The Curse of Aging (March 2025), Silent Film, 4:03 minutes
On the night of my twenty first birthday, I had a very odd dream, one that stuck with me for months afterwards. In the dream, I was dressed in a nightgown and a panda hat and ate a whole cake with my bare hands. I found this very strange and started to wonder what it might mean.
Picture of me on my 21st Birthday (inspo for cake)
It was believed that Witches could communicate with the devil through their dreams, with nightmares being used as evidence to prove someone is a witch. [1] This led me to consider the contents of my dreams and the importance of their meaning.
I wanted to experiment further with filmmaking, after Hold Your Tongue. My feedback from earlier works was to be less obvious with my imagery, so I decided to recreate my birthday dream in a silent film. This allowed me to not overthink how something looks in an aesthetic sense as it was purely just recreating what I had dreamt.
Details from The Curse of Aging
Before filming, I wrote out instructions, similar to how Marina Abramovic does in her works:
1. Walk up to the cake
2. Light the birthday candles
3. Blow out the candles
4. Remove the candles from the cake
5. Eat as much of the cake as possible with bare hands
The film ended differently than in my dream, as my small appetite only allowed me to eat a small amount of it, rather than the whole thing. I liked the distorted visuals of the final film but want to develop my work further using different scenery and multiple actors. I also want to experiment with showing the films on different devices (rather than a computer screen) such as an old TV.
[1] Davies, O. (2003). The Nightmare Experience, Sleep Paralysis, and Witchcraft Accusations. Folklore, 114(2), 181–203. https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587032000104211