This chapter marks a development beyond the examination of temporal performances between humans to also consider the wider ecologies of temporal performances that a person living with dementia might be in. By ‘ecologies of temporal performances’, I refer to both the networks of temporal performances and the study of temporal performances in and of itself. The former is concerned with how a person living with dementia is performing and performed by the temporalities of the human and non-human phenomena that they are entangled with, and the latter is concerned with the method of studying these enmeshed temporal performances. This understanding of ‘ecology’ is drawn from the theatre and performance studies scholar Baz Kershaw, who notes that the word ‘fundamentally emphasises the inseparable and reflexive interrelational and interdependent qualities of systems as systems’ (Kershaw 2007: 16; emphasis in original). In drawing the audience's attention to the multiple temporalities in negotiation, films about dementia not only encourage us to think about how we, humans, are temporally entangled with non-human phenomena, but to also consider how we might methodologically think through this entanglement.

I concentrate on the former in this chapter, and will go on to think through the epistemological concerns in the next chapter. Here, through two case study films, I make the claim that a person living with dementia is embedded in ecologies of temporal performances. These two films are Pandora's Box (Yeşim Ustaoğlu, 2008, Turkey/France/Germany/Belgium) and Happy End (Michael Haneke, 2017, France/Austria/Germany). In Pandora's Box, Nusret, the matriarch of the family, the person living with dementia, lives alone by a mountain near the Black Sea. As her condition deteriorates, her three children bring her back to Istanbul so that she can be cared for by people. In Happy End, Georges Laurent, who is living with dementia, is the patriarch of an extremely wealthy French family. As the film progresses, he interacts with different surroundings so as to continually try and commit suicide. These two films, though tonally and narratively dissimilar, draw the audience's attention to the ways that the person living with dementia is not just performed by the temporalities of human beings, but also by the temporalities of other non-human phenomena, underscoring ‘how ageing is a temporal process of embodied transformations that engages with other ageings that surround us’ (Sawchuk 2019: 217).