The film industry rediscovers Alzheimer’s! Very recent highlights are the following:
THE FATHER
Anthony Hopkins gives the highly demented 80-year-old Anthony, whose daughter wants to move to Paris and organizes care for him in his London apartment. What is extraordinary about the film is that the viewer never quite realizes which scenario is real and which Anthony is hallucinating – he is placed in the mind of someone who is losing his mind. As a result, the viewer repeatedly loses his footing and his stable-seeming reality turns to quicksand. Hopkins, the Welsh character head, received the Oscar for this – and slept through the award ceremony!
DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD
… is a netflix project in which Kirsten Johnson captures the passing of her father, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, in a documentary film. What sounds macabre at first is an extraordinarily warm-hearted film, which those involved call a “comedy about dying” themselves. Johnson, who incidentally also lost her mother to the disease, shows without any pathos how they dealt with the diagnosis together. For example, she staged the death of her father in small macabre scenes with specially hired stuntmen: sometimes a fallen air conditioner kills him, sometimes he falls from the stairs or a construction worker fatally injures him. In this way, both took away the fear of death by giving it something slapstick-like.
By the way, we already reported on films about Alzheimer’s a long time ago, in “Honig im Kopf” and later “Still Alice“.
My personal favorite, however, is and remains “Like a Single Day”/ “The Notebook” – it requires a lot of handkerchiefs every time…
Two sides of one medal
Abraham is said to have reached 175 years of age – will we humans reach this goal one day? Fact is, we humans are getting older and older, the number of centenarians is growing steadily, “40 is the new 20”, and so on….
General life expectancy continues to rise. While it was still at a tender 29 years globally in the 18th century, in 1950 men were 65 years old and women 69 years old, and in 1980 70, and 77 years old respectively!
We know the reasons, they are among others
- – progress in medicine and technology
- – healthier nutrition and lifestyle
- – (better access to) education
- – decrease in major international conflicts
With age, susceptibility to disease increases; logical, because the body’s defenses are also aging. Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative disease and a form of dementia, discovered by Alois Alzheimer in the early 20th century. He noticed protein deposits in the brain of a deceased patient. Before her death, the patient was remarkably confused and forgetful.
Alzheimer’s has only really entered our consciousness in recent years, when the percentage of older people has risen sharply.
Why are we writing about these films here in the blog? There are also alternatives to tablets in Alzheimer’s therapy, such as transdermal patches – a topic that LTS has been working on for years
Image: LTS Lohmann Therapie-Systeme AG
