Film techniques aim to demonstrate cognitive decline

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St. Boniface-born, Montreal-based filmmaker Ryan McKenna is concerned with the geography of memory.

His Winnipeg-set 2020 film Cranks delved into what critic Alison Gillmor described as a “hyper-local form of nostalgia,” laden with references to Kern Hill Furniture and local radio broadcasting icon Peter Warren’s Action Line.

His recent short film Four Mile Creek travelled back in time to investigate an enduring family ghost story.

If there is one thing McKenna doesn’t allow himself to do as a director, it is to forget where he comes from. His newest feature, Promenades Nocturnes — screening Saturday at the Dave Barber Cinematheque — follows a woman who isn’t so lucky.

Promenades Nocturnes (Late Night Walks), took form as McKenna returned home each year over a 15-year period, witnessing the gradual shift in his own grandmother’s awareness as she experienced Alzheimer’s disease, accompanied by a slow, yet somehow unpredictable loss of language and coherence.

“I wanted to take those observations and compress them into an hour of cinema. We’re questioning reality just as she is,” says McKenna, 41.

The film places the viewer directly in the experience of the fading but still vibrant Ethel (played by Quebec stage legend Marie Brassard). As her daughter Pam (Sarianne Cormier) tells her mother stories about her upbringing, Ethel hears them as if for the first time.

The scenes with dialogue are shot with documentary realism, and while the words spoken give McKenna’s film a clear and familiar underpinning of dementia-related art, his visual rendering of the terror of memory loss is inventive, immersive and transportative.

“I learned about this painter named William Utermohlen, who when he was diagnosed with dementia painted a series of self-portraits. As the illness progressed, the images became more and more abstract, and I figured it might be interesting to emulate that on a visual level,” McKenna says. (Promenades Nocturnes’ poster is an homage to Utermohlen.)

As Ethel’s condition worsens, she wanders off into the night, seeing the world through a terrifying prism: the edges of reality become foggy and the street light dances like a firework, the after-image shimmering across the screen. It’s not fair to call it dream-like or nightmarish because for Ethel this is everyday life.

To achieve that effect, McKenna put crystals in front of the camera lens, spinning them and twisting them until he found the desired refractions. During one scene, as Ethel “returns” to her childhood on the farm, an entire segment of the screen is missing.

“Ethel grew up on a farm in my mind, and her memories are superimposed as her coherence becomes fragmented on top of her reality,” McKenna says.

Originally written as a chapter in Cranks, McKenna saw that the story could stand on its own. He then interviewed his mother, Elaine, about her experience dealing with her mother’s memory loss, which opened up another avenue for storytelling.

Promenades Nocturnes — which won the award for outstanding film at last year’s Festival du Nouveau Cinema in Montreal — is dedicated to Elaine and her mother Stella.

McKenna’s feature comes in at 63 minutes, so Cinematheque will screen the filmmaker’s latest short, I Used To Live There, a 14-minute blend of documentary and fiction that also focuses on changing ability and sensory experience.

The funny, compelling short follows McKenna’s friend, the photographer Daniel Gerson, a Winnipegger who is losing his vision.

“Dan is really talking about his visual impairment and his own experience,” says McKenna.

Asked to take headshots for an acquaintance, played by Montreal actor Monika Schneider, Gerson dusts off his camera.

Like Promenades Nocturnes, I Used To Live There uses hands-on film effects to explore the deterioration of image: some of the film McKenna shot was processed in a lab, some went through a lomography machine to alter images, and some was “scrunched up like a bird’s nest inside a bucket.”

The short premiered at the Locarno Film Festival and is playing at the TIFF Top Ten showcase next week in Toronto.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com