Athina Rachel Tsangari’s lockdown diary

Is seclusion a childhood dream come true or a trap? The director of Chevalier and Trigonometry still doesn’t know which.

Updated: 10 June 2020

A lockdown self-portrait by Athina Rachel TsangariAthina Rachel Tsangari

By Athina Rachel Tsangari

Cinema in lockdown

▶︎ Athina Rachel Tsangari’s series Trigonometry is on BBC iPlayer

I remember thinking when I saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread (2017) how I’d been wishing to be ordered to bed (nothing deadly) surrounded by a stack of books, Blu-rays, comfort food (crisps! ice cream!), off line and off the grid.

I got my wish all right. An imposed seclusion – yet in a dense, public network of communal seclusions. Like a summer afternoon back in childhood. The entire city is napping, dead quiet except for the uncensorable cicadas, my sister and I are reading in bed, or playing dress up, patiently awaiting the five o’ clock signal to run back to the sea and rejoin our gang.

Covid Time feels at once compressed and expanded indefinitely. An overstimulated pause, a raucous silence. The radio voices, the thirsty screens, the bodiless meetings, the remote fatalities, the frontliners, the furloughed, the ‘liberators’. I’m swinging wildly between states of listlessness, overactivity, guilt, anxiety, yearning, micro-focus, greedy distraction. A nine-year-old going on 90 in a loop, Groundhog Day everyday.

I’m reckoning with my role as a filmmaker in the midst of and post-pandemic. Am I essential, non-essential, deployed, a fatality, a disaster consumer, a privileged observer, a recorder, a sleepwalker, a carrier, a body, an antibody?

I find solace in David Lynch’s universal call for daydreaming, for sitting tight by a window or under a tree, and waiting to ‘catch ideas’ from the ether. On a lucky day, when one appears all of a sudden fluttering about, I quickly grasp it and press it between the pages of my notebook, hopeful it will ferment into a sentence, an image, a watermark.

We have yet to see if this fissure in time and space proves to be a dreamcatcher, or a dreamtrapper.