Medicine and Film

Catalog description

In this course, we examine the historical intersections of cinema and the medical realm. We watch historical examples of educational films created at medical institutions by medical professionals, narrative and documentary films about such institutions, appropriations and re-uses of medical films in art cinema, and fictional films set in medical environments, such as Altered States (1980), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), and The Knick (2014/15). Pairing these films with readings from medical humanities, cultural studies, and critical theory, we consider the ethical dimensions of 1. creating audio visual records of medical ailments (as well as their fictionalized performance and representation); 2. showcasing "authentic" medical environments—their workers and their patients—to the public, and 3. watching such films as spectators who have no direct professional affiliation with the medical realm. Approaching many of these films as time-witness documents that reveal a particular set of values which ground the role of medicine in society, we also examine the aesthetic dimensions of "fitness," "health," and "sickness" that such films put forth, and the broader implications of these aesthetic judgments. We critically interrogate the historical fluidity of terms such as "illness," "disease," and "madness," and the ways these concepts have been weaponized to justify particular actions against certain populations who were deemed undesirable, deviant, or otherwise subordinate to the status quo.