The Reality Clock (2011)

The Reality Clock is an animated short by US film-maker Amanda Tasse, depicting the struggles of an elderly watchmaker (voice of J Louis Reid) to maintain a grip on his sense of space, time and personal identity during the onset of early stage Dementia.  While undertaking the Reality Comprehension Clock Test, an assessment in which patients are tasked with replicating a drawing of a clock face from memory, he misplaces his favourite pocket watch - an ostensibly trivial occurrence which causes him to become cast adrift in a crisis of temporal and spatial confusion.  In the midst of this, he is forced to grapple with his most pressing fear - namely, that the person he once was is slipping between his fingers and that the person he is now becoming is effectively a stranger to him.

Shot in stereoscopic 3D, The Reality Clock uses a hybrid of stop-motion animation, time-lapse photography and live action to create an affecting portrait of deterioration, both mental and physical, which poses the question as to what, if anything, remains of the being when so much of what once defined them in mind and body has been stripped and eroded by time.  This deterioration is shown from the perspective of the subject, and the film sets out to immerse the viewer in their peeling internal world.  The result makes for challenging but also tremendously powerful viewing.

As a watchmaker, the protagonist has a particularly pronounced relationship with time, and the separation from his pocket watch comes as a double-edged blow.  To him, the watch signifies everything that makes reality fixed and comprehensible - it embodies certainty and linearity, while its circular shape serves as an illustration of everything being connected in an unending cycle.  To have "lost the hours", as the protagonist puts it, is to have been severed from this comprehension, and the flurry of time-lapse photography depicting the day/night cycle and changing seasons in a distorted and fragmented succession reflects his tortured attempts relocate where he stands in this unraveling reality.  Even more cripplingly, a broken relationship with time marks a further detachment from his former self.  Time, his former ally, has tricked and betrayed him by facilitating his decline, signified by a sequence in which the watch is seen to be buried in the grasses of a metaphorical garden, and he now finds himself abandoned and forced to continue his way alone.

Overwhelmingly, the film captures the protagonist's sense of disconnect, not so much from time itself, but from who he is in relation to the passage of time.  At the heart of the short is the tension between the man he recalls he used to be and the man who now remains, whom the protagonist regards with an equal sense of suspicion and disconnect.  This is reflected, hauntingly, in the contrasting selection of medium used to represent the man at different stages of his life.  Initially, the stop-motion animation gives off an endearingly hand-crafted charm, but it becomes more troubling as we delve deeper into the film and see the confrontation play out between these discordant figures.  The younger man who haunts the protagonist's visions is a human being of flesh and blood (Marco Tazioli), while the man in the present is a puppet, indicative of his fears that he is less "real", a husk of his former self and, most frighteningly of all, no longer the driving force behind his own actions.  The protagonist finds himself stranded in a no man's land between two states of being - his former self little more than a spectral memory which gazes back at him with horror and despair, and he feels only loss and uncertainty when contemplating the man he is becoming.  It is in this state of estrangement from everything that he feels has defined him that he ultimately attains clarity, realising that as long as his life continues to endure, then he still has some firm footing on which to stand and locate himself as a person.  At the end of the film the man is reunited with his watch, although it is through his interactions with another circular object that has featured prominently throughout, a gramophone record, that he is finally able to reaffirm his sense of self.  We see him wind the gramophone in the manner of his younger counterpart, thus restarting the cycle and restoring his confidence that he remains connected to the ongoing circles and processes of life.

Tasse, who drew inspiration for The Reality Clock from her own interactions with dementia patients while volunteering at a hospice and from witnessing her father's decline from ill-health, has indicated that the purpose of the film is to give weight to the emotional potency lurking beneath the pains and challenges of deterioration - in the words of Student Academy Awards, "to value all stages of the human experience on a very basic level."  It is a deeply harrowing film, but ultimately rewarding in the poetic beauty it finds in the protagonist's endurance and his willingness to live and survive in the present moment, even when staring into inevitable decline.

Availability: You can watch the short on Vimeo.  Unfortunately, the privacy settings prevent me from embedding the video here.

Official website: http://therealityclock.com/