Teaser for The Midnight Archive, a New Web Video Series Based Around the Event/Gallery Space Observatory, Brooklyn

Film maker, friend, and many-time Observatory lecturer Ronni Thomas finds Observatory--the event and gallery space I founded with some friends in Brooklyn New York a few years back--inspiring. So inspiring, in fact, that he has created a new web-based video series entitled "The Midnight Archive: Tales from the Observatory" which will use as a launching off point the events, classes, field trips and personalities to be found in this space.

This Friday night we will be hosting a launch party for The Midnight Archive at The Coney Island Museum as part of my ongoing exhibition The Great Coney Island Spectacularium; more on that party can be found here.

In the meantime, above is a teaser for the show, which features five Observatory presenters--including our self-taught anthropomorphic taxidermy and mummification instructors--and is graced by the music of Stephen Coates of The Real Tuesday Weld. And following is what auteur Ronni Thomas has to say about this new series and its inspiration:

About an ODD year ago, or so, i had the honor to lecture at the ever impressive Brooklyn Observatory in, well... Brooklyn, NY. I was amazed at the turnout - I could not believe so many people were interested in such strange topics. Talking to Joanna Ebenstein of Morbid Anatomy and the Observatory itself, it seemed apparent that there was a demand for a series on the exotic and the esoteric.

Hence - The Midnight Archive... Its not only a web series but a collection - so to speak - of some of the unique people, collections, careers and artifacts from the Observatory as well as around the world. Consider it a sampler, an Observatory Sampler - like those Whitman's Chocolate Samplers (only don't crush each of these to figure out whats inside). The Series launches Friday August 12th at Coney Island USA - for details please email ronni [at] themidnightarchive.com

Title Theme by the ever amazing Stephen Coates (The Real Tuesday Weld, Lazarus and the Plane Crash) http://www.tuesdayweld.com.

Stay tuned for full episodes at themidnightarchive.com. For more on Friday's launch party--where at least one entire episode will be screened--click here. For more on Observatory--the space that inspired it all!--click here.

Dead Cities! Victorian Hair Scrapbooks! Automata Demonstrations! This Week and Beyond at Observatory!

I am very excited to announce a whole slew of Morbid Anatomy Presents events taking place at Observatory, this week and beyond. Tonight, join Colin Dickey--author of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius--as he attempts to "conjoin a history of the necropolis with a history of ghost towns and abandoned urban landscapes." This Thursday, join Collector David Freund for a demonstration and discussion of Victorian scrapbooks holding everything "from inventive collages to seaweed compositions to artistically arranged feathers to advertising fragments to human hair to basically anything else that could be glued down." In July, make mummies at one of our popular mummy workshops, take in some “Theatrum Mundi,” investigate postmodern mermaidia, parse the politics of taxidermy, and/or witness antique automatons go through their motions live and in person!

Full list follows; hope very much to see you at one or more of these fantastic events!

Dead Cities / Cities of the Dead: An illustrated lecture by Colin Dickey, author of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius
Date: TONIGHT: Monday, June 20th
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5

Tonight, author Colin Dickey will conjoin a history of the necropolis with a history of ghost towns and abandoned urban landscapes. The necropolis has always been a vital feature of the city, from its earliest incarnations to today. The dead body has long been regarded as both sacred and polluting, so what does a community do with thousands of bodies? From medieval chapels literally bursting with the bones of the dead to the sanitized splendor of the modern funeral industry, how we treat the dead reveal much about how we view the living. How we treat dead cities--from California ghost towns to Ukraine's Pripyat, just outside of Chernobyl--begs a different question: what do we abandon, and why? What does all this urban ruin say about our future? Colin Dickey will intertwine these two forms of urban death to see what it all adds up to.

Colin Dickey is the author of Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius, and the co-editor (with Nicole Antebi and Robby Herbst) of Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Cabinet, TriQuarterly, and The Santa Monica Review. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, he now lives in Los Angeles. This is a return visit for Colin, who lectured on Cranioklepty earlier this year at Observatory to great acclaim; more on that lecture can be found here.

Image: The Metropolitan Sepulcher, a plan for a London cemetery circa 1820

Home-Made Visual Albums: An Artifact-Based Lecture with Collector David Freund
Date: THIS THURSDAY June 23
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Part of the Out of the Cabinet: Tales of Strange Objects and the People Who Love Them Series, presented by Morbid Anatomy and Morbid Anatomy Scholar in Residence Evan Michelson

Home-Made Visual Albums were incredibly popular productions between the the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century; these scrap books contained artful arrangements of a wide range of materials, from inventive collages to seaweed compositions to artistically arranged feathers to advertising fragments to human hair to basically anything else that could be glued down. More than simply collections or scrap books, these albums can also be seen as diaries, and project a sense of their absent makers through imaginative content, arresting design, obsession, and, above all, narrative.

Collector and artist David Freund has been collecting--and classifying, into over 40 categories of his own invention-- these enigmatic and fascinating artifacts over the last 30 years. Tonight, join Mr. Freund as be discusses the history and taxonomy of these artifacts and presents a number of exquisite examples from his collection for your delight and perusal.

David Freund earned his MFA from the Visual Studies Workshop after a BA in Theater at UC Davis. Professor Emeritus of Photography at Ramapo College of New Jersey, he chaired its Visual Arts for twenty years. He also taught at Pratt and was a Dayton-Hudson Distinguished Visiting Artist at Carleton College. His NEA photographs showed gas station environments nationwide. Other grants included New York’s CAPS program and NYC’s Institute for Art and Urban Resources. During a Light Works residency Freund curated a regional photo post card exhibition, Penny Publishing. Exhibitions include Light Gallery and Eastman House. Among collections with his work are MOMA, the Corcoran, MFA Houston, and the Bibliotheque Nationale.

Image: Detail from one of David Freund's collection of home-made visual albums from the 19th and early 20th Century

And onward and upward in the weeks to come:

• July 18: SCREENING: “Theatrum Mundi” Production of Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana"
• July 21: Sirens & Society: Postmodern Mermaidia: A Screening & Panel Discussion featuring Prof. Amy Herzog, Mica Scalin, Ilise “The Lady Aye” Carter and Bambi the Mermaid
• July 24: Class: Mummification: Learn the art and ritual of animal mummification with instructor Sorceress Cagliastro
• July 28: Shrinking and Other Acts of Sabotage: An illustrated lecture with Petra Lange-Berndt, University College London
• July 29: Living Dolls: The Guinness Collection of Mechanical Musical Instruments and Automata at the Morris Museum: A live automata demonstration and illustrated lecture by Jere Ryder, Conservator of the Guinness Collection of Mechanical Musical Instruments and Automata at the Morris Museum
• July 31: Class: Mummification: Learn the art and ritual of animal mummification with instructor Sorceress Cagliastro

You can find out more about these events on the Observatory website by clicking here. You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

Le Cochon Danseur (Dancing Pig), 1907

Le Cochon Danseur (Dancing Pig), 1907, described by IMDB thusly: "A pig dressed in fancy clothes flirts with a pretty girl, but she humiliates him and tears off his suit; she then makes him dance for her affections."

Wow.

Thanks to esteemed Congress of Curious Peoples participant Simon Werrett for introducing me to this fascinating piece of cinematic history with a decidedly early Coney Island bent!

From the DVD Saved From The Flames - 54 Rare and Restored Films 1896 - 1944; more on that here.

"Proteus" Screening with Film Maker David Lebrun, Observatory, April 1st

This April Fools Day, why not join Morbid Anatomy and Observatory for a screening of one of our absolute favorite films, Proteus, featuring an introduction by--and Q and A with--the film's maker, David Lebrun, in a rare East Coast appearance?

The film Proteus details the biography and struggles of biologist and artist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) who, as the copy for the film describes, "found himself torn between seeming irreconcilables: science and art, materialism and religion, rationality and passion, outer and inner worlds." Lebrun tells Haeckel's tale with inventive and almost chillingly beautiful animation constructed almost entirely from 19th Century archival images, with the most stirring and awe-inspiring sequences created from quick successions of scores of Haeckel's astonishing depictions of protista, as seen above in some of his drawings, and in the video clip at about 5:10 minutes in.

We are thrilled to be hosting two screenings of the film, one at 7 PM and one at 9 PM, in conjunction with Proteus Gowanus Interdisciplinary Gallery and Reading Room. Film maker David Lebrun will be on hand at each to introduce the film and to answer any questions you might have.

Please pass this on to any interested parties, and hope very very much to see you there!

Date: Friday, April 1
Time: 7:00 PM and 9:00 PM (2 Screenings)
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy in partnership with Proteus Gowanus

The ocean is a wilderness reaching 'round the globe, wilder than
a Bengal jungle, and fuller of monsters, washing the very wharves
of our cities and the gardens of our sea-side residences.
-- Henry David Thoreau, 1864

For the nineteenth century, the world beneath the sea played much the same role that "outer space" played for the twentieth. The ocean depths were at once the ultimate scientific frontier and what Coleridge called "the reservoir of the soul": the place of the unconscious, of imagination and the fantastic. Proteus uses the undersea world as the locus for a meditation on the troubled intersection of scientific and artistic vision. The one-hour film is based almost entirely on the images of nineteenth century painters, graphic artists, photographers and scientific illustrators, photographed from rare materials in European and American collections and brought to life through innovative animation.

The central figure of the film is biologist and artist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). As a young man, Haeckel found himself torn between seeming irreconcilables: science and art, materialism and religion, rationality and passion, outer and inner worlds. Through his discoveries beneath the sea, Haeckel would eventually reconcile these dualities, bringing science and art together in a unitary, almost mystical vision. His work would profoundly influence not only biology but also movements, thinkers and authors as disparate as Art Nouveau and Surrealism, Sigmund Freud and D.H. Lawrence, Vladimir Lenin and Thomas Edison.

The key to Haeckel's vision was a tiny undersea organism called the radiolarian. Haeckel discovered, described, classified and painted four thousand species of these one-celled creatures. They are among the earliest forms of life. In their intricate geometric skeletons, Haeckel saw all the future possibilities of organic and created form. Proteus explores their metamorphoses and celebrates their stunning beauty and seemingly infinite variety in animation sequences based on Haeckel's graphic work.

Around Haeckel's story, Proteus weaves a tapestry of poetry and myth, biology and oceanography, scientific history and spiritual biography. The legend of Faust and the alchemical journey of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner are part of the story, together with the laying of the transatlantic telegraphic cable and the epic oceanographic voyage of HMS Challenger. All these threads lead us back to Haeckel and the radiolaria. Ultimately the film is a parable of both the difficulty and the possibility of unitary vision.

DAVID LEBRUN has served as producer, director, writer, cinematographer, animator and/or editor of more than sixty films, among them films on the Mazatec Indians of Oaxaca, a 1960s traveling commune, Tibetan mythology and a year in the life of a Maya village. He edited the Academy-award winning documentary Broken Rainbow, on the Hopi and Navajo of the American Southwest. Proteus premiered at Sundance and has won numerous international awards. The two-hour documentary feature Breaking the Maya Code (2008) tells the story of the 200-year quest to decipher the hieroglyphic script of the ancient Maya of central America; a drastically shortened version was broadcast on the PBS series NOVA and has been seen on television around the world. His experimental and animated works include the animated films Tanka (1976) and Metamorphosis (2010), works for multiple and variable-speed projectors such as Wind Over Water (1983), and a 2007 multimedia performance piece, Maya Variations, created in collaboration with composer Yuval Ron. Lebrun has taught film production and editing at the California Institute of the Arts and has curated numerous art exhibitions. He was president of First Light Video Publishing from 1987-1996, and since then president of Night Fire Films. He was a founding Board Member of the Center for Visual Music (CVM) and is on the Advisory Board of the Chabot Space & Science Center’s Maya Skies project. For a complete biography and filmography, please visit www.nightfirefilms.org.

You can find out more about the film by clicking here, and more about this event on the Observatory website by clicking here; you can access these events on Facebook here (7 PM) and here (9 PM). You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

Images: From Ernst Haeckel's Die Radiolarien, Berlin, 1862. And special thanks to Ben Cerveny for turning me onto this wonderful film so many years ago.

"La Santa Muerte" ("Saint Death"), Film Screening with Director Eva Aridjis, Observatory, Thursday, February 24th

In Mexico there is a cult that is rapidly growing--the cult of Saint Death. This female grim reaper, considered a saint by followers but Satanic by the Catholic Church, is worshipped by people whose lives are filled with danger and/or violence--criminals, gang members, transvestites, sick people, drug addicts, and families living in rough neighborhoods. Eva Aridjis' documentary film La Santa Muerte examines the origins of the cult and takes us on a tour of the altars, jails, and neighborhoods in Mexico where the saint's most devoted followers can be found.

Morbid Anatomy is extremely excited to announce a screening of the film "La Santa Muerte" ("Saint Death") followed by a moderated Q and A with Eva Aridjis, the film's director.

The event will take place this Thursday, February 24th at 8:00 PM; If interested, we suggest you arrive early, as this event looks poised to sell out.

Full details follow; hope to see you there!

"La Santa Muerte" ("Saint Death") Film Screening
A screening of the documentary film "La Santa Muerte" ("Saint Death") with the film's director Eva Aridjis
Date: Thursday, February 24th
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

In Mexico there is a cult that is rapidly growing--the cult of Saint Death. This female grim reaper, considered a saint by followers but Satanic by the Catholic Church, is worshipped by people whose lives are filled with danger and/or violence--criminals, gang members, transvestites, sick people, drug addicts, and families living in rough neighborhoods. Eva Aridjis' documentary film La Santa Muerte examines the origins of the cult and takes us on a tour of the altars, jails, and neighborhoods in Mexico where the saint's most devoted followers can be found.

Tonight, join Morbid Anatomy and Observatory for a screening of the film in its entirety. The film's director, Eva Aridjis, will be on hand to introduce the film and to answer questions.

Eva S. Aridjis is a Mexican filmmaker born in Holland. She studied Comparative Literature at Princeton University and received an MFA in Film and TV at New York University (1996–2001) where she produced a number of short films including Taxidermy: The Art of Imitating Life" and "Billy Twist", both of which played at the Sundance Film Festival and dozens of other festivals around the world. An activist for many of Mexico City's street children, in 2003 she made the film "Niños de la Calle" ("Children of the Street") to bring attention to the epidemic. Eva wrote and directed her first narrative feature film entitled The Favor, starring Frank Wood and Ryan Donowho, in 2004. Aridjis's second feature documentary, about a Mexican religious cult, is entitled "La Santa Muerte" ("Saint Death") and is narrated by Gael García Bernal. "La Santa Muerte" premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival in 2007 and has screened at festivals all over the US, Latin America, and Europe. Aridjis is currently teaching Screenwriting in the Graduate Film department at New York University and preparing her next narrative feature.

You can find out more about this event on the Observatory website by clicking here and can can access the event on Facebook here. You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

Animated Gif from Metropoplis, 1927

Animated Gif from Metropoplis, 1927; Click on image to see larger, more impressive version.

Via Who Killed Bambi.

'The Night of the Hunter' New Deluxe Criterion Edition

News alert! Just in time for Christmas, Criterion--God bless them--has released a deluxe, 2-DVD edition of Charles Laughton's 1955 unparalleled masterwork--and Morbid Anatomy film favorite--The Night of the Hunter.

Director Charles Laughton memorably and accurately described The Night of the Hunter as "a nightmarish sort of Mother Goose tale," and that it is. Starring film-noir bad boy Robert Mitchum in a much imitated performance as an evil preacher with "love" and "hate" tattooed on his knuckles (see top image), a slightly depressing Shelley Winters, and a late-career star turn by silent film mega-star Lilian Gish (see bottom image), the films is by turns hallucinatory, menacing, and darkly comic, but always lyrically beautiful at the same time. It is truly its own thing entirely; I simply cannot recommend it highly enough.

The new Criterion edition supplements the film itself with an archival interview with the film's cinematographer Stanley Cortez, a 2 1/2-hour making-of documentary, and interviews with a variety of critics and scholars.

To read a really wonderful article about the history of this remarkable, influential, and idiosyncratic film, click here. Click here to purchase the Criterion Edition of Night of the Hunter from Amazon.com. To purchase same in Blu-ray, click here.

Thanks so much, Megan, for letting me know about this!!

Image credits: Image one, from the LA Times article "A Second Look: 'The Night of the Hunter'"; other images from The Horror Digest.

The Brothers Quay at the Mütter Museum

This just in from the New York Times: The Brothers Quay--creators of so many memorable films including "The Phantom Museum," their homage to the Wellcome Collection--are in the process of producing a "as-yet-untitled documentary on the [Mütter] museum and its adjoining 340,000-volume library!" Better yet, when it is completed, the final film will be screened as part of a symposia to be hosted in turn by the Mütter Museum, New York's Museum of Modern Art, and the incomparable Museum of Jurassic Technology.

Click here to read the entire story, entitled "Animators Amok in a Curiosity Cabinet" in today's New York Times.

Thanks, Alison, for sending this my way!

Image: Evi Numen/College of Physicians of Philadelphia, via the New York Times.

"Of Dolls and Murder," A Documentary about the “Nutshell Studies” Dollhouse Crime-Scene Dioramas

"Convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell." --Police Mantra in Of Dolls and Murder

Wow. Looks like there is a new documentary film--narrated by none other than John Waters and featuring a cameo by our good friend John Troyer--about the fantastic and exquisite “Nutshell Studies” Dollhouse crime-scene dioramas created by Frances Glessner Lee to serve as student aids in the 1930s and 40s.

Here is an excerpted description from the film's website:

The new documentary film, Of Dolls and Murder, explores our collective fascination with forensics while unearthing the criminal element that lurks in one particularly gruesome collection of dollhouses. Rather than reflecting an idealized version of reality, these surreal dollhouses reveal the darker, disturbing side of domestic life.

Created strictly for adults, these dollhouse dioramas are home to violent murder, prostitution, mental illness, adultery and alcohol abuse. Each dollhouse has tiny corpse dolls, representing an actual murder victim. In one bizarre case, a beautiful woman lays shot to death in her bed, her clean-cut, pajama-clad husband lies next to the bed, also fatally shot. Their sweet little baby was shot as she slept in her crib. Blood is spattered everywhere. And all the doors were locked from the inside, meaning the case is likely a double homicide/suicide. But something isn’t right. The murder weapon is nowhere near the doll corpses – instead the gun was found in another room.

Why would anyone create such macabre dollhouses? And why would anyone re-create crime scenes with such exquisite craftsmanship that artists and miniaturists from around the globe clamor (unsuccessfully) to experience this dollhouse collection in person?

Of Dolls and Murder investigates these haunting “Nutshell Studies” dollhouses and the unlikely grandmother who painstakingly created them – Frances Glessner Lee. Known as the Patron Saint of Forensics, Lee didn’t let gender biases and prescribed social behavior of a wealthy heiress keep her from pioneering the new arena of “legal medicine” in the late 1930s and 1940s.

To train investigators, Lee created 18 dioramas (20 actually, but two are missing) for detectives to study crime scenes from every angle, including the medical angle. She used only the most mysterious cases (cases that could have easily been misruled as accidents, murders, or suicides) to challenge students’ ability to interpret evidence. Almost 70 years later, Lee’s dollhouses are still relevant training tools because all the latest technological advances in forensics do not change the fact that crime scenes can be misread, and then someone will literally get away with murder. But the story does not end with Lee and her dollhouses of death.

The nation is obsessed with forensic justice television, and why? Why do we love to watch a skewed reality of crime-fighting forensics? The answer lies somewhere with the need we have to entertain ourselves with stories about our fear of untimely, brutal death. The societal truths about how loved ones often murder one another is far too wicked to face, let alone change. Instead, we prefer to escape into a safe haven where solving murders easily wraps up in under one hour.

For more about this production, visit the film's website by clicking here. You can read a post on the film by participant John Troyer--who just informed me that not only has the film been released (despite the website saying it is "still in production) but has already won Best Documentary at the Thrill Spy Film Festival in Washington, D.C.--by clicking here. For more on these amazing dioramas, check out Corinne May Botz's lush photo book The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death by clicking here.

Story via Laughing Squid.

Images from the NY Times slide show "Visible Proofs: Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death;" you can see the full show by clicking here.

"The Ossuary," Jan Švankmajer, 1970

To continue on the theme of bone chapels begun in my last post, thanks so much to Morbid Anatomy reader and commentator Mirloniger for pointing me in the direction of Jan Švankmajer--muse to the Brothers Quay--and his short film "Kostnice" (The Ossuary), devoted to the wonders of the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora, a truly epic bone chapel located in an ancient town near Prague in the Czech Republic. This film was commissioned in 1970 to celebrate the work of František Rint--the man responsible for the bone compositions that fill the chapel--on the centenary of the completion of his osteo-masterwork in 1870.

Kinoeye: New Perspectives on European Film describes the film thusly:

One of the neglected masterpieces produced during Švankmajer's early career is Kostnice (The Ossuary, 1970), a "horror documentary" shot in one of his country's most unique and bleakest monuments, the Sedlec Monastery Ossuary. The Sedlec Ossuary contains the bones of some 50 to 70 thousand people buried there since the Middle Ages. Over a period of a decade, they were fashioned by the Czech artist František Rint with his wife and two children into fascinating displays of shapes and objects, including skull pyramids, crosses, a monstrance and a chandelier containing every bone of the human body. Their work was completed in 1870, and these artifacts have been placed in the crypt of the Cistercian chapel as a memento mori for the contemplation of visitors.

You can watch the entire film above, or by clicking here. Click here to buy a copy of it from the Morbid Anatomy Bookstore. To see previous post on osteo-architecture, click here. To see a previous post on the art of the Brothers Quay, click here. More on the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora can be found by clicking here. Thanks, Mirloniger, for sending this along!

Philadelphia Medical Film Symposium Recap

I am still processing the many pleasures and terrors that comprised last week's Medical Film Symposium. I left the symposium completely exhausted, dreaming of bloodily sliced corneas and feeling that I might never need to see another surgical or venereal disease film ever again. But, on the other hand, I was much excited and stimulated by many things I saw or learned and the many fascinating people I had the opportunity to meet.

Highlights of the symposium included (but were not limited to):

• Friday night's experimental film fest in the oldest operating theatre in the U.S., which I liken to being immersed in a kaleidoscopic, phantasmagoric fun house of medical horrors (but in a good way! See above images 2-6).
  
  
• Michael Sappol's meta-lecture on the ethically-fraught pleasures of filming, collecting and viewing medical films paired with a screening of terrible and beautiful silent films from the National Library of Medicine (stay tuned for the opportunity to see this lecture at Observatory in Brooklyn! Click here to get on the mailing list and thus be alerted).
  
  
• Oliver Gayken's lecture on wonder and science in early popular science films.
  
  
• Getting to spend an entire day in the Mütter Museum's elegant and wonderful event space!
  
  
• Saturday night's "Medical Film Cabinet of Curiosities" curated by Skip Elsheimer & Jay Schwartz, which gave all of us shell-shocked attendees the opportunity to laugh again, and made me long for the permissive and Utopian 1970s with the screening of the charmingly and innocently explicit school health film entitled "Achieving Sexual Maturity(1973)--completely unthinkable in today's social climate, with its nudity and celebration of youth sensuality, including on screen erections and masturbation--followed by a surrealistically charming school film demystifying a visit to the school nurse called "Just Awful" (1972).
  
  
• The opportunity to take in the really wonderful Jan van Riemsdyk (aka van Rymsdyk) pastel exhibition outside the old operating theatre, which I highly recommend you check out if you are able before it closes in December 2010 (see bottom 2 photos; more on that here).
  
  
• The grilled grapefruit at Reading Terminal's Down Home Diner!
  

All in all, although emotionally draining and a tad exhausting, the 2010 Medical Film Symposium was a wonderful experience, well organized and programmed, and I hope that the conference organizers have plans for a sequel in the near future.

You can find out more on the symposium by clicking here and here. You can find out about the Jan van Riemsdyk by clicking here.

Very special thanks to official symposium photographer Michelle Enemark (Observatory cohort and Curious Expeditions co-author and photographer) for the use of most of the above photos, and to conference organizers Dwight Swanson and Joanna Poses, for putting together such an inspired weekend and for giving me role of "official blogger."

Philadelphia Medical Film Symposium Weekend!

Today I am busing off for the weekend, to join the already-in-progress Philadelphia medical film symposium for a very exciting Friday night screening in the Pennsylvania Hospital's operating theatre, the oldest of its kind in the United States! Am also very much looking forward to tomorrow's day-long film symposium at the Mütter Museum, followed by Saturday night's "Medical Film Cabinet of Curiosities."

If you haven't registered for this amazing looking conference, do not despair; you can still attend screenings of your choice and pay on an event-by-event basis.

Hope very much to see you there! More on the details and locations of this event here.

Image, which I could swear I also saw in the original Wellcome Medicine Man Exhibit, via Rapeblossom.

Medical Film Symposium, January 20-23, Philadelphia, PA

The Medical Film Symposium will examine—through screenings, presentations and papers—the relationship between moving images and medical science. Medical films comprised one of the earliest film genres, but the vast majority of these films are unseen and unknown today...

I can hardly wait for the upcoming Medical Film Symposium, taking place later this month in Philadelphia, PA--January 20-23 to be exact. As far as I know, this ambitious event--featuring over a dozen academics, film-makers and film-historians screening and expounding on films that explore "the relationship between moving images and medical science"--is the first of its kind, and promises to be a really fascinating, compelling, and, at times, perhaps even disturbing event.

As if the stellar line-up (see below) and opportunity to see obscure, under-seen old medical films weren't enough of a draw, the spaces housing the symposium are nearly as alluring as the events themselves; the incomparable Mütter Museum (!!!) will be hosting Saturday's day long program, and Friday night's screening will take place within (yes, within!) the Pennsylvania Hospital Surgical Theatre, the oldest surgical theatre in the United States. As an added bonus, attendees of this screening will have the opportunity to take in the Jan van Rymsdyk pastel drawings on view at the Pennsylvania Hospital's medical library--as mentioned in this previous post--before and after the event.

Other highlights of the symposium include Saturday night's "Medical Film Cabinet of Curiosities" co-curated by the Secret Cinema and North Carolina's A/V Geeks, and friend-of-Morbid-Anatomy Michael Sappol's presentation "Difficult Subjects," in which he will screen some harrowing medical film clips from the collection of The National Library of Medicine and "think aloud about the cultural meaning, scientific uses, ethical issues that arose in the making and showing of such films in their first historical moment" as well as today.

Full conference text follows; its a bit wordy, but well worth reading. The deadline for registration is this Friday, the 15th of January; the conference cost is only $80 ($50 for students), which includes admission to all events, plus breakfast and lunch on Saturday. I will definitely be there, in my role as "official blogger" for the event, and hope to see you there, too. This looks seriously not-to-be-missed, and lets hope it is the first of many such events exploring seriously the interstices of art and medicine, death and culture.

Medical Film Symposium, January 20-23, 2010

Wednesday, January 20
7:00pm
Screening of A Man to Remember at International House
(presented by Nico de Klerk of the Nederlands Filmmuseum) [info]
Preceded by opening of Radiologic Images exhibit (begins at 6:00pm)

Thursday, January 21
7:00pm
Film screening at International House
(curated by Barbara Hammer) [info]

Friday, January 22
7:00pm: Film screening within the historic Pennsylvania Hospital Operating Theatre
(curated by Andrew Lampert and Greg Pierce, open to symposium attendees only)

Saturday, January 23
9:00am to 5:00pm
A full day of presentations at the Mütter Museum
(Philadelphia College of Physicians )

1. "The Body Visible"
   R. Nick Bryan, University of Pennsylvania
   
   While mankind has always been driven by morbid curiosity to see inside its own body, medical practitioners have had a more urgent need to do so – their business lies there-in. The spatial complexity of the body demands imaging not only for diagnosis but for successful treatment. However, the unaided human visual system that depends on visible light cannot see below the skin. Prior to Rontgen’s discovery of x-rays in 1895, the interior of the body could be imaged only by cutting through the skin and ‘letting the light in.’ Unfortunately, until the late 19th Century, such invasive medical imaging was usually performed after or immediately prior to death. Despite an initially slow and crude start with ‘Rontgenography’, the eternal goal of real time, safe, non-invasive, detailed imaging of the living human body has come to dramatic fruition in the past decade. With modern CT, nuclear, MR and ultrasound scanners, vivid static as well as moving images of all major organ systems are now routinely performed, as will be illustrated by videos of, “My Body”, a self-exposé by the presenter.
   
   
2. "Between Photography and Film: Early Uses of Medical Cinematography"
   Scott Curtis, Northwestern University
   
   From the beginning, medical researchers and physicians eagerly appropriated the new technology of motion pictures. For some, especially those interested in a more "scientific" approach to medicine, film represented an improvement upon and transformation of serial photography--that is, they regarded motion pictures as a series of still images. Others extended medical photography's more common use as documentary evidence to their application of cinema. Still others emphasized the spectacular and moving quality of the cinematic image in their promotion of film as an educational tool, often distinguishing it from photography. This presentation, then, will survey the professional perceptions and uses of medical cinematography in its first two decades and compare those uses to the functions, genres, and venues of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century medical photography.
   
   
3. "The Flow of Life: Moving Images of Magnified Blood"
   Oliver Gaycken, Temple University
   
   A staple of medical moving-image presentations was the spectacle of blood as seen under a microscope projected onto a screen. This talk will consider some examples of this tradition that range from nineteenth-century lantern lectures to reminiscences of researchers to the incorporation of this genre into the medical motion picture.
   
   
4. "Complexities and Enigmas of Cinefluorography in the work of Dr. James Sibley Watson and Colleagues"
   Barbara Hammer (Independent filmmaker) and Patti Doyen (George Eastman House
   
   This presentation will explore through Watson et. al.'s text and images the discoveries and problems of the Rochester medical team that led to mechanical inventions that enabled views of the interior of the human body. The uses and abuses of the techniques will be highlighted as well as the artistic curiosities Watson pursued in spectacles that had no scientific purpose.
   
   
5. "Telephone Operator, Camera-Operator: Laryngoscopy and High Speed Motion Pictures at Bell Labs"
   Mara Mills, University of Pennsylvania
   
   During the early twentieth century, telephone engineers became authorities on psychoacoustics and otolaryngology. In the interests of visualizing speech production and the movement of circuit components, they also made key contributions to high speed motion picture photography. This talk will survey the history of laryngoscopy through the 1940s, concluding with a few remarks about the nature of the "telephonic gaze."
   
   
6. "Edgar Ulmer and the National Tuberculosis Association: Fighting Faith in the War Against TB"
   Devin Orgeron, North Carolina State University
   
   From the late 1930s through the early 1940s, well-known “B” movie director Edgar Ulmer (sometimes called the King of PRC) directed eight health shorts for the National Tuberculosis Association. A strain of fatal contamination runs though all of Ulmer’s work and is brilliantly, if oddly articulated in these tuberculosis films, many of which are aimed at specific American racial minorities and the inadequacies of their sometimes imported faith in the face of the disease. Along with their fit within Ulmer’s career, I hope to illustrate the role these films played in shaping 1930s/1940s notions of race, religion, and disease.
   
   
7. “‘Spectacular Problems in Surgery’: Medical Motion Pictures at the American College of Surgeons”
   Kirsten Ostherr, Rice University
   
   Early in the twentieth century, the American College of Surgeons was a leading national force in the use of motion pictures for educational purposes. This movement encompassed all facets of the motion picture industry (ranging from education to entertainment), and established the ACS as a central institution in the history of cinema. Moreover, the ACS became an important vehicle for international medical education through motion pictures after World War II, and this aspect of ACS activities provides an important and unique perspective on the varied global uses of medical media in the postwar era. This presentation will address the medical motion pictures produced, reviewed, distributed, and exhibited by the ACS, from the late 1920s to the present. The talk will be based on research at the American College of Surgeons archive, which contains paper records related to a vast range of medical motion pictures. These films were primarily technical medical films produced by specialists for other specialists, as well as for medical student and resident training. Since the ACS films were concerned not only with medical education but also with the public image of the medical profession, this history serves a critical function in assessing the role of visual images in shaping the popular and specialist cultures of medicine throughout the twentieth century.
   
   
8. "Difficult Subjects: Working with Films from the Collection of the National Library of Medicine"
   Michael Sappol, History of Medicine Division at the National Library of Medicine
   
   Historical medical film is notable for its representation and documentation of "difficult subjects"—the interior of the body, death, disgfigurement, radical medical intervention, infliction of pain on patients and research subjects, behavioral disturbance, venereal disease, emotional and physical distress, etc. Although publicly available, such films are rarely screened and, as a result, rarely studied. This presentation will screen a selection of these difficult films, explore their unique history, uses and abuses, effects on viewers, and the larger issues that they raise.
   
   
9. “Research, education, and patient care: archival medical film collections at academic health institutions”
   Timothy Wisniewski, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Johns Hopkins University
   
   This presentation will focus on the institutional context of archival film collections produced within academic health centers, using the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions as the primary example. The presentation will look at historical examples of centralized and decentralized models of film production at Johns Hopkins, and compare genres of medical film as produced for educational, clinical, or biomedical research purposes. Finally, the presentation will discuss the value of making these often unprocessed or restricted collections accessible for research and use by diverse groups of users.

Saturday, January 23
8:00 pm
A MEDICAL FILM CABINET OF CURIOSITIES
Film screening at Moore College of Art (curated by Skip Elsheimer & Jay Schwartz)
Admission: $7.00 [admission included with symposium registration]

Co-programmed by Jay Schwartz of the Secret Cinema and Skip Elsheimer of North Carolina's A/V Geeks, who will be present at the screening. This will be Skip's first return visit since he presented his popular program S IS FOR SISSY! at Moore, just over one year ago.

The program will include:

• FEET AND POSTURE (1920s) - This reel, from the earliest era of 16mm educational films, aims to explain the physiology of feet and how to best take care of them. It demonstrates through x-rays how the well-dressed young flapper of the time often did not choose the best footwear. Made with the cooperation of M.I.T. and the American Posture League.
  
  
• CELL WARS (1987) A lively introduction to immunology that shows kids how the body´s cells defend themselves against invading germs. Crazy-costumed actors and dazzling video effects demonstrate what happens after germs enter the body through a skinned knee.
  
  
• CRYOEXTRACTION (195?) - A sales and demonstration film showing off the Thomas Cryopter--a device which resembles a power router, which is then shown in use for eye surgery.
  
  
• COLDS AND FLU (1975) - Kids dressed in armor battle each other to seize control of a giant-mouthed castle.
  
  
• ACHIEVING SEXUAL MATURITY (1973) - At a time when DEEP THROAT played in neighborhood cinemas alongside traditional Hollywood fare, educators struggled as to how to best meet increasingly rebellious high school and college students on their own terms. It was during this possibly unique moment in pop culture that ACHIEVING SEXUAL MATURITY was successfully sold to school districts around the country. Its use of graphic live photography of nude males and females to explain and illustrate sexual anatomy from conception to adulthood is today quite surprising.
  
  
• NON-SYPHILITIC VENEREAL DISEASE (195?) - This short film made for the medical community--in still-stunning Kodachrome color -- details a variety of exotic venereal diseases, in close-up after horrifying close-up. This mainstay of Secret Cinema Halloween screenings is guaranteed to have audiences screaming in terror.
  
  
• JUST AWFUL (1972) This film was made to help eradicate any fears children may have about visiting the school nurse.

SECRET CINEMA WEBSITE: http://www.thesecretcinema.com

For more information about the symposium, visit the conference website by clicking here; you can find out more about registration here. For more about symposium hosts the Mütter Museum and Pennsylvania Hospital Surgical Theatre, click here and here, respectively. Please feel free to contact me with any questions by clicking here.

Hope to see you there!

Images: From top: Still from SANCTUS, dir. Barbara Hammer, Courtesy of Barbara Hammer; X-rays by Dr. James Sibley Watson, Courtesy of Barbara Hammer; Maurice L. Blatt, Samuel J. Hoffman, & Maurice Schneider, “Rabies: Report of Twelve Cases, with a Discussion of Prophylaxis,” Journal of the American Medical Association 111 (1938): 688-91

Zoe Beloff in New York City, January 18th and 19th

I have just been alerted to two upcoming presentations by Zoe Beloff, frequent Observatory contributer, personal friend, and friend of Morbid Anatomy. Her work is always interesting, informative, and thought provoking, and these presentations look particularly not-to-be-missed. Very much hope to see you at one or both of these events!

1) An Evening with Zoe Beloff at MOMA
Museum of Modern Art, NYC
January 18, 2010 7pm
11 West 53 Street New York, NY 10019

Zoe Beloff will be discussing recent installations with an emphasis on her current exhibition "Dreamland: The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and its Circle 1926- 1972" at the Coney Island Museum. As part of the show, she will be screening all the Coney Island "Dream Films" and giving a little preview of new work. You can find out more about the event, which is part of the series "Modern Mondays" by clicking here.

2) Zoe Beloff presents at Light Industry: Obedience
Light Industry in Brooklyn
January 19, 2010 7.30pm
220 36th Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenue), 5th Floor
Brooklyn, New York
Tickets - $7, available at door

Obedience, Stanley Milgram, 16mm, 1962, 45 mins
Folie à Deux, National Film Board of Canada, 16mm, 1952, 15 mins
Motion Studies Application, 16mm, ca. 1950, 15 mins
Presented by Zoe Beloff

Obedience documents the infamous "Milgram experiment" conducted at Yale University in 1962, created to evaluate an everyday person's deference to authority within institutional structures. Psychologist Stanley Milgram designed a scenario in which individuals were made to think they were administering electric shocks to an unseen subject, with a researcher asking them to increase the voltage levels despite the loud cries of pain that seemed to come from the other room. Milgram saw his test, conducted mere months after Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem, as a way to understand the environments that made genocide possible.

Tonight, artist Zoe Beloff pairs Obedience with two earlier works dealing with psycho-social control: Folie à Deux andMotion Studies Application. The former, one of a series of films on various psychological maladies produced by the National Film Board of Canada in the 1950s, presents an interview with a young woman and her immigrant mother afflicted by shared delusions that manifest when the two are together. The latter is an industrial film purporting to present ways to increase efficiency in the workplace: explaining, for instance, a means to fold cardboard boxes more quickly. In stark contrast to the nostalgic whimsy typically associated with old educational films, Folie à Deux andMotion Studies Application play as infernal dreams of systemic power and sources of surprising, unintended pathos.

"The concept of 'motion studies' is central to cinema itself. Without the desire to analyze human motion, there would be no cinematic apparatus. But the history of motion studies is freighted with ideology. Its inventor Étienne-Jules Marey was paid by the French Government to figure out the most efficient method for soldiers to march, while his protégé Albert Londe analyzed the gait of hysterical patients. From the beginning, the productive body promoted by Taylorism was always shadowed by its double, the body riven by psychic breakdown. We see this in Motion Studies Applicationand especially Folie à Deux, where unproductive patients, confined to the asylum, understand with paranoid lucidity that the institution is everywhere, monitoring them always. Obedience stands as a conscious critique of these earlier industrial films, co-opting their form only to subvert them and reveal their fascist underpinnings." - ZB

You can find directions to Light Industry and more about their screenings here.

More information on the MOMA show is available here; you can find out more about the Light Industries screening, and get directions, by clicking here. More about her exhibition "Dreamland: The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and its Circle 1926- 1972," on view at the Coney Island Museum until March 21st of this year, by clicking here. Click here to visit Zoe's website and find out more about her work.

Image: Still from the film Obedience, 1962

Wege Zu Kraft und Schönheit (The Way of Strength and Beauty), Film Stills, 1925

Above are some fantastic film stills from a German film called Wege Zu Kraft und Schönheit - Ein Film über moderne Körperkultur (The Way to Strength and Beauty), a film on modern body culture by Nicholas Kaufmann and Wilhelm Prager from 1925.

Found on the wonderful Elettrogenica blog, which captioned the images as follows: top 2: "beware the corset!" and bottom 2: "about breathing." Click here to see original post.

Wes Anderson & Noah Baumbach at the New York Public Library, Next Monday, November 9th!

I know its rather twee of me, but I am a huge fan of Wes Anderson's work--well, to be specific, I am a huge fan of all of Wes Anderson's work except for his more recent live action film, The Darjeeling Limited, which I rather hated. But my hatred for that film has not in any way diminished my enthusiasm for the the rest of Anderson's œuvre.

On that note: I was quite excited to find out that the New York Public Library's fantastic "NYPL Live" series will be hosting a Wes Anderson event next Monday, November 9th, at 7:00 PM, which will feature Anderson in conversation with Noah Baumbach, co-author of the screenplay for Anderson's new production The Fantastic Mr. Fox and writer/director of the memorable film The Squid and the Whale. I just bought my tickets, $25 ticket price and Darjeeling Limited be damned! Hope to see you there.

Full info, including ticket purchasing information, can be found by clicking here.

Pictured above: Wes Anderson at Paris' inestimable Deyrolle Taxidermy and Naturalia shop, from the This Recording website.

"Dormitorium: Film Decors by the Quay Brothers," Exhibition," Parsons, NYC

Last night I went to check out the wonderful "Dormitorium: Film Decors by the Quay Brothers" exhibition at Parsons, which features miniature sets, props, and characters constructed by the Quay Brothers' and used as source material for their unforgettable and highly influential stop-motion animated films. These "décors" (in the exhibition's parlance) are presented as static silent narrative worlds; it is as if you had peeked into each tiny space mid-shoot, characters and props all in their place, just waiting to be brought to life by the film-maker's art.

"Dormitorium" is much more than just a collection of props and artifacts; instead, the "décors" you see on view here are something of a revelation, leading one to a greater understanding and appreciation of the Quay Brother's artistry. Having the luxury of time to study these décors in their static state allows the viewer to see things impossible to grasp amidst the thrust and drive of the films; namely, the obsessive and beautiful detail in the source materials. The more one looks, the more one comes to realize that this attention to detail and minutia is what gives the Quay's work so much of its character and mise en scène--at least as much as their lurchy, atmospheric, uncanny stop-motion animation technique. Details such as exquisite and varied typography and calligraphy, a judicious application of dust and grime, the seductively hand-made feel of the materials, and wall hangings, hidden figures, archaic signage and other easy-to-miss details adorning the spaces; of these elements is the Quay's compelling and absorbing universe composed.

In a nice installation decision, also on view in the exhibition are the films themselves, allowing the viewer to go from the décors to the films and back again, encouraging insights into the ways in which the Brothers expertly use cinematic techniques, selective and shifting focus, and obscured views to bring their static miniature worlds to vivid and uncanny life, imbuing them with a sense of depth and abundance of space so at odds with scale and scope of the sets.

More about the exhibition, from Parson's website:

"Dormitorium" explores the macabre fantasy world of twin brothers Stephen and Timothy Quay through the highly detailed miniature sets of their influential stop-motion animations. "Dormitorium", which originated at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, represents the first time the décors of the London-based Quays have been exhibited in N. America. The Brothers have built a cult following with their dark, moody films, which are heavily influenced by Eastern European film, literature, and music and often feature disassembled dolls and no spoken dialogue. The exhibition combines rarely seen, collaboratively designed miniature décors from some of their most prominent works, as well as continuous screenings of excerpts from several of the films.

The exhibition will be on view until Sunday, October 4th, 2009 at Parson School of Design's Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery; you can find out more by clicking here. I highly highly recommend you pay it a visit, whether you are already a Quay Brothers fan or not!

All photos* are mine, taken at the exhibition; you can see more by clicking here. You can view some of the Quay Brothers' films on You Tube by clicking here; better yet, buy yourself the film collection "Phantom Museums: The Short Films of the Quay Brothers" and watch the entire 2-DVD collection in fine quality at home; click here to purchase from the Morbid Anatomy Bookstore (all proceeds benefit the Morbid Anatomy Library).

*Images: Top 2 images from set for Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles; Next 2 images from set for The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer, bottom image from set for The Calligrapher.

"Satan S'amuse," Segunda de Chomon, 1907

From Wikipedia's description of this short film: "In an unnamed place, Satan is bored. Despite his servants' exertions, nothing can be found to cheer him up."

Watch a morose Satan reject all attempts at amusement above; worth a peek for--if nothing else!--the wonderful early 20th Century sets and costumes.

Via Coal Black Filly blog.

Observatory Event: 3D Hysteria Double Feature Presented by Zoe Beloff, May 29th, 7 and 9 PM

You are cordially invited to a Hysteria-themed double feature presented by visual artist Zoe Beloff at Observatory, the new Brooklyn-based performance/exhibition/presentation space run by myself and 6 others.

Details:
Friday, May 29th, 7:00 and 9:00 PM
(2 showings to keep numbers low enough to optimize 3D viewing)
Wine and Snacks Served
Cost: Free, but please RSVP (specifying 7:00 or 9:00 show) to morbidanatomy@gmail.com.

Film 1: "Charming Augustine" (2004, 40 min., 3-D 16mm film, b/w) is an experimental narrative by Beloff inspired by one of Charcot's most famous patients at the Salpétrière in turn-of-the-century Paris. It explores connections between photographic documentation of hysteria and the prehistory of narrative film: Augustine captivates the doctors with her theatrical and photogenic hysterical attacks and in the process becomes a star-the "Sarah Bernhardt" of the asylum.

Film 2: "Case History of a Multiple Personality", a medical film from 1930 made by Doctor Cornelius C. Wholey, a neurologist turned psychoanalyst.

Directions:
Enter Observatory via Proteus Gowanus Gallery
R or M train to Union Street in Brooklyn: Walk two long blocks on Union (towards the Gowanus Canal) to Nevins Street. 543 Union Street is the large red brick building on right. Go right on Nevins and left down alley through large black gates. Gallery is the second door on the left.

F or G train to Carroll Street: Walk one block to Union. Turn right, walk two long blocks on Union towards the Gowanus Canal, cross the bridge, take left on Nevins, go down the alley to the second door on the left.

More info on the Observatory website, which you can visit by clicking here.

Images: Top: Still from Beloff's "Charming Augustine."; Bottom: Still from "Case History of a Multiple Personality"

Tod Browning's "Freaks" (1932) Downloadable at Archive.org!

The 1932 Tod Browning classic film "Freaks" is now available for download on Rick Prelinger's wonderful Archive.org website. Tod Browning is most famous for his direction of "Dracula" (1931) starring Bela Lugosi; the cinematic release of "Freaks" made him infamous. And it is not hard to figure out why. From the Wikipedia description:

...the film concerns a love triangle between a wealthy dwarf, a gold-digging aerialist, and a strongman; a murder plot; and the vengeance dealt out by the dwarf and his fellow circus freaks. The film was highly controversial, even after heavy editing to remove many disturbing scenes, and was a commercial failure. Browning's career was derailed.

Download the film (and see for yourself) here.

Via Hugo Strikes Back and Boing Boing.