Quick Brown Fox [film]. 2004. White Noise Productions. Directed by Ann Hedreen and Rustin Thompson. Color, 63 minutes. Distributed by Women Make Movies.

Reviewed by Nancy Viva Davis Halifax, York University; Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, Toronto General Hospital, University Health Network.

The video starts and the repetitive sound of a manual typewriter tears through the skin of this paper body at its leisure. At some point the words of the sentence, "The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog," are being typed, except the first and last words seem to have been mislaid. The sentence, a pangram, is supposed to contain all the letters of the English alphabet. The absence of 14 letters and the direct sensual appeal of the opening of the video move me bodily toward Alzheimer's, the subject of this video, where I meet the question: How can I speak, write, if I have only the odds and ends of an alphabet? Who am I, how do I tell my story with what is left?

Anne Hedreen and Rustin Thompson, a couple who have been making films for over 20 years, directed and produced Quick Brown Fox. It is a family movie about the agonizing living loss of a parent, Hedreen's mother. Hedreen brings the sheer denseness of the effects of Alzheimer's to us thoughtfully as she narrates the story of her mother, herself, her siblings, her family–a story familiar to those of us who have gained intimacy with Alzheimer's disease. It is a story that lingers in the personal, and wanders into the present state of research, though the latter is not what this review will focus upon.

Quick Brown Fox interrogates memory, loss, identity, and love through archival family films and slides, and interviews with researchers, physicians, family and friends, as Hedreen reveals to us who her mother was and how/who she has become. Her mother, an intellectual woman, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's at age 60; she had been a schoolteacher, had grown up in an age of scientific miracles, and had begun showing symptoms of confusion, lapses of memory, in her early 50's.

The fluidity of identity is unyielding in its dance; the letters on the page of this mother's being pallidly shuffle, shuffle and turn. It is the single bed on the floor of a bare room that aches in my bones, bringing to me the tension of presence/absence that is Alzehimer's. The single bed signifies to me that this woman who has had three husbands will now sleep alone, unattended, with not even a bear to cuddle and watch over her as she sleeps. The bareness of the room evokes for me what Alzheimer's performs for her socially and personally. It has emptied her room of all but the most familiar of objects: perhaps six photographs hang in a cluster in her room above eye level. I could be wrong in my suggestion that these objects–the photographs–retain familiarity for her; it could be they function to tie the past of the family to the present of their mother, a woman who has become someone they no longer always recognize.

Who are we when we no longer remember who we are? Who do we become when those who hold our memories are exiled within their skins? The question of identity, "Who am I?" is one asked by all of us at different times in our lives until, in some instances, we no longer can articulate the question or the answer. Who Hedreen's mother is resides in the temporal and geographical complexity of familial and significant relationships. Her family seeks her out, offering her their memories, acknowledging that they still see "her" at times. They watch out for "her," all the while loving this other woman, deeply estranged from the familiar.

Hedreen tells us the story of identity that was. Yet we view the story in the present moment. This is a story of an intellectual woman, we are told. She is returned to and removed from us by the use of 8mm films and slideshow. Voices break as we find out that this woman who is now not recognizable by her family was a poet. When we see her in the movie she is, according to her children, lost to them. She has become submerged, missing like the letters in the pangram of the title, only sometimes found. The people around her are, at times, in turmoil as their own identities recede and surge. They must live with the ambiguity of her being there/not there.

Hedreen and Thompson have with great sensitivity created a film that allows us to perceive and challenge the contemporary cultural fantasy of a stable identity located in an isolated self. They have also revealed some of the difficulties of language. Language, or its lack, has a tendency to fix us in particular positions rather than to pull us toward an imaginative constitutive act. The language that we choose to use as we reflect on the relational fluidity of identity, so much a constant in the province of life, not only as we change, but also as others around us change, deserves greater consideration within the field of disability studies. Quick Brown Fox draws us toward this necessity.