This book makes the argument that films about dementia encourage a temporally relational worldview. To make this claim, this introduction begins with the Clock Drawing Test (CDT), which is one of the most common tests administered to people suspected to be living with dementia. The CDT requires the individual to draw a clock, fill in the numbers and, after which, set the clock to a specified time (usually at ten past eleven). The test is deceptively simple but actually examines multiple cognitive functions that highlight the neurodegeneration experienced by people living with dementia: it requires the person to have adequate auditory language skills in order to comprehend the verbal instructions; to retrieve and reconstruct the visual representation of the clock in their visual memory; to coordinate their visuospatial system with their graphomotor skills in order to translate their visual image into drawing; to possess a certain level of numerical knowledge so as to label the hours on the clock face accurately; to be able to think abstractly so that ten past eleven can be understood temporally; to be able to resist and suppress the perceptual pull towards the number ten on the clock face so that the hour hand can be positioned correctly; and, finally, to be able to concentrate.

A clock drawn by someone without dementia will largely be able to accurately lay out the numbers in an ascending order on the clock face and identify the correct prescribed time (though the length of the hour and minute hand might not necessarily be adequately distinguished). A clock drawn by the person living with dementia, on the other hand, might include extra numbers, have the hours laid out in an incorrect order, and not tell the correct time at all. Furthermore, as Morris Freedman et al. observe, ‘patients with more severe dementia show more deficits on clock drawings as compared to those with mild impairment’ (Freedman et al. 1994: 63). Put differently, the chances of an individual being diagnosed with dementia become more certain when they are unable to tell the time on the clock, a device that conditions and locks us into thinking about time linearly and homogeneously.