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2019 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

4. Film and the Medical Humanities: The ‘Romantic Science’ of Neurocinema

Authors : Germán Gil-Curiel, Armida de la Garza

Published in: The STEAM Revolution

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Oliver Sacks and Alexander Luria advocated for ‘a romantic science’, a literary form at the intersection of fact and fable, which Sacks employed to introduce lay readers to the complexities of the brain, providing an excellent example of how the two cultures of science and humanities could be reconciled. This is the goal of the medical humanities, which emerged in recognition of the fact that medicine is an art just as much as it is a science. Here we argue there is a particular affinity between film and the brain that the medical humanities, which have hitherto mostly focused on literature, music and the fine arts, could fruitfully develop.

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Footnotes
1
Both visual arts and music are also used therapeutically, encouraging patients to engage in creative pursuits, particularly in psychiatry and in hospitals (Jordanova 2014, p. 43). It is not only consuming but also performing and producing the creative arts that relate medicine to the arts and humanities.
 
2
A pre-film animation device that produces the illusion of motion by displaying a sequence of drawings or photographs showing motion in its progressive phases
 
3
At the moment, however, these findings are being capitalised upon by the Hollywood film industry, which increasingly relies on fMRI techniques as opposed to the previously widely used focus groups, to monitor audience’s reactions to specific scenes in films and indeed to whole films, for creative and marketing purposes (Randall 2011).
 
4
According to Jameson, in society a sort of schizophrenia has eroded historicity ‘in the new forms of our private temporality’ and has established ‘new types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships in the more temporal arts’ (Jameson 1991, p. 6). However, Jameson uses Lacan’s account of schizophrenia as a description rather than a diagnosis, insofar as ‘it seems […] to offer a suggestive aesthetic model’ (p. 26).
 
5
Ever since personal computers became widespread at the turn of the century, an increase in narrative complexity in popular cinema has taken place, a trend variously termed ‘modular narrative’ or ‘database aesthetic’ (Cameron 2008, p. 1). These films articulate a sense of time as divisible and subject to manipulation, essentially as consisting of discrete, segments that can be accessed in a non-linear manner, in the same way that files stored in a computer—or memories in a brain. See, for instance, ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ (2004), ‘Vanilla Sky’ (2001) or ‘Memento’ (2000).
 
6
Many cultures regard hallucinations and dreams as privileged states of consciousness, actively sought through diverse means such as drugs, meditation or isolation. Western cultures however ascribe negative connotations to hallucinations, including madness or brain damage or malfunction, and admitting to them carries a stigma. But hallucinations may well be at the origin of art. The geometric patterns of migraine might prefigure the motifs of aboriginal art and also the visions of light or halos that viewers attributed to saints and apparitions. Lilliputian hallucinations may account for imps, elves and fairies, and ‘ecstatic’ seizures may play a role generating a sense of the divine (Sacks 2012, p. xii).
 
7
As the character of Pessoa puts it later in the film ‘if “the evocation” has the power to recall the dead, if its faculties of medium allow them to recall the deceased, it is because it is also a convocation. The image of the deceased appears and materialises thanks to the [director], it returns to life: we are in the presence of a ghost. The voice [of the director] has the power to establish a dialogue with the ghosts’ or, from our perspective, with memories (Tabucchi, Requiem, 165–166, my translation).
 
8
Felicity Callard and Des Fitzgerald offer a more nuanced approach: they do not see the medical humanities as a meeting point for demarcated territories, but see them instead as a series of knowledges, materials and practices mixed a priori ‘whose ongoing embroilment is entirely indifferent to covetous claims regarding disciplinary contribution’ (2014, p. 16).
 
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Metadata
Title
Film and the Medical Humanities: The ‘Romantic Science’ of Neurocinema
Authors
Germán Gil-Curiel
Armida de la Garza
Copyright Year
2019
Book
The STEAM Revolution

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-89817-9

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-89818-6

Copyright Year: 2019

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89818-6_4