Movies, Music and Memory

Tools for Wellbeing in Later Life

Julia Hallam, Lisa Shaw

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839092015
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

Presenting research findings from recent studies which use innovative, creative approaches, including pilot projects led by the authors in the UK and Brazil, this book provides an accessible, timely, practical and jargon-free overview of how music and films are currently used in nursing homes, dementia wards and day-care centres for the older population.
Drawing on the expertise of researchers, health care professionals and carers, the book looks at the experience of both stakeholder groups - carers and the cared-for. It provides useful, unique insights into how we might tackle the pressing real-world challenge posed by an ageing global population and attendant increase in the number of those living with dementia.
Complemented by a downloadable 'best-practice' toolkit that contains tips and materials relating to film- and music-related activities for use by carers (both professionals and family members), this book fills a gap in the market by providing both academic responses and practical solutions to a critical global challenge.

1

Cinema, Memory and Wellbeing: Pilot Projects in Liverpool and Brazil

Lisa Shaw and Julia Hallam

Abstract

This chapter explores three different Cinema, Memory and Wellbeing pilot projects, two of which were carried out in Liverpool and the other in Petrópolis, a city of comparable size in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It begins by discussing our motivations for developing these projects and how we drew on our previous research relating to films and cinema-going. It then presents the three different projects, showing how each was tailored to the care context in question (a residential nursing home and a day-care centre on Merseyside, and a GP practice in Brazil), explaining how they were conducted and discussing the results, with a view to informing and improving future initiatives of this type. We also show how our findings have shaped the creation of the ‘best-practice’ toolkit designed to enable activities coordinators, carers and health professionals to optimize the benefits of using films to stimulate memories and reminiscence and promote an improved sense of wellbeing among older people and those living with dementia. (This toolkit is available to download from the Emerald website in English: https://books.emeraldinsight.com/page/detail/Selfies/?K=9781787437173). We recount in detail our practical experiences of setting up and running screenings in diverse environments, how we set about trying to ‘measure’ or at least gather some tangible evidence of the wellbeing benefits of these events, and provide numerous examples of the reminiscences that they generated, as well as the feedback on the projects that we received from both the people who participated and the people who care for them.

Introduction

Colleagues at the University of Liverpool, but above all great friends who both had older parents and a passionate commitment to developing projects to engage with and support the local community, in late 2014 Lisa Shaw (Professor of Brazilian Studies) and Julia Hallam (Professor of Film and Media Studies) came up with the idea of combining their interests and teaming up with care homes in the Merseyside area to create the project Cinema, Memory and Wellbeing. In this chapter, we explore how our different research interests and approaches have coalesced to inform the development of various linked pilot projects and the toolkit that we have developed for use by care workers and volunteers working in day-care and residential settings. These linked projects use film and music to improve the wellbeing of older people in the UK and Brazil, including those living with a dementia-related cognitive impairment, in nursing home and health-care settings and as part of activities organized for those living independently.

Julia has published books and articles on various aspects of film and media and led research on the relationship between film, place and memory as part of the government-funded Arts and Humanities Research Council ‘City in Film’ project. ¹ While working with amateur filmmaking organizations from Merseyside, Julia was struck by how frequently the filmmakers were asked to show their films to local groups and organizations catering primarily for older people, where they provided a common point of recognition for discussion, reminiscence and social engagement. Wirral-based filmmaker and collector Angus Tilston regularly screened his amateur movies of the city in past times to local groups and in care homes. As Julia says: ‘When I discussed the screening of these films with him, he talked about how the films stimulated a collective memory that was often shared by the group and gave them something to talk about. He was convinced that these screenings had a therapeutic benefit’.

Lisa, on the other hand, has published books on Brazilian popular music and cinema, particularly the musical comedy tradition known as chanchada, a genre that launched the career of Carmen Miranda in Brazil before she was catapulted to international stardom in Hollywood in the 1940s. During research for her book Carmen Miranda (Shaw, 2013), Lisa was struck by the numbers of older fans of the star from all over the world (including her own mother and auntie from Runcorn in North West England!), who were keen to tell her about the therapeutic value of watching one of her films on DVD today. Lisa discovered that all the older fans she interviewed still use Miranda's films and music as a way of enhancing their emotional wellbeing. Their testimonies reveal the ability of musical film to stimulate positive emotions, particularly among older people. One fan in Brazil commented: ‘For me, Carmen Miranda's most important legacy was that she always brought joy to people – even today and without being physically present.’ Another older Australian fan said: ‘Her legacy to the world is in one word – happiness. It is impossible to feel down when you watch her on film.’ As British super-fan Ivan Jack succinctly put it in an interview with Lisa: ‘She left us all happy. I'll never forget her.’ Another fan in Brazil confessed that he particularly listens to her songs or watches her films when he is feeling tired, stressed, angry or sad, adding: ‘Carmen has the power to make me quickly feel joyful again, to find peace of mind.’

In her research into the Brazilian musical comedy tradition known as the chanchada, Lisa had studied local audiences' identificatory responses to its film stars in the 1940s and 1950s. She had concluded that the success of these films hinged in large part on their ability to engage spectators in identifying with the characters on screen, and the stars who played them, as they constructed their own cultural meanings and sense of selfhood. Drawing on work such as that of Annette Kuhn and Jackie Stacey, she also explored the role of audience memory in cultural constructions of identity, conducting a small parallel study of how older audiences in Brazil today remember their relationship with the homegrown screen idols of their youth. She was particularly inspired by the way that Stacey emphasized in her work the importance of social identities and cultural differences, such as gender, race and class, in determining how audiences of the past and present interpret films and their stars. As Stacey concluded:

Stars were as important for cinema spectators as the narratives of the films in which they appeared. They offered one of the key sources of pleasure to the cinema audiences. Stars were the most common reason given for the choice of film made in the 1940s by cinema-goers in my research(Stacey, 1994, p. 106)

In her research into film stardom in Brazil, Lisa had explored how the chanchada musical comedies sought to attract a wide audience by adopting formulaic elements that appealed to both genders, and to people of different racial and regional backgrounds. She furthermore discovered that in spite of the low-brow connotations of this cinematic tradition, audience members were drawn from a variety of social classes. These films, which are now increasingly available on DVD, thus provided a rich source of material to engage with a vast spectrum of ‘third-age’ Brazilians today, and particularly those born in the 1930s and 1940s. Those born in later decades were also likely to have seen these films either at the cinema as children, or in their adolescence and early adulthood, when they began to appear on free-to-air television. Carmen Miranda's Hollywood musicals, which Lisa had studied in depth for a book about the star, were also screened in Brazil in the 1940s and 1950s and had huge repercussions in the press.

These research findings gave Lisa the idea of putting her extensive collection of Carmen Miranda films and Brazilian chanchadas to good use. Having visited several nursing homes in Merseyside and Cheshire, not least when her father required residential care, Lisa was struck by how television and DVD collections were being under-utilized to stimulate residents cognitively and emotionally. There was clearly a need for a much more interactive experience of film viewing and a creative, dynamic engagement with audio-visual material that could improve the participants' sense of wellbeing. The Cinema, Memory and Wellbeing project that we created for use on Merseyside uses a combination of archive film footage of Liverpool and clips from Carmen Miranda's spectacular Hollywood musicals, to trigger memories and spark reminiscences among older, care home audiences. We were keen to explore the emotional wellbeing benefits of group reminiscence of this kind. With the financial support of a University of Liverpool Knowledge Exchange Voucher, in March 2015 we held two pilot Cinema, Memory and Wellbeing events for residents of a nursing home in Liverpool. The audience responded enthusiastically to a series of short clips of documentary footage of scenes of the city in the 1950s and early 1960s, as well as excerpts from feature films shot on location in Liverpool. Clearly fascinated by these locations associated with their younger lives, they began to reminisce with each other. Lisa then took the project to Brazil, where she worked with a GP in a practice in the city of Petrópolis, in the state of Rio de Janeiro. With some minor modifications, the methodology proved to be equally effective in eliciting shared reminiscences and wellbeing benefits among older Brazilians. The results of all these projects are discussed in more detail below.

Pilot Project at a Nursing Home in Liverpool

We are always looking for ways to help our residents maintain community connections and feel part of the wider city around them – which this project did.

Representative of the Nursing Home ²

In England, the care home sector is run primarily by private companies, charities and sometimes the local council who admit older people who are struggling to live independently even with the help of daily carers, relatives and friends. As well as accommodation and meals, these homes provide help with personal and/or nursing care. Admission is usually at the request of the individual in consultation with family members following a needs assessment by a social worker or care manager. We worked with the activities coordinator at a privately owned nursing home in Liverpool to devise a film-related activity tailored to the backgrounds and interests of the residents of the home. Most of them were born and raised in Liverpool during the 1930s; by the 1950s, they were living their young adult lives in a city recovering from the traumas of the Second World War. None of the residents knew each other before coming to the home. Some were born in the docklands, an area alongside the river Mersey and adjacent to the city centre that had been heavily bombed during the war, others in the surrounding inner-city housing estates and nineteenth-century terraces. We were aware that the sense of loss of family members and friends, and the traumas of re-housing in the new satellite estates outside the city, might be triggered during the reminiscence sessions. We were therefore careful in our selection of material, choosing short clips (between 3 and 10 minutes in length) of well-known streets, buildings and beaches from popular British Ealing Studios comedy films such as The Magnet (Frend, 1950) and ‘social problem’ films such as Violent Playground (Dearden, 1958), the latter clips focussed, for the most part, on a car chase through streets left virtually intact after the air raids. A large number of clips were drawn from amateur footage that focussed on activities such as car racing at Aintree (now known for the Grand National horse race), football (matches at Everton and Liverpool Football Clubs), city centre night clubs, shopping areas and work activities on the docks and in the new factories. Lisa selected spectacular musical numbers from some of Carmen Miranda's most popular Hollywood films that had been screened in Liverpool in the 1940s and subsequently screened on the BBC in the 1970s, such as Down Argentine Way (Cummings, 1940), That Night in Rio (Cummings, 1941) and The Gangs All Here (Berkeley, 1943).

While we were waiting for the necessary Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) checks to be conducted and for approval from the University of Liverpool's Research Ethics Committee, an easily transportable projector and sound system had to be bought that would meet the requirements of screenings planned for Liverpool and Petrópolis. (For the Liverpool screenings, we borrowed a projector screen, but for the Brazilian screenings, Lisa thought she would have to improvise with a large white sheet and hopes of a helping hand or two to hang it on the wall! In the end she managed to borrow a large portable screen.) One of the most challenging aspects of audio-visually stimulated memory work, as the discussions of similar projects in the Introduction reveal, is demonstrating the ways in which it can enhance cognitive engagement and a sense of wellbeing. We therefore decided to record on video the sessions to enable us to reflect on the events, as well as providing us with a permanent, qualitative record of interaction with the participants. We also consulted a Professor of Psychology and Public Mental Health experienced in measuring wellbeing, Professor Rhiannon Corcoran from the Institute of Life and Human Sciences at the University of Liverpool, who helped us to develop a set of tailored instruments for measuring wellbeing using nationally recognized assessments of cognitive abilities and quality-of-life indicators. ³ With Rhiannon's help, we devised a series of simple questionnaires that required responses from the residents the day before the screening, immediately following the screening and 24 hours later (see Appendix). Our intention, following the conventional way of administering the tests, was to ask the staff at the care home to undertake the first stage with the residents the day before the screening, then to work with care home staff to administer the second questionnaire immediately after the event, and to follow up with the final one on the day after the screening.

Due to the research dimension of the project, we needed to ensure that everyone attending the screening was made aware of, and consented to, being recorded on video, that they knew that individual conversations might be recorded and that we would be asking people to complete questionnaires. We also asked the residents for permission to use their comments and images in any publications that might result from the project, be that in on-line postings or any other form of research dissemination. The activities coordinator kindly undertook the task of helping us to explain the project to everyone and obtaining informed consent. With help from the care assistants, we were then able to administer the wellbeing questionnaires the day before the screening, immediately after each session and the following day, to most of the participants, some of whom had mild cognitive impairments linked to a dementia diagnosis.

Screening films in unknown settings and engaging the audience in discussion about them is part of what teachers of film and media arts do; nonetheless, nursing home and day-care settings present particular challenges and opportunities. The practical aspects of preparing to screen the films were discussed with the activities coordinator at the nursing home in Liverpool; we needed to ensure that residents could view the screen comfortably and hear the soundtracks as well as interact with us and each other. The large residents lounge was made available, which ensured that all those wanting to participate could be seated comfortably. Power points, extension cables and other trailing wires had to be secured to prevent any tripping hazards or accidents. The projector and the presenter had to be carefully positioned to avoid obstructing vision and maximize the size of the image. We then offered a film and media student keen to gain some experience for his CV the opportunity to video the proceedings; we also had a handheld sound recorder to capture discussions with individuals.

Capturing Wellbeing Benefits in a Nursing Home Setti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Serires editor
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• About the Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Mapping the Terrain – Film and Music in Third-Age Care
• 1. Cinema, Memory and Wellbeing: Pilot Projects in Liverpool and Brazil
• 2. Music, Memory and Wellbeing: A Pilot Project in Liverpool
• 3. Music and Film in Dementia Care in Brazil and on Merseyside
• Conclusions and Future Developments
• Afterword
• Appendix: Cinema, Memory and Wellbeing Questionnaires
• References
• Index