| Jill Robinson was working
on a new novel when a daily swim took an unexpected
turn, placing her writing career on a 10-year hiatus.
Jill had an epileptic seizure mid-stroke, and when she
awoke in the hospital she could identify neither herself
nor her husband of many years. A few childhood memories
floated freely in her mind, but for the most part her
past was a blank. Retrograde amnesia erased large chunks
of Jill’s past but left the possibility of reclaiming
part or all of her memory, with hard work.
Forget Me Nots uses interviews and
verité footage to retrace Jill’s process:
she talks about studying unrecognizable family photographs
and personal letters, spending time with close friends
who seemed like strangers, and reading the books she
had written, as if for the first time. We attend her
writing group and participate in the meals she cooks
as a way of identifying and reliving her past…
Jill spent ten years of her life on the trail of Proustian
moments that might bring back a flood of memories, or
even a simple flash of remembrance. Jill eventually
emerged with a memory largely reconstructed, but blank
spots are still there and she lives with the nagging
feeling that certain memories are not quite reliable,
and that others may have evaporated entirely. Abstract
imagery and recreations - shot in a soft, hazy style
to represent the often imperfect lens of memory - illustrate
Jill’s Proustian pursuit as she plumbed the depths
of memory experience.
A writer whose observational faculties were honed during
her ten-year search for self, Jill is now able to articulate
with tremendous clarity what the experience of amnesia
was like. “I’d wake up in the morning and
have no idea of what I was waking up to see,”
she says, “I’d go out on the street and
turn around and have no idea how I was going to get
home again.” In a hilarious moment, Jill, whose
father Dore Schary was the head of MGM Studios in the
1950s, recalls seeing Robert Redford at a party and
recognizing him as neither the close family friend that
he was, nor as an internationally known celebrity. In
Jill’s case, absence ultimately led to a greater
sense of presence.
Donald Davis’ life has been in many ways unrelentingly
defined by memory. Growing up in the southern Appalachian
Mountains on land that has been in his family since
1781, Donald remembers a world before television when
the family’s entertainment was the spoken word,
with Uncle Frank, a man “who talked in stories,”
as master storyteller. Uncle Frank taught Donald that
“storytellers are the ambassadors of memory,”
whose role is to fill listeners in on events or people
from the past who can still lend meaning to the present.
“Storytelling tells you where you are on this
earth right now,” Donald says, “Here’s
the tradition you come from, here’s how you got
to be who you are. What’s valuable about it is
that you can then take that information and go on from
there.”
The filmmakers visit Donald on Ocracoke Island, where
he now lives with about 500 other year-rounders who
pass the slow winters in informal storytelling sessions
gathered in living rooms and around kitchen tables.
It is an extraordinary group exercise in remembering.
Donald’s memory is finely honed, as he effortlessly
calls on a huge repertoire of intricate memories of
his own and Appalachia’s histories. The filmmaker
also follows Donald to storytelling festivals and workshops
around the country, where he is a star in the storytelling-as-performance
trend that has grown over the past ten years. At workshops,
Donald leads memory and storytelling exercises with
people of all ages and backgrounds, showing them how
to be make art of their own pasts through storytelling.
Donald’s words awaken memories in his listeners
– a childhood swing set, a first bicycle, a sense
of home…
“I loved swinging. But most of all I loved
pushing my brother. I could really get him going and
when he’d go waaay out, the legs on the back
of the swing would kind of come off the ground a little
bit. And then he’d come way back this way and
the legs on the front would kind of come off the ground
a little bit. And I’d really get him going back
and forth and back and forth and the swing would kind
of start walking back and forth and because our front
yard went down hill- the swing would come right down
through the yard. My daddy’d get home and say
how’d the swing set get down here? He’d
pull it back up and we’d start again.”
The filmmaker will work with Donald to visually explore
the images he creates with words. Images that represent
the range of possible visualizations prompted by his
stories (a swing set in the front yard, a first bike,
laundry snapping in the wind) will come alive using
a scratched, soft focus style and a Super 8 camera.
Donald has what Jill is seeking… a deep connection
to his past that informs who he is. By contrasting and
interweaving Donald’s life as a storyteller with
Jill’s struggle to remember, Forget Me
Nots is seeking to highlight the importance
of the stories and memories that are in each of us and
strengthen our connection to our own memories and the
stories of our lives. The stylized sequences in 16mm
and Super 8 creatively visualize and evoke the color
and shape of memory, tied to key moments in Jill’s
and Donald’s stories. This enables the filmmaker
to illustrate the contrasts between memory and “real
life”, and also to use the expandable medium of
film to express both the vivid, “hyper-real”
qualities of memory, and, at the same time, its ephemerality.
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