Tracing Rita

PLOT SUMMARY:

Tracing Rita is a feature film about an animator with a memory condition. When we meet her, Rita is in her early 50s, and has just suffered some kind of event which has damaged her memory. She is still a vibrant, alert person, but is now obsessed with drawing grids and often forgets what has just happened. Her best friend Phyllis, a filmmaker, helps to keep her out of an institution by caring for her at her home, calming her down when she is confused, and facilitating her artistic practice in her home studio.

Through hospital interviews, voicemails, video footage from Phyllis’ archive, and Rita’s animation (both pre- and post-event), we learn about Rita, the parts of her life she’s forgotten, a childhood trauma that, ironically, might have prepared her for the loss she now faces daily, and her friendship with Phyllis. We watch her work develop from grids to sequential images, to crude, short animated snippets, and finally, longer clips that address loss, the brain, the nature of time, and the most important friendship of her life.

Rita’s animation consists of handmade techniques, created under the camera, combined with audio collages from her personal audio archive of interviews and recordings: an early sequence uses photo album pages as a starting point, the photos later cut out and moved around in stop-motion. She re-purposes old paper puppets from previous films to create scenes from Ozma of Oz (a children’s book, the third in the Wizard of Oz series), casting herself and Phyllis in the roles of Dorothy and Queen Ozma. A recording of Rita, sleepy, describing a sleep hallucination to her then (and now forgotten) husband is rendered in swirling ink animation. A BBC documentary about a woman with a rare neurological condition is explored in smudgy, indelible charcoal animation. An interview with film editor Walter Murch, in which he talks about the crucial element of time, is explored with images cut out from magazines.

We realize that the film we are now watching is actually edited by Rita herself, during substantially lucid moments when she remembers the purpose of the key tied around her wrist (to her spare bedroom, set up as an editing suite). Rita has improved greatly, and regained, by and large, control of her story. But it is not consistent, and in a final conversation between her and Phyllis, we can see how unpredictable her condition is, leaving them both to wonder who is Dorothy and who is Ozma, and how long their journey together can last.