As Far as I Can Record: Constructing the Representations of Living with Dementia in a Personal Documentary Film

Constructing the Representations of Living with Dementia in a Personal Documentary Film

Abstract

This account draws on my experience as a practitioner filmmaker documenting my father’s experience of living with dementia. The scope is to analyze how the intimate relationship between me as a filmmaker and the people portrayed in the film shapes the construction of the visual representation of the experience of living with de- mentia. This reflection is placed in the larger frame of the cinematic and media portrayal of mental lines. Visual portrayal of circumstances that involve people struggling with mental disorders, calls for a particular awareness of the responsibility and accountability of documentary filmmakers who assume such endeavors. Personal audio-visual engagements have been viewed as a possible answer to the problem of representation raised by the ethnographic and documentary practice. They are part of a broader ‘social movement that blurs the lines between public and private life’ (Aufderheide 1997). Throughout the process, the filmmaker assumes interchangeable roles of both in- sider and outsider. The subjective position of the filmmaker subverts the aspiration to objectivity, realism, and precision of traditional documentary discourses. Drawing on my experience as a practitioner filmmaker documenting my father’s experience of living with dementia, I discuss the methodological challenges that emerged during the process of film production. What are the cinematic strategies of reinterpretation, reconstruction, and understand- ing of self and otherness? How does such a level of access and intimacy affect the construction of the narrative of living with dementia?