The father, the son and the historian:

Dialogues between cinema, family history and Alzheimer's patients

Abstract

This article discusses relationships between family memories, cinema and the cultural history of a patient with Alzheimer's disease. Based on the theoretical and methodological inspiration of Ivan Jablonka (a historian who wrote about his paternal grandparents who, as Communist Jews, were victims of police persecution and sent to Auschwitz in 1943), I  write about family experiences of a man who was victimized by Alzheimer's at the age of 64. Using personal objects and the film The Notebook (2004) as sources of research, the article discusses the relationship between history, testimony and new research objects. Thus, the article analyzes questions about the historian's profession, involving the interface between distancing from the object of research and affective relationships, scientific writing and narrative inventiveness.