Contagion and the boundaries of the visible: The cinema of world health

Camera Obscura

Volumn 17, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 1-38

  Ostherr, Kirsten ^a  

^a RICE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33646456620     PISSN: 02705346     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-17-2_50-1     Document Type: Review

References (54)

1. For a discussion of the importance of border crossing to debates about postmodern hybridity and postwar globalization, see Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991);
2. see also Lynne Joyrich, Re-viewing Reception: Television, Gender, and Postmodern Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).
3. On the anxious production of coherent subjectivity through postwar Hollywood film, see Kaja Silverman, "Historical Trauma and Male Subjectivity," in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (New York: Routledge, 1990).
4. In a sense, then, the public health films produced in this period fit with the New Deal style of documentary filmmaking Paul Arthur describes, but these films simultaneously invoke the mode of constituting cinematic authority typical of the dominant style of the period and assume a cinema verité epistemological stance based on their faith in the truth of " unmediated" images and sounds. For more on these distinctions, see Paul Arthur, "Jargons of Authenticity (Three American Moments)," in Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993), 108-34.
5. André Bazin, What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 14. Bazin goes on to argue that "every image is to be seen as an object and every object as an image" (16). This is not to elide Bazin's own privileging of deep-focus cinematography, which "reintroduced ambiguity into the structure of the image" (36). Space does not permit an extended discussion of the distinctions between Bazin's emphasis on the indexicality of the image and his praise of the potential ambiguity of cinematic representation; suffice it to say that the public health films under discussion here would fall within Bazin's category of films that "put their faith in reality" and, therefore, maintain their indexical qualities.
6. Tom Gunning, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In) Credulous Spectator," Art and Text 34 (1989): 31-45. The "cinema of attractions" that partook of this "aesthetic of astonishment" included the early medical films of Pathé and the Unseen World series by Charles Urban (1903).
7. The concept of "aesthetic censorship" comes from Martin Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of "Defective " Babies in American Medicine and, Motion Pictures since 1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 123.
8. For an excellent analysis of the early medical and scientific uses of cinema, see Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
9. On the intersection of medicine and more contemporary moving images, see Paula Treichler, Lisa Cartwright, and Constance Penley, eds., The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Science (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
10. John Duffy, The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 193.
11. The definitive analysis of the linkage of disease and difference in the history of immigration to the United States comes from Alan Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the "Immigrant Menace " (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
12. Instead of being disrupted by the advent of microbiology, the discourse of racialized contagion expanded during this period as the pronouncements of public health gained an ever widening audience. See Duffy, The Sanitarians, 179, for a discussion of the ongoing linkage of nonnormative, immigrant bodies with disease in late-nineteenth-century popular media, despite the low incidence of the diseases being discursively invoked.
13. My argument that "globalization" only enters these film genres (and popular culture in general) after World War II is not meant to imply that the American motion picture industry only became "global" in the postwar period. On the contrary, the discursive globalization that I identify lags far behind the economic globalization of cinema. For a thoroughly documented argument that Hollywood was already a global culture industry long before World War II, see Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: America, in the World Film Market 1907-1934 (London: British Film Institute, 1985);
14. see also Ruth Vasey, The World, According to Hollywood, 1918-1939 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997).
15. On the Spanish-American War and early cinema, see Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), esp. 126-33;
16. James Castonguay, "The Spanish-American War in U.S. Media Culture," American Quarterly (1999), available at chnm.gmu.edu/aq/war.
17. See also Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Macmillan, 1990);
18. John Fell, ed., Film before Griffith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
19. Ralph Chester Williams, The United States Public, Health Service, 1798-1950 (Richmond, VA: Whittet and Shepperson, 1951), 86-87.
20. See, for instance, Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: British Film Institute, 1990);
21. Mary Ann Doane, "Temporality, Storage, Legibility: Freud, Marey, and the Cinema," Critical Inquiry 22.2 (1996): 313-43;
22. Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Maret (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
23. For a feminist critique of the status of the female body in these "investigations," see Linda Williams, "Film Body: An Implantation of Perversions," in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 507 - 34.
24. For a critique of the racial uses of early scientific cinema, especially ethnographic documentary, see Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).
25. Rudimentary animation techniques gained a popularity comparable to that enjoyed by microscopic images (and, later, by X-ray images). In fact, numerous public health films would eventually replace microscopic images with stop-action insertions of visible signifiers of germs (such as little black stars at the site of contagion, in "How Disease Is Spread" (1922), part of the Science of Life series). On the Science of Life series, see Martin Pernick, "Sex Education Films, U.S. Government, 1920s," Isis 84.4 (1993): 766-68.
26. Cartwright, Screening the Body, xiii.
27. Pernick, The Black Stork, 119.
28. Robert Eberwein, Sex Ed: Film, Video, and the Framework of Desire (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999).
29. The cinematic mapping of contagion has endured to the present day, as I have discussed extensively in "Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Audiovisual Discourse of World Health" (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2001).
30. Qtd. in Bess Furman, A Profile of the United Slates Public Health Service, 1798-1948 (Washington, DC: US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1950), 360,
31. Williams, The United States Public Health Service, 93.
32. Qtd. in Furman, A Profile of the United States Public Health Service, 373-74.
33. Williams, The United Stales Public Health Service, 93.
34. As JoAnne Brown has argued, in a discussion of the linkage of "modern conveniences" with invisible germs in early-twentieth-century advertising, "The telephone, with its close proximity to the mouth and ear and its conveyance of the invisible across a great distance, was a particular concern" ("Crime, Commerce, and Contagionism: The Political Languages of Public Health and the Popularization of Germ Theory in the United States, 1870-1950," in Scientific Authority and Twentieth-Century America, ed. Ronald G. Walters [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997], 68).
35. For a complete history of the US Film Service, see Richard Dyer MacCann, The People's Films: A Political History of U.S. Government Motion Pictures (New York: Hastings, 1973).
36. For additional examples, see Fight Syphilis (1942),
37. Tsutsugamushi: Prevention (1945)
38. The Fight against the Communicable Diseases (1950)
39. A Monthly Review from Europe (1952)
40. The, Silent Invader (1957)
41. Hospital Sepsis: A Communicable Disease (1959).
42. The gap between image and sound in this film is similar to the gap between story and discourse theorized by Emile Benvéniste in Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971)
43. taken up in film and television studies by Margaret Morse, "The Television News Personality and Credibility: Reflections on the News in Transition," in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 55-79.
44. On the homosocial/homosexual naval collapse, see George Chauncey, "Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion? Homosexual Identities and the Construction of Sexual Boundaries in the World War I Era," in Gender and American History since 1890, ed. Barbara Melosh (New York: Routledge, 1992), 72-105.
45. On the role of the railroad in discourses of modernity engaged with the threat of the unknown masses in the public sphere, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
46. For a recent account of the interconnections between the cinema and the railroad, see Lvnne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
47. As McClintock explains, "According to the colonial version of this trope, imperial progress across the space of empire is figured as a journey backward in time to an anachronistic moment of prehistory. . Geographical difference across space is figured as a historical difference across time" (Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest [New York: Routledge, 1995]. 40).
48. As Mary Ann Doane has argued, "Despite a number of experiments with other types of sound/image relationships . synchronous dialogue remains the dominant form of sonorous representation in the cinema" ("The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space," in Rosen, Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, 336).
49. The strategies by which the classical Hollywood cinema constructs an apparent unity of image and sound are extensively analyzed in David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 5th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997).
50. On countercinematic oppositions to Hollywood form and style, see Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, "Cinema/Ideology/ Criticism," and Comolli and Narboni, "Parenthesis or Indirect Route: An Attempt at Theoretical Definition of the Relationship between Cinema and Politics," both in Screen Reader I: Cinema/Ideology/Politics, ed. Society for Education in Film and Television (London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1977), 2-11 and 23-35;
51. Colin MacCabe, "Realism and the Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian Theses," Screen 15.2 (1974): 7-27;
52. Paul Willemen, "The Third Cinema Question: Notes and Reflections," in Questions of Third Cinema, ed. Jim Pines and Willemen (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 1-29.
53. On the economic global dominance of the Hollywood film industry, see Tino Balio, ed., Hollywood in the Age of Television (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990); see also note 13, above.
54. Doane, "The Voice in the Cinema," 335-36.