[Sci-tech-public] Colloquium - March 8th with Zoe Beloff

[Bianca Sinausky]

“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 1920’s 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 patient’s 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

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/sci-tech-public/attachments/20100304/c224608d/attachment.htm