Catherine Clement - Tumblr Posts

The dissection of a madwoman, pictured by Notari, speaks of the effort to make female mental illness a medical issue. Throughout the nineteenth century, pathological anatomy attempts an inquiry into the female malady to map out a distribution of symptoms. However, madness confronts anatomy like a sphinx and falls into the blanks of dialectics of the visible/invisible. As this peculiar malady cannot be localized in any particular spot, it ultimately escapes anatomical exploration. Hysteria is malum sine materia: evidence of it lies only in the spectacle of its symptoms, in the bodily catastrophe enacted as mise-en-scene. Grounded in a process of representation, acting out fantasies translated into motion or lack of motion, the female malady escapes actual anatomical analysis but ends up anatomized by the photographic apparatus. St the turn of the century the pathology of insanity was made visible, locatable, by the dispositif of mechanical reproduction. Photography became instrumental in the construction of a clinical physiognomy of insanity. Furthermore, both the photographic and the filmic camera were essential tools in the analysis of hysteria and its grounding in a theory of mimesis. Enacted as a visual mise-en-scene of bodily configurations, directed by a doctor, hysteria, performed for a camera and a public, exhibits a libido spectandi, a crossing of voyeurism and fetishism, which is not just a simulation but a fiction. This paradigm, inscribed in a proleptic representational movement, points to the scopic regime of the cinematic apparatus and its fictional mode. As Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement put it: “With… the cinema we have moved into the institutionalization of hysteria.” Documented as seen, the elusive female body could now be captured, framed, frozen and cut.

Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari. (via batarde)