As part of the AGE-C project on ageing and gender in European cinema, the NECSUS special section on ageing seeks to engage with the temporal dimension encapsulated by the term ageing. Conceived as ‘a movement through time’, ageing is inherently bound to process, and therefore to narrative. Co-written by Luis Freijo, Asja Makarević and Belén Vidal, the Introduction presents some of the key questions arising at the intersection of media studies and the growing multidisciplinary field of cultural gerontology. How do moving image representations inform perceptions of biological, chronological, and functional age? How do they perpetuate or contest ageist myths in culture? And perhaps most importantly, how might they be narrated within the process-bound temporality that ageing entails? The contributions to this special section approach ageing as a dynamic, contested territory, riddled with particularities and yet lending a powerful lens through which to analyse audiovisual media.
Special Issue on Ageing in Journal NECSUS edited by Belén Vidal, Luis Freijo, and Asja Makarević