Troubled men: ageing, dementia and masculinity in contemporary British crime drama

Focussing on three recent British film and television crime dramas, Mr Holmes, The Fear and the English language version of Wallander, this article argues that older men in these texts are a site through which contemporary social and cultural anxieties about ageing and dementia are played out in highly gendered ways that link to social and philosophical reflections on power, autonomy and selfhood. The dramas, while very different in affective orientation and tone, nonetheless all produce reflections on the meanings of memory loss within figurations of masculinity in the crime genre which have a broader significance for thinking through the representational dilemmas of dementia

I am not particularly despondent yet: the political tone of Jill Craigie’s equal pay film to be a woman

To Be a Woman is a short campaigning film made in 1950-1 by documentary film-maker Jill Craigie. This article offers an account of the film which aims to recover the affective life of both the film text and the archival correspondence between Craigie and the General Secretary of the National Union of Women Teachers, which refers to its production history. The article analyses the 'feeling tones' of the letters that describe both Craigie's attempts to get the film made and her difficulties in distributing it. It is argued that paying attention to these affective aspects of the archive and the film together enables a recalibration of (in a variant of Raymond Williams's formulation) the structure of feminist feeling in both the film and, to an extent, the wider public realm in the immediate post-war period. Paying attention to the film's affective dynamics in this way is also revealing, it is suggested, of its class and race positionality, enabling a more nuanced critical account of its politics

Frames of dementia, grieving otherwise in The Father, Relic and Supernova: representing dementia in recent film

In recent years, the number of ‘critically acclaimed’ films in Europe, the UK and the US about dementia has continued to flourish. This chapter analyses three films, all released in 2020: The Father (Dir. Florian Zeller), The Relic (Dir. Natalie Erika James) and Supernova (Dir. Harry MacQueen). These films differ in significant ways; they cover a range of genres, from the family melodrama to romance and horror. Such genre differences produce a wide range of ‘feeling tones’, with the potential to elicit a range of affective responses in the viewer, which may, in turn, have a transformative impact on how the condition is understood culturally, socially and politically. But how far do these recent films challenge the problems that have already been identified as key questions for thinking through representations of this condition? (Or, more accurately, range of conditions.) Namely, the dangers of entrenching stigma, fear and denial and the production of ‘epistemic injustice’ that ultimately dehumanises and renders abject the character (and, by implication, anyone else) who is identified with dementia? These preoccupations reflect the critical challenges that the field of dementia studies explores. The films in question raise a range of potentially productive issues specifically for critical accounts of the portrayals of dementia on film. For example, has the perspectival shift, widely reported in press reactions to The Father, answered the critique of cinema that it has too often focused on the traumas of the caregiver and failed to attempt to represent the embodied experiences of dementia? If so, to what extent does this shift reflect a more progressive cultural narrative? Supernova explores a same-sex couple’s experiences of dementia. Does this narrative rearticulate the gendered dimensions of dementia and care that have interested critics or does the figuration of loss and grief and the invocation of suicide override these potential considerations? And, finally, what shape does the cultural imaginary of dementia take in The Relic when inflected through the horror genre? What might this offer to critical accounts concerned with questions of personhood and the ethics of representation? This chapter takes the opportunity afforded by this cluster of films all released in the same year to produce a ‘snapshot’ of both the range of representations currently circulating and contemporary critical approaches to the representation of dementia on film