat whenever she couldn’t find her. Sometimes I wanted to kill the cat myself after ten straight hours of mum repeatedly demanding the key to the front door so she could go out looking for it. Mum would shout “Give me the key” and thrust out her right hand, demanding it over and over until I would lose my temper and she would walk again down the stairs, turn the front door handle and return upstairs to me in the kitchen and start all over again with her demands. I have no doubt that I would act the same if I couldn’t go outside and do what I wanted.
Her mobility was ok in 2012. I was usually sitting working in the kitchen but there was no escape even in my bedroom because she would walk in and demand the key. It tested my temper after the fifth or sixth time and I would shout at her because she was shouting at me and it would make the situation worse. I’d calm her down and then after five minutes it would start all over again like Groundhog Day. Sometimes the cat would be asleep on mum’s bed but she couldn’t see it and she would get so upset and anxious that I would have to grab Charlie and show her that I hadn’t killed her and that she was safely indoors. Charlie was never let out again.
Mum would show no emotional connection with me when she was rattled and confused. There was no recognition of me in her eyes and it was hard for me to look at her because her eyes were cold like all the love had been drained. And then just like a flick of a light, the sparkle in her eyes would return and she would recognize me again. Her eyes would fill up with love and a sad bewilderment and in these moments she would apologize and say, “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m like this.” I was often reduced to tears at this point because in those days I didn’t understand the disease and I couldn’t come to terms with the inevitable change that was happening to her. I never even discussed it with mum because I was too afraid to tell her she had dementia. How frightening would that bit of news be to anyone? Of course I would do things differently with hindsight but when you’re living with it and it’s happening to the person you love most in the world, no one can think straight.
Four years later, this repeated phrase stuck with me as a symbol of her disease and the turning point of my mother’s loss of herself. Give Me the Key is a roller coaster of emotions performed direct to camera and is loosely based on Renee Falconetti’s performance in Carl Dreyer’s 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc and influenced by the cinematography in Laszlo Nemes Son of Saul. I am a portrait photographer and I used those skills to produce a moving image portrait of dementia. I created soft lighting with a black background and photographed with a portrait lens on a full frame camera fixed to a tripod. It took a few tries to position myself in focus and to prepare my emotions. Performing emotions is as exhausting as living them. I like to give my work breathing space before I make decisions on structure and after a month I sat down to edit and produced a film with multiple audio overlap.
In September 2017 my mother was given a few months to live. During these last months we spent every moment together in her living room. Faced with the inevitably of her being gone for ever I made the decision to pick up my camera and record every moment. Well, almost. I made another decision that if I was going to record my mother’s last months it wouldn’t be the cruelty of the disease. Instead I chose to record those flickering moments of the real Noni. For she was still in there and I recorded hundreds of videos and thousands of digital and analog photographs in order to capture The Portrait of Noni.
Portrait of Noni is a film in development compiled from this footage and is produced by Ginger Media & Entertainment.
from Ginger Liu
01:09
Trailer One.
Ginger Liu. M.F.A.
