Director and editor Rupert Murray’s Unknown White Male is no fantasy or “based on” movie. It’s stone reality: the story of amnesiac Doug Bruce through home movies, snapshots, interviews and “creative reproductions.”

Imagine being able to revisit your favorite experience or movie or book, or love, as though for the first time, in the body and hormonal makeup of the adult you now are but with the rapturous awe of a child: colors pristine, and animals, sounds, emotions; the touch of a first snowball in the hand, the taste of a pint, a seashore or fireworks display. But also the dark side, the frightened grown-up with zero past, no memories good or bad, the lack of any connectedness, roots, attachments, associations.  

Experts in fields of physical or mental health explain the various manifestations of memory loss commonly grouped as “amnesia,” the average (as opposed to individual) short- or long-term repercussions, and the theoretical causes. No definite answer in this direction, they admit, nor do we need one, not even the later discovery of pituitary hemorrhage, not at present life-threatening. Using a few visits to probable, or certain, places, and hospital video records taken soon after the event, the film plunges into what seems almost pedestrian in its quietness but is actually horrifying. Scanty facts establish that, somehow, somewhere between eight one July evening three years ago and the following morning, a handsome outgoing young man came unstuck in time and place, as sweet memory simply died.

British TV documentarian Murray had known Bruce for two decades, through an active young man’s social life in Paris and their native London, and a subsidiary though not subservient story is how he himself, their mutual friends, and the subject’s father and two sisters -- all living in Spain -- came to terms with themselves and with the man they know and love but who does not know, has no reason to love, them. Obviously, all radiates from Bruce, former stockbroker turned photographer three thousand miles away in New York, who came out of a blank, as it were, alone on an elevated F train, into a “fugue state.”

With no remembrance of things past, who, what, when or where, in shorts, tee shirt and flip-flops on a cold wet morning, he was scared, got off in Brooklyn’s now-Russian Coney Island and went to the police and a hospital with apparently inconsequential bumps on the head. Educated and well-spoken, no trace of drugs or alcohol, all tests negative, said the reports, and no name. Only a fortuitous pink paper folded into a Latin American Spanish phrasebook produced a hint, and the woman at the phone number on it initially denied any knowledge.

But his voice was familiar, Eva Eckert recognized the Doug who had recently been dating her daughter Nadine, and a chink opened in the darkness.

From here, the documentary is a logical progression of the Henry Jamesian “new” person’s gradual exposure to his past -- his East Village apartment with his clothing, cockatoos and dogs, photography professors, family, lovers, friends and associates on two continents, and an orderly storeroom of memorabilia in the Paris where his mother died of cancer and which repressed memory may have been the start of it all.

Along the journey to maybe finding himself, intriguing points are raised as to who an individual is, and what makes him/her so. Is the person, the personality, purely Locke’s tabula rasa, a clean slate which becomes only what it experiences, or is there an inherent something more to it? Seeing the film in edit, British philosopher Mary Warnock reacted that, “the same man as before, . . . is he the same person?” As he learns about his past and the man he was, his warts as well as lovable traits, he might be able to choose what responsibility still lies in him for that past and to the people who inhabit it, they now as nervously cautious as he. And to the present as well: new Australian live-in girlfriend Narelle wonders what turn their relationship will take when and if, “beyond medical knowledge,” memory should as mysteriously pop up again. Forgotten, as Robbie Fulks wrote and sang it, but not gone.

A difficult film to make, this, given its extremely personal and painful nature and the necessary open cooperation of Bruce, “a co-filmmaker in a sense” who also learns about himself in a most unusual sense. Personality being the unaccountable thing that it is, however, there is a discomforting coldness, almost a clinical analysis and consequent distancing of subject from audience. So many of the questions here can have no clear answers, which is okay, but backed by Mukul’s off-putting abstract electronic music and sound effects plus snips from Dvorak, Stravinsky and Sibelius, the film does not emotionally engage us. 

(Released by Wellspring and rated “PG-13” for drug references and brief strong language.)