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CINEMATIC
REPRESENTATIONS
OF
ALZHEIMER’S
RAQUEL
MEDINA DISEASE
Cinematic Representations of Alzheimer’s Disease
 Raquel Medina

Cinematic
Representations of
Alzheimer’s Disease
Raquel Medina
School of Languages and Social Sciences
Aston University
Birmingham, UK

ISBN 978-1-137-53370-8 ISBN 978-1-137-53371-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53371-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018947398

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover image: Adrián Lueerssen-Medina

Cover design: Tom Howey

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Limited
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
 To my sister Esther, my father, and my mother. Always with me.
To all the people living with Alzheimer’s disease, their families, and their
caregivers.
 Acknowledgements

Writing this book has taken longer than initially expected due to some of
the adversities I have had to endure over the past few years. Therefore,
my first thanks are for my husband, Dietrich Lüerßen, and my chil-
dren, Alicia and Adrián, for their unconditional support throughout the
not-so-good and not-so-happy times. Thanks for being there and for
believing in this project, even when I thought I would never finish it.
My gratitude also goes to Raquel Fernández Sánchez, Olga Castro, and
Aurelio Ramos Caballero, as they have always been there when I needed
them the most. Having the consistent presence and support of Professor
Barbara Zecchi, with whom I established the International Research
Network CinemAGEnder, has been key in shaping and sharpening my
approach to film and gender studies. Beverly Adab was a big part of this
project when she read and commented on the book proposal and the
sample chapter. Many friends and family members have been involved in
the process of writing this book, either directly or indirectly, so my grat-
itude goes to Nina Gerassi-Navarro, Marta Cerezo Moreno, Mercedes
Sastre, María José Gómez Amores, Itziar Martínez Tobar, Pilar Cruz
and Belén García Llamas; but especially to my brothers, Nacho and Luis,
and my sister Regina.
During the past few years, I have presented some of the analyses
included in this book at international conferences, which has given me
the opportunity to meet exceptional scholars and colleagues in the field
of ageing studies. Over the last year, I have had the pleasure of working
very closely with Dr. Sarah Falcus, with whom I co-direct the Dementia

vii
viii    Acknowledgements

and Culture Network and with whom I also organised the Dementia
and Culture Narratives Symposium that was held at Aston University
on 8 and 9 December 2017. Sarah has been very supportive through-
out the past few months, thus my gratitude. I would also like to express
my appreciation of my colleagues from the European Network in Aging
Studies (ENAS) and the North American Network in Aging Studies
(NANAS), whose knowledge is part of this book. Among them, special
thanks to Professor Aagje Swinnen, whose support has been invaluable.
The constructive feedback I received from the reviewers must be praised
and acknowledged, as well as the support from past and present editors
at Palgrave, especially Lina Aboujieb and Ellie Freedman.
Aston University granted me a term without teaching in order to fin-
ish the monograph, which proved to be crucial. I am also thankful to my
colleague in the English Department, Nur Kurtoglu-Hooton, and her
brother-in-law, Dr. Ali Nihat Eken, for buying me a copy of the Turkish
film Pandora’s Box in Turkey. I am much obliged to the Catalan film-
maker Carla Subirana, whose film Nedar (2008) is part of this book.
Carla gave me a whole dossier about the film and indirectly convinced
me to include a chapter about historical memory and Alzheimer’s dis-
ease. My nephew Alvaro Medina Sánchez helped me with some of
the technical difficulties I faced, sometimes at very short notice. Vija
Mendelson was very helpful and made sure I had access to some essential
reading matter. Katy Bird played an essential role in the last stages of this
project; I wish her a wonderful life and professional career in Colombia.
I also want to thank Benecé Produccions, Ustaoglu Film Yapim, and
Axolote Cine for responding very quickly and positively to my requests
for permission to reproduce some still images from films they produced.
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to the Spanish poet Juana
Castro for inspiring me to take this research path. It is not an easy topic,
but I hope that this book helps to eliminate some of the stigmas and ste-
reotypes associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Old Age and Alzheimer’s Disease in Film 15

3 Intergenerational Interactions and Alzheimer’s Disease 45

4 Gender and Alzheimer’s Disease: The Power of Words,

Herbs, Water, Veils, and Mountains 95

5 Agency and Masculinity in Alzheimer’s Disease: Cortex

(2008) and The Memory of a Killer (2003) 135

6 Recovering the Past: Historical Memory and Alzheimer’s

Disease 171

7 Conclusion 205

Index 215

ix
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Pandora’s Box: The three siblings in the car 58

Fig. 3.2 Pandora’s Box: The distance between mother and daughter 59
Fig. 3.3 Wrinkles: State-of-the-art facilities in the nursing home 80
Fig. 3.4 Wrinkles: The luxurious swimming pool 81
Fig. 3.5 Wrinkles: The great escape 83
Fig. 4.1 The Good Herbs: Dinner scene 103
Fig. 4.2 The Good Herbs: Assisted death 105
Fig. 4.3 Old Cats: The power of water: The fountain 109
Fig. 4.4 Poetry: The meeting at the restaurant with the fathers of the
boys who raped Agnes 112
Fig. 4.5 Poetry: Kang and Mija’s sexual encounter in the bathtub 115
Fig. 4.6 Poetry: Drops of rain soaking the notebook 116
Fig. 4.7 A Separation: Windows and doors separating the characters 126
Fig. 5.1 Cortex: The Rubik’s Cube, the lamp, and the clock 142
Fig. 5.2 Cortex: Charles holding a gun, about to kill himself 147
Fig. 5.3 Cortex: Shot from above of patient files 148
Fig. 5.4 The Memory of a Killer: Ledda’s train journey to Antwerp 157
Fig. 5.5 The Memory of a Killer: Angelo Ledda is shot repeatedly 159
Fig. 6.1 Swimming: Subarina recreates the image of her grandfather as
Humphrey Bogart hiding in the shadows 183
Fig. 6.2 Swimming: Having a good physical appearance is important
for people living with Alzheimer’s 185
Fig. 6.3 Bucharest: The Lost Memory: MRI images 187

xi
xii    List of Figures

Fig. 6.4 Remember: Old Jewish man confined to a wheelchair and

dependent on oxygen support 193
Fig. 6.5 Remember: The shower 196
Fig. 6.6 Remember: Zev walking with difficulty and carrying the bag
with the gun 199
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In 2010 I was invited to present a paper on one of my favourite Spanish

female poets, Juana Castro, who was also going to speak at the confer-
ence. When I accepted the invitation, I decided to explore her 2005 book
of poetry Dark Bodies (Los cuerpos oscuros), which had been awarded the
prestigious Jaén Poetry Prize (Premio Jaén de Poesía). Dark Bodies is a
collection of poems written by Juana Castro during and after the time
that she had to look after both of her parents, both living at the same
time with Alzheimer’s disease. While her 1982 poetry book devoted to
the death of her child had had a profound impact on me, the reading of
Dark Bodies opened my mind to the world of Alzheimer’s disease. The
lyricism, beauty, and love encapsulated in these poems did not prevent the
soreness of the experience as both daughter and caregiver from emerging,
but it was shaped in a way that celebrated life, despite what the title of the
book might initially indicate: pain is transformed into beauty.
Prior to reading Castro’s book and writing about it (Medina 2012), my
relationship with dementia had been merely linked to my role as a reader
and viewer of the news. For instance, a few years before I read Castro’s
book, two important Spanish politicians disclosed that they had been diag-
nosed with Alzheimer’s disease. In 2005, it was announced that Adolfo
Suárez—the first Prime Minister appointed by the King Juan Carlos
I after the dictator Francisco Franco’s death in 1975—had been diagnosed
with the disease; this news was followed in 2007 by the news that Pasqual
Maragall, Barcelona’s mayor during the 1992 Olympic Games and later
President of the Generalitat de Catalunya, also had Alzheimer’s.1 The very

© The Author(s) 2018 1

R. Medina, Cinematic Representations of Alzheimer’s Disease,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53371-5_1
2 R. MEDINA

same year in which Maragall gave a press conference to announce that

he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, Adolfo Suárez received
a home visit from King Juan Carlos I of Spain. A photograph taken by
Suárez’s son of that encounter was sent to the press as a record of the
event. The photograph showed the King and the former Prime Minister
walking away from the camera, thus not showing their faces. After the
photograph had been widely circulated, Adolfo Suárez’s son told the press
that his father had not recognised the King. This was the last time the for-
mer Prime Minister was seen in public. By contrast, Pasqual Maragall’s
public announcement served as the starting point of his advocacy and sup-
port for, and campaigning on behalf of, the search to find a cure. Even
today, almost a decade after being diagnosed, Maragall continues to make
some public appearances, clearly demonstrating the need to normalise
what it means to live with Alzheimer’s disease. The contrast between hid-
ing and displaying what it is to live with Alzheimer’s struck me as some-
thing which represented two opposite perceptions of Alzheimer’s, the
private and public: it is seen on the one hand as a stigmatic disease, and on
the other as a disease with no cure, that should not be hidden.
In his book of memoirs, My Last Sigh (1983), Luis Buñuel devoted
the first chapter to the effects of ageing in the subject’s memory, the
main effect being that of forgetting. Having witnessed his mother’s lost
battle against forgetting, Buñuel expresses his anxiety about facing the
same health problem.

I’m overwhelmed by anxiety when I can’t remember a recent event, or the

name of a person met in recent months, or the name of a familiar object.
I feel as if suddenly my whole personality has disintegrated … The obli-
gation to find a metaphor to describe ‘table’ is a monstrous feeling, but
I console myself that there is something even worse—to be alive and
yet not recognize yourself, not know anymore who you are… You have
to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that
memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at
all … Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our
action. Without it, we are nothing. (Buñuel 2003, 4–5)2

Buñuel’s words serve as an excellent example of the fear we have as

individuals with regards to losing our memories, and our inclination to
associate memory with well-being and being alive. Almost 35 years after
Buñuel published his memoirs, dementia has become a global mat-
ter of concern. Dementia is predicted to affect 25–30% of the over-65s
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

in developed countries by 2050, and it is present in many areas of our

society, from family relations to policymaking. The need to address the
health and social problems that dementia is creating globally, nation-
ally, and locally appears simultaneously in many different disciplines:
medicine, pharmaceutics, biotechnology, social sciences, care p ­ractices,
health policies, architecture, and culture. For instance, as early as 1994
one could find a description of Alzheimer’s as the epidemic of the twen-
ty-first century in the Spanish newspaper El País (Sánchez 1994). Since
then, and during the first decade of this century, not only has the label-
ling of Alzheimer’s disease as an epidemic burgeoned but also new con-
cepts have become attached to it, such as ‘tsunami’ and ‘challenge’. These
labels have been regularly used by the media, national governments, and
international institutions, so it is not surprising that they have had a dou-
ble impact on the public. On the one hand, neo-liberal agendas have
been persistently highlighting two ‘challenges’ for national budgets: that
of the ageing population and that of dementia. Having to fund pensions
and provide healthcare for a longer period are areas that have created
clear divisions between the young and the old, with old age being blamed
for the pressure on financial resources to fund welfare systems. On the
other hand, the sense of horror associated with dementia that has been
introduced to the public through a variety of cultural texts has alarmed
and increased anxiety about it in public opinion; this applies to especially
the fear of becoming a zombie, a hollow body (Behuniak 2011; Bitenc
2012; Zeilig 2013). I consider these depictions, which stereotype and
dehumanise people living with dementia, to be very disturbing, hence
my curiosity about exploring how other cultures perceive, represent, and
deal with dementia. In her seminal book Forget Memory (2009), Anne
Davis Basting challenges the cultural and social perception of dementia
as a tragedy, and stresses the importance of creativity through the arts for
expressing oneself while experiencing memory loss. Basting’s work claims
the essential re-humanising aspect of cultural narratives about dementia.
Therefore, and following the advice of the Alzheimer’s Society by avoid-
ing negative expressions about and representations of Alzheimer’s disease,
this book uses the term ‘person living with Alzheimer’s disease’ instead of
‘person suffering from Alzheimer’s disease’.
Reading books and watching films from diverse cultures and back-
grounds can offer us a better understanding of how global and nation-
al/local cultures influence conceptualisations of dementia. Although
dementia is a global health issue, it may not be perceived, defined, or
4 R. MEDINA

represented uniformly around the world. Scholarly approaches to

­cultural representations of dementia have taken place mainly in Western
cultural texts belonging largely to the UK, the USA, and Canada.3
However, some new scholarly approaches are slowly emerging, thus
providing visibility for other cultural representations of dementia
from a cross-cultural perspective. This book aims to present this new
cross-cultural approach, by means of which a global issue such as demen-
tia can be shown in its rich multiplicity. Consciously avoiding idealising
or romanticising ‘other’ cinematic representations of dementia, in par-
ticular of Alzheimer’s disease, it explores how these cinematic representa-
tions do not focus on the negative aspects of the disease even when
symptoms are portrayed.
This book aims to elucidate the extent to which the films under study
present a concept of dementia that underscores the importance of the
person living with the disease as a subject, as an individual whose person-
hood and agency are not diminished. In addition, it intends to explore
whether these films challenge the overly medicalised concept of demen-
tia that westernised viewers have, due to the great influence of neg-
ative depictions of it deployed by the ideological apparatus of culture.
This book aims to reveal how, contrary to most mainstream films on the
topic, such as Iris (2001), The Iron Lady (2011), Away from Her (2006),
and Still Alice (2014), films from other cultures whose film industries do
not mirror Hollywood or that of the UK, offer viewers both ontologi-
cal and phenomenological discussions of the self that are crucial for the
understanding of dementia, the people living with dementia, and those
around them. As will be shown in our analysis, most of the films dis-
cussed in this book do not present Alzheimer’s disease, the most com-
mon form of dementia, as just a presence or a motif with which to focus
on the struggle of relatives to understand the disease, or the impact it
has on those relatives. On the contrary, in most of the films explored in
this book the people living with Alzheimer’s disease are the main char-
acters; thus they share and communicate, in many instances, their sub-
jectivity so that the viewer can identify with them and feel what they are
experiencing. Similarly, the book intends to reveal whether these films
use Alzheimer’s disease as a cultural metaphor (Zeilig 2013) through
which to address issues pertaining to different areas of life and society
within the cultures they belong to: for example, family matters such as
intergenerational interactions, or the role of women in the family and
society; tradition versus modernity within the country; the global vs
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

the local; agency in people living with dementia; caring for people with
dementia; and many others that will be explored in the following pages.
In this sense, the feminist framework that links most of the analyses of
the films undertaken is central to this book. Finally, the in-depth exami-
nation of these films aims to highlight and stress the social obligation we
have within the academic and non-academic spheres to make these coun-
ter-discourses visible. This visibility is crucial because it will help to trans-
form stigmatised perceptions of dementia and to reshape public opinion
about Alzheimer’s disease. Instead of staging terrifying images of living
with dementia, these films offer alternative insights on the disease by
describing it as a moment of positive paradigm shift and change in either
the lives of the persons living with dementia or in those close to them.
The corpus of films from different cultures dealing with dementia as
their main topic is quickly growing. The selection of films for the anal-
ysis I present in this book was subject to several considerations: first,
I sought diversity in cultural terms; second, I grouped them according
to the topics they approached, such as gender issues, intergenerational
relationships, agency and personhood, and so on; and third, I considered
the role that filmic genre or subgenre played in constructing a specific
concept of dementia. My quest led me to a great number of documen-
tary films in which caring and living with dementia was documented:
these covered topics ranging from the use of music and art therapies,
to the hardships experienced by caregivers. I had tackled these types of
documentary films in the Spanish context in previous publications, but
found that the question of historical memory in Spain seemed to be met-
aphorically linked to Alzheimer’s memory loss, and thus deserved to
be examined. I have excluded films that have been extensively analysed
by other scholars, such as the Danish Welcome to Verona (Wellkåmm to
Verona 2006), the Swedish A Song for Martin (En sång för Martin
2001), and the Argentinean Son of the Bride (El hijo de la novia 2001).
Other films, like Amour (2012), do not make explicit the cause of the
neurological deterioration suffered by the character, thus their exclu-
sion. The analysis refers in some instances to the Spanish fictional film
Awaking from a Dream (Despertar de un sueño 2008), on which I have
already published an article (Medina 2013a). Films that deal with very
early onset of Alzheimer’s disease deserve to be analysed separately since
the link between ageing and dementia disappears, which makes the dis-
ease’s portrayal different, but very interesting nonetheless; among these
films are the Japanese Memories of Tomorrow (Ashita no kioku 2006), the
6 R. MEDINA

Italian A Second Childhood (Una sconfinata giovinezza 2010), and the

South Korean A Moment to Remember (Nae meorisokui jiwoogae 2004).
Where I have included films that have already been studied by other
scholars (Chivers 2011, 2013; Cohen-Shalev and Marcus 2011, 2012a, b;
Gravagne 2013; Zimmermann 2017) I have applied a different kind of
analysis. These films include the South Korean Poetry (Shi 2010), the
Iranian A Separation (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin 2011), the Chilean Old
Cats (Gatos viejos 2010), the Turkish Pandora’s Box (Pandora’nin kutusu
2008), and the French Cortex (2008). In addition to the films just men-
tioned, other films that form the corpus under study are the Mexican
The Good Herbs (Las buenas hierbas 2010); the Dutch The Memory of a
Killer (De zaak Alzheimer 2003); the Spanish film Wrinkles (Arrugas
2011), and the Spanish documentary films Swimming (Nedar 2008) and
Bucharest, the Lost Memory (Bucarest, la memòria perduda 2008); and the
Canadian film Remember (2015). A brief synopsis of each film is provided
in the chapter in which it is analysed for the first time.
There are great films which I have not included due to space limita-
tions; this is the case, for example, of the Bollywood film Black (2005).
This film narrates the story of a deaf and blind woman and her long-
term teacher, who has Alzheimer’s and has been confined to a medical-
ised nursing home. It is also the case of the Spanish film The City of No
Limits (La ciudad sin límites 2002), in which the themes of Alzheimer’s,
exile after the Spanish Civil War, and homosexuality are explored. The
Salvadorian film by Brenda Vanegas Flying (Volar) was released in March
2018; thus it was not possible to include it. These and other films such
as the Hindu film Mai (2013), the Bollywood drama You, Me and Us
(U Me Aur Hum 2013), or the German Head Full of Honey (Honig im
Kopf 2014), present important depictions of dementia and deserve to be
examined in depth elsewhere.
The five chapters that form the main body this book (Chapters 2–6)
address varied and important issues around cinematic depictions of
Alzheimer’s such as the ones already mentioned, but they do so, as
explained in Chapter 2, by taking an interdisciplinary approach to the
films under study. Alzheimer’s disease accounts for 60–80% of demen-
tia cases, according to the Alzheimer’s Organisation (Alzheimer’s Disease
International 2017). In this book, the term ‘dementia’ is used to refer to
all types of dementia, as well as to the broad concept used by many dis-
ciplines. I use the term ‘Alzheimer’s disease’ only when referring to cases
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

in which a diagnosis has been made. In all but one of the films studied
(Remember, 2005), a formal diagnosis of Alzheimer’s has been made,
hence the reference to Alzheimer’s disease in the title of this book.4
Chapter 2, ‘Old Age and Alzheimer’s Disease in Film’, provides the
theoretical framework for the analysis carried out in the following four
chapters. The growing body of scholarly work on cultural narratives
about dementia reveals its multi- and interdisciplinary character, so the
chapter presents the crucial role played by ageing studies in the develop-
ment of dementia studies. Important concepts such as ageism, the third
and fourth ages, and personhood are explained, as well as the part that
the mind/body dichotomy has played in shaping perceptions of demen-
tia. The importance of approaches to dementia from cultural and criti-
cal gerontology perspectives, and from the viewpoints of gender and film
studies are also described, with the objective of giving a general method-
ological overview. Nonetheless, each chapter will provide a detailed theo-
retical contextualisation of the films under study.
Recent statistics show that the number of people worldwide living
with dementia is believed to be around 50 million, will reach 75 mil-
lion in 2030, and will have reached 131.5 million by 2050 (Alzheimer’s
Disease International, n.d.). Dementia is a significant health problem
that deserves medical, social, and financial attention. However, the way
in which it is usually presented, talked about, and portrayed in the media
removes the focus from the people living with dementia and instead
places it on the burden the disease creates for carers and on the national
financial resources needed. In developed countries, neo-liberalism is
quickly delegating the care of people with dementia—and of the elderly
in general—to their families and their own financial resources. This obvi-
ously adds to the perception that living with dementia is a ‘challenge’,
even more so for those who do not have the economic means to pay
for professional care. Therefore, shifting caregiving from the state to the
family means trading formal caregiving for informal caregiving, some-
thing that might have a negative impact on the quality of care and the
quality of life of informal caregivers.
Chapter 3, ‘Intergenerational Interactions and Alzheimer’s Disease’,
presents an approach that considers cultural diversity when analysing cul-
tural texts about dementia and caregiving. That is, the degree to which
governments rely on local cultural values for caregiving determines the
way dementia is perceived by the public and represented by cultural
texts. In some of the films examined in this chapter, an attempt emerges
8 R. MEDINA

to erase the economic and social negativity associated with dementia

by disputing the postmodern glorification of individualism and youth.
Therefore, these films replace intergenerational conflict with intergener-
ational solidarity or ambivalence. The chapter uses a cross-cultural geron-
tology perspective by examining how different cultures conceptualise the
process of ageing and the social position that old age has. It also explores
the set of symbols that each culture creates and that shape the way reality
is perceived and represented. Finally, it examines films from the perspec-
tive of themes such as types of intergenerational relationships, concepts of
the family structure, and family as a trope for discussing national issues.
Chapter 4, ‘Gender and Alzheimer’s disease: the Power of Words,
Herbs, Water, Veils and Mountains’, approaches the films The Good Herbs
(2011), Poetry (2010), Old Cats (2010), Pandora’s Box (2008), and A
Separation (2011) from a feminist perspective; this enables us to docu-
ment the social and cultural norms that mark the life of men and women
living with Alzheimer’s disease or caring for people living with the dis-
ease. Of those living with dementia, two thirds are women. Women are
not only more at risk of developing dementia but form the largest per-
centage of carers. In developing countries, or in countries with strong
family values, social expectations require that women become carers of
the family’s elderly members. These films place women with Alzheimer’s
at the forefront, either by making them the main characters or by rep-
resenting the personal turmoil they undergo as a result of the clash
between their own individual wishes and their social roles. The social
pressure on women to carry out these caregiving duties affects the capac-
ity of women to be independent citizens, and these films will be stud-
ied within this context. Likewise, all these films will be contrasted with
gerontological studies that have been used to generalise and homogenise
the ageing process across cultures and genders, as if it equally affected
all. The burden on the caregiver, the isolation and loneliness of women
in that role, and their desire to maintain social and professional status
are touched on in these films. The presence of important gender con-
cepts such as sorority and womanhood, motherhood and matrophobia
(the fear of becoming like one’s mother), and working women—particu-
larly relevant in countries with predominantly Muslim and Confucian
values that clash with the transformations those countries are experienc-
ing through globalisation—seems to be of capital importance, and there-
fore deserves to be considered and evaluated. In addition, this chapter
will explore how, as opposed to the narrative of deterioration that main-
stream films such as Still Alice or Iris present, the films mentioned above
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

portray alternative depictions of dementia in which symptoms and horror

are replaced by the prevalence of human solidarity. Finally, this chapter
will consider the role played by nature in Poetry, Pandora’s Box, and The
Good Herbs.
Chapter 5, ‘Agency and Masculinity in Alzheimer’s Disease: Cortex
(2008) and The Memory of a Killer (2003)’ focuses on two films in
which the main characters are male. Whereas Cortex follows the tech-
niques of mystery and detective fiction, The Memory of a Killer uses
film noir and psychological thriller techniques. Using well-known film
approaches to thrillers, detection films, film noir, and psychological thrill-
ers, this chapter focuses on how these two films use Alzheimer’s disease
as a device with which to create and enhance suspense. As will be dis-
cussed, these two films go beyond the mere deployment of Alzheimer’s
as an action-and-suspense trigger by stressing the role, and permanence,
of agency in people living with Alzheimer’s. In both films, the protago-
nists are men whose masculinity is determined by their social and sexual
productivity, as would be expected in any patriarchal society. In addition,
contrary to the approach of mainstream films in which the progression
of symptoms is used to highlight the horror attached to the disease,
here that progression is transformed into a mechanism that captures the
viewer’s attention. The chapter will analyse how the viewer in these films
is placed in the difficult position of deciding whether the main charac-
ters are truly experiencing the symptoms depicted, or are just pretend-
ing they are having them, with the intention of fooling the controlling
forces who want to restrain or kill them. Within the context of ageing
on screen, this chapter will examine how these two male protagonists
can still solve crimes or redeem themselves, which has a clear impact on
how the notion of memory loss is presented. In addition, the contradic-
tion created by the juxtaposition of memory loss and detective or hitman
work will be studied as the driving force of these plots. Finally, these two
films will be explored from masculinity and ageing studies approaches in
order to consider the role of the aged male character. Reflecting on the
Hollywood star system’s propensity to display male ageing bodies as still
being active and attractive, these films will be analysed from the perspec-
tive of the politics of active/successful ageing and gender studies.
Chapter 6, ‘Recovering the Past: Historical Memory and Alzheimer’s
Disease’, develops the topic of the use of Alzheimer’s disease as a met-
aphor for historical memory. This chapter will focus on two Spanish
documentary films, Swimming and Bucharest, the Lost Memory,5 and
10 R. MEDINA

one fictional film from Canada, Remember. The central point will be
the concept of historical memory, which is presented in all three films
as the main thematic thread; that is, the role of the past in the pres-
ent in national and personal terms. Using Pierre Nora’s (1989) and
Halbwachs’s (1992) concepts of collective memory and its connection
to individual memory, as well as Paul Ricoeur's (1994) link between
­memory, history, and forgetting, the chapter examines how forgetting
and remembering, for the good of the country and for the reconciliation
of its people, are employed as the narrative theme of these films. The two
Spanish documentary films are approached within the context of the con-
troversial decision by Spanish politicians, during the transitional period
from Franco’s dictatorship to a democratic Spain, to avoid criminalising
Franco’s government and followers for the atrocities they committed
against Republicans during and after the Spanish Civil War. The so-called
‘pactos del olvido’ (pacts of forgetting)—had the aim of allowing those
politicians to concentrate on the future of a democratic Spain. Thus, the
silencing, incarceration, or killing of dissidents under Franco’s regime
was ignored as the result of this political urge to focus on the future. The
memory loss due to Alzheimer’s of those last survivors of the Spanish
Civil War is analysed in this chapter as an important metaphor for explor-
ing the silenced Spanish past for a generation which needs to discover
and uncover its buried history. To do so, this chapter will study these two
documentary films from several angles, including: the form of contempo-
rary documentary film and its implications in terms of the presentation
of reality and subjectivity; the intertwining of the diagnosis and progres-
sion of Alzheimer’s disease with the personal life of the documentary
film-maker, who is also a character in both films; and the role that his-
torical memory might have in these two documentary films. The last part
of this chapter will be devoted to the Canadian film Remember, which
will be approached from several perspectives with regard to the notion of
dementia in the context of the Holocaust. Upon contextualising this film
within the large scholarly literature on texts representing the Holocaust
and the controversies surrounding these representations, this part of
the chapter evaluates Atom Egoyan’s unexpected intertwining of that
theme with those of revenge and dementia in Remember. The analysis
will explore how Egoyan arranges the features of the thriller and the road
movie in a highly original manner; the main characters are two old men,
one confined to a wheelchair and the other one living with Alzheimer’s
disease. Like the analysis undertaken in Chapter 5 with regard to Cortex
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