The Subway Series A Joint Colloquium Between Harvard History of Science and MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society
Charming Augustine & the Dramatization of Mental Disturbance Zoe Beloff Filmmaker and Digital Installation Artist Abstract: My presentation will examine the relationship between this documentation of hysteria in the 19th and early 20th centuries and the birth of narrative cinema. I will screen and discuss, Case History of a Multiple Personality made in the 1920s by a psychoanalyst, Dr. Cornelius C. Wholey and my own film Charming Augustine. Charming Augustine was inspired by series of photographs and texts from the "Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière". It is an experimental narrative based on the case of a young patient, Augustine.The role of the motion studies by Marey and Muybridge in the birth of cinema is well known. However while they attempted to study the mechanics of the body, the doctors at the Salpêtrière, working with similar cameras, aimed to unlock the secrets of their patients minds. I wish to show how, in this environment ,doctors and patients collaborated to give birth to a melodramatic form of representation that would come to flower in the works of D.W. Griffith. I will compare the documentation of this case with that of Mrs X. in Case History of a Multiple Personality, a film that attempts to reveal the inner life of a woman who's unconscious appears to have been invaded by the characters of popular cinema. Monday, March 8, 2010 4pm MIT, E51-095
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