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ALASKA

By Josh DEANE

True Story - Completed 2020

Alaska is a live dreamlike audio-visual experience exploring the dangers of nostalgia. Using a video element comprised of seven decades of home videos, live music, poetry, dance, audience participation, and projected textures, it is a new media experience like no other.

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& Awards

Video Drunk 2020

Experimental Work

- Year of production
- 2020
- Genres
- True Story, Musical, Experimental
- Countries
- USA
- Duration
- 48 mn
- Director(s)
- Josh DEANE
- Synopsis
- Alaska is a live dreamlike audio-visual experience exploring the dangers of nostalgia. Using a video element comprised of seven decades of home videos, live music, poetry, dance, audience participation, and projected textures—the live film experience simulates one person’s attachment and eventual absorption into his own past—erasing his future in the process. The film begins as a celebration of captured memory and ends in a funeral procession with the audience acting as the gathered mourners.
  
  It is difficult to discuss the process behind Alaska. It began as one thing, and through intuition and subconscious connection mutated into something completely different. The reason it is difficult to describe is because I had no intention to create the deeply personal musical dream experience that you see before you. In the beginning, I simply wanted to create a pop album based loosely on the instrumentation of Giallo soundtracks. As the writing process continued, the music morphed slowly into a wrestling match with nostalgia, longing, grief, and loneliness. Simultaneously, I began digitizing and rewatching all of my old home movies—some I haven’t watched in ten years, others I had never watched.
  
  Bored and stressed by the ongoing quarantine and worldwide health crisis, I had begun all of these seemingly unrelated projects in order to set goals for myself and to take my mind from a planet that seems to be on fire. My father nearly died from Covid, my best friend died mere months ago, and my little sister died just last year. I have not processed the great amount of loss that I have experienced, and I doubt that I will anytime soon.
  
  Without any real thought about how they could go together, I began editing the more interesting portions of my home movies to the beat of the music that I had been working on since the beginning of the pandemic. Before I knew it, one music video had grown into a full- length work of experimental musical cinema. I had somehow recreated my own dreams using footage from what felt like a past life—a life that on the surface feels goofy and carefree, but was constantly shaped and dominated by the cult I was raised in and which my parents led. Through the cracks I also saw my relationship with my sisters, and saw how I was made to act as the de-facto parent after my parents checked out—an unforeseen side-effect of my sister’s diagnosis with what would become a fatal illness. Hidden in the hours of footage I had captured was a deep loneliness and longing for love and peace. I had essentially stumbled upon what no one should be subject to—the fears and joys of yourself as a child. I was able to see the world through my own eyes at 14, and it felt like I had unearthed video recordings of my own dreams. The videos depressed me in a way that I had not expected, I felt submerged in myself, drowning below the surface of a life already lived. Nostalgia threatened to devour me.

ALASKA

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