Angry Old Men

Abstract

Old age has never been one of cinema’s favourite topics. Narrative cinema, historically, mostly favoured stories of young people, and, similarly to television, contributed to the systematic underrepresentation of elderly people in visual media. As a result, up until quite recently, old age as a central theme was mostly confined to well-defined quarters of the medium. In the twenty-first century, however, one may notice a shift in this cinematic treatment of elderly people, and the number and types of age-focused narratives have noticeably grown. The present chapter outlines the conventional ways of the cinematic representation of elderly people, lays out the twenty-first-century shifts in these trends, and explores some of the socio-cultural reasons behind these. It discusses three films in more detail, Tyrannosaur (Paddy Considine 2011), I, Daniel Blake (Ken Loach, 2016) and A Man Called Ove (Hannes Holm, 2015), together with the post-crisis social issues they present.