Antosh Wójcik, the writer and composer of Xenia Glen’s The Memory Boom, says “Pops, it’s me, your grandson”, in a voiceover at its beginning that will continue, sporadically, throughout. Antosh is addressing his grandfather Paul Foster in a hospice, trying to jog the memories of a man who has suffered multiple brain-damaging mini-strokes, so that for him time and the past have become tied in dissociative ‘knots’, with occasional ‘booms’ of clarity. This is, like Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland’s Still Alice (2014), Florian Zeller’s The Father (2020), Natalie Erika James’ Relic (2020) and Gonzalo Calzada’s Nocturna: Side A – The Great Old Man’s Night (2021), a film about an individual receding into the oblivion of cognitive impairment, as later generations in the family struggle to keep their grip on the ghost left behind.

Yet if we hear Antosh’s attempts to break through to Paul with talk and electronic compositions of the grandson’s own making, if we hear recorded anecodotes and invented stories told (presumably earlier) by Paul who was clearly once a talented raconteur with a poetic bent, and if we even hear Antosh chatting with a Filipina nurse (Venus Perez-Lonoy) whose own father succumbed to Alzheimer’s, all that we see is footage from old home movies shot by Paul or his own father decades earlier. These improvised high jinks, holidays abroad, family gatherings and trips to the seaside represent a flood of flashbacks to Paul’s muddled experiences as he himself once captured them on film. They are a window into a world long since gone, and preserved only in film reel, and perhaps also somewhere in Paul’s atomised associations and severed synapses.

The medium of cinema is often regarded as a repository for memory, where images of the past are ordered together and idealised to suggest a narrative continuity. Yet the effect of Glen and Wójcik’s experimental film essay is in many ways the opposite. For here Paul’s original footage, though already old and archival, has been distressed, tinted, chopped up, sometimes shown in negative, in reverse, or at the wrong speed, made to judder and jitter, covered in static and noise, and edited to highlight discontinuity. This is Glen’s visual analogue for the evaporation of Paul’s memories as his mind undergoes its final scrambled fragmentation. Wójcik’s synthesised tunes, too, though intended to calm and stimulate Paul, occasionally acquire spastic rhythms and violent discordancies to orchestrate the confusion in the dying man’s brain.

Here everything, both the visual images and the soundtrack accompanying them, appears to be in collapse, unhinged from coherence or rationality, with only Antosh’s words – soothing, curious, occasionally critical – serving as a tether line from the bedlam of free associations back to a grounding reality, however momentary, whether for Paul or indeed for the viewer. For The Memory Boom may be, like Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2002), a formally (and deliberately) messy monument to dissolution, and to the chasm of cluttered, centrifugal meaning into which we will all eventually disappear, but it is also a love letter, from grandson to grandfather, where memory is something not just fragile, but also transmissible and indeed transformative. Glen has taken the detritus of Paul’s rich, long life, and remixed it into something new that still lives and breathes with the old man’s spirit, while movingly tracking his passage to a different state. It is a cry across the generations and across the void, and an elegy for a past that ineluctably repeats itself down the ages: “Pops, it’s me, your grandson”,

The Memory Boom had its world première at the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. Also showing in the 24th REC Tarragona International Film Festival.