Twisted bodies, broken minds

film and neuropsychiatry in the First World War

Edición de la obra Twisted bodies, broken minds

This dissertation explores the discovery and application of cinematography by neurologists and psychiatrists in the three decades after its invention (1895-1925), focusing on its use by physicians in France, Britain and Germany to document the physical symptoms of war neurosis during the First World War. The purpose of the research is to explain the distinct elective affinity that emerged in the early twentieth century between film and medicine, especially to depict extreme mental states. The dissertation investigates why wartime doctors chose to commit these images of their shaking, contorted and often naked patients to film and asks for whom the films were intended. It also explores how the traumatic experience of war determined the nature and reception of these films. Conversely, the dissertation investigates the influences of such images on the depiction of mental illness in cinema and art. Visual discourses surrounding war neurosis were shaped by national context and transnational exchange. The analysis accommodates this by examining the war neurosis films of each country in turn. By analyzing surviving films and the written debate in the medical community provoked by their production and dissemination, the dissertation explores these questions and addresses the set of intertwined themes they raise: the contested relationship between body and mind, medical professionalization in the early twentieth century, relations between doctor and patient, and the impact of medical film on modernism and the 'aesthetics of dismemberment.' The dissertation uses a detailed discussion of 'war neurosis' films in the First World War as a window on larger questions about the use of images in medicine in the early twentieth century, the shifting understanding of the mind and body, and the broader cultural impact of these debates. It argues that the body played a much greater role in the understanding of trauma and emotion during the First World War than has usually been recognised and that many doctors shared the nuanced thinking about visual images that characterised contemporary film theory, sometimes employing film with great subtlety to convey prestige or the distress of their patients.