FMS 395-02 - Advanced Special Topic: Madness and the Moving Image

4 credits (Spring)

Cross-listed as: ARH 395-01. This course examines how filmmakers, artists, psychologists, and psychiatrists have envisioned the concept of madness through the moving image. We will begin with the medical gaze in early cinema, moving through representations of psychotherapy, the politics of deinstitutionalization, cinematic conceptions of trauma, and the question of madness and creativity. Drawing on early medical films, self-help media, narrative representations, documentary, and experimental cinema, this course will consider the particular ways that the representation of madness allows filmmakers to shape conceptions and views of medicine, media, war, race, gender, and sexuality. Through the study of these varied forms of cinema, students will collectively design a curatorial project on the topic of madness and the moving image, with each student developing and contributing an individual research project as part of a group catalogue.

Prerequisite: Second-year standing.
Instructor: Ely