Review of Ageing, Dementia and Time in Film: Temporal Performances

Drawing from film studies, cultural gerontology, and dementia studies, MaoHui Deng conducts interdisciplinary research on films about aging and dementia through a temporal framework--an approach that recognizes time as fluid and individually experienced.His monograph, Ageing, Dementia and Time in Film: Temporal Performances, explores how people living with dementia navigate their unique perceptions of time and how these diverse temporal experiences are depicted and understood in films.Deng encourages a "temporally relational worldview" (5) to challenge the linear, homogeneous clock time that Others people living with dementia under the medical gaze.Situating his work in conversation with the growing attention to the aging population and the scholarly call to imagine different "ageing futures" by Linn J. Sandberg and Barbara L. Marshall (qtd. in Deng 13), Deng offers new insights into relationality, dementia care, and the construction of age-based difference.By examining eleven contemporary films primarily from Asia, he complements existing research done on films about dementia across Europe, North America, and South America.I would first like to highlight the study's major contributions to the fields of film studies, cultural gerontology, and dementia studies, namely: 1) Rather than viewing film as representing reality, Deng analyzes cinematic temporalities as integral to the time of the material world, building on Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of cinema and time.Focusing on filmic form, Deng closely analyzes audio-visual details to elaborate on "temporal performances" (13), a term he uses to show how subjects perform and are performed by time, i.e., the various ways people experience, perceive, and enact time.In doing so, he highlights the multifaceted, interconnected, and dynamic temporal negotiations of people living with dementia.2) The book centers around relationality, engaging with the relational approach advocated within dementia studies and cultural gerontology, which views aging not as an isolated or individual experience but as deeply interconnected and shaped by