[Commlist] CFP for Comparative Cinema 21: Cinematographic Pathologies: Representations and Figurations of the Sick Body

Call For Papers Nº 21 (Fall 2023)
Cinematographic Pathologies: Representations and Figurations of the Sick 
Body

Guest Editors: Alan Salvadó, Àngel Quintana and Daniel Pérez-Pamies
https://raco.cat/index.php/Comparativecinema/announcement/view/181

The Covid-19 pandemic has established the sick body as one of the main 
axes of contemporary thought and 21st-century visual culture. There has 
been a resurgence in the importance of the body and mental health in 
media perceptions that has changed political, economic and social life 
at the global level.
The militaristic declarations of struggle and resistance against the 
virus (the invisible enemy) in most Western countries masked the 
impossibility that these states could succeed in managing and 
safeguarding the welfare of bodies, paralyzing an economic system that, 
meanwhile, is based on the racialization, exploitation and enslavement 
of specific bodies (Preciado 2022). A few days after the Covid-19 
pandemic outbreak, Jacques Rancière observed, somewhat perplexed, that 
the medical debate on the Coronavirus was not concentrated on academic 
research on the circulation of the virus, instead it was focused on the 
reception capacity of hospitals (Rancière 2021). The figures, 
statistics, percentages and ratios associated with the neoliberal 
imaginary made sick bodies invisible and turned the occupation rate of 
hospital beds into the focus of attention. But while the quantification 
of the pandemic dominated the public discourse, how was the sick body 
being portrayed in 21st-century visual culture?

Going from the iconographic archive images of the Spanish flu from the 
early 20th century to bodies sick with AIDS in the late 20th century, 
and onto the recent figurations of the Coronavirus pandemic, the sick 
body has been a constant in many film poetics. Beyond the figuration of 
pain and the resulting care, the sick body has enabled filmmakers to 
both construct discourses on the depiction of sickness and to create a 
constellation of tales in which pathologies and their consequences have 
existed at the center of the dramatic and even tragic heart of stories. 
Within popular culture, classical melodrama and the attendant soap 
operas have constructed one of the most fertile imaginaries in relation 
to the sick body and the buildings that provide it with shelter: 
hospitals, sanatoriums, asylums, medical offices and lounges with 
couches. Meanwhile, modernity has made the sick body one of its central 
motifs. Parallel to the rewriting of certain classicist formulas, a 
large proportion of the corpus of modern cinema is built on an array of 
characters who express their discontent with society through the 
performativity of illnesses which, in turn, become a symptom of the 
impossibility of these people finding their place in the world (Font 
2002). From The Eternal Breasts (Chibusa yo eien nare, Kinuyo Tanaka, 
1955) to The Silence (Tystnaden, Ingmar Bergman, 1963) and Red Desert 
(Il deserto rosso, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966), on to A Woman Under 
the Influence (John Cassavetes, 1974), we find examples in which the 
sick body epitomizes this existential unease. Finally, an in-depth study 
of much of contemporary cinema situates the issue of mental illness as a 
way of illustrating the bifurcation between the real world and an 
imagined or virtual one. Amnesia, schizophrenia, multiple personality 
and bipolarity are just some of the disorders that are used as a pretext 
to break new ground in both the spectacle-based aesthetic related to the 
digital sphere and the “narrative complexification” (Elsaesser 2021) by 
which the body is transformed into terra incognita (Imbert 2019). And 
amid the gamut of bodies that have been altered by computer technology, 
producing an artificial rejuvenation, the sick body becomes a mere 
vestige of the real.
However, the sick body has not only been an object of study throughout 
the history of cinema, the field of medicine and its technological 
evolution have also enabled us to explore new ways of envisioning it, 
from radiography to ultrasound and on to microscopy. At the visual 
crossroads between cinema and medicine, we have witnessed the creation 
of what we could call “medical films”; a cinematographic subgenre that 
has become an authentic visual experimental laboratory with regard to 
the sick body, as we have seen in the films of Yervant Gianikian and 
Angela Ricci Lucchi (Ruiz 2016).
In this age of bodily immortality, thanks to digital technologies and 
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and in light of the still-recent 
consequences of the Coronavirus pandemic, consideration of the sick body 
in cinema is evolving as a necessary journey that can enable us to 
critically update some of the issues which until recent years had been 
the backbone of our visual culture and our approach to the way sickness 
is portrayed.

Issue 21 of Comparative Cinema is calling for articles of 5,500-7,000 
words in length that address these issues, using a comparative approach. 
Lines of research may include (though are not limited to) the following:

-  Iconography of the sick body in cinema: the existence of a series of 
visual motifs which, from different artistic disciplines, have built up 
a certain expressive and recognizable imaginary on the question of how 
illness is portrayed in cinema.
- Historiography of the sick body in cinema: from early cinema to 
contemporary film, the sick body has come to represent a central issue 
for the evolution of both cinematographic aesthetics and their 
figuration through cinematographic language.
- Portrayal of the pandemic in cinema: pandemics have become the 
universal argument par excellence for viewing illness and our 
relationship with it from a collective perspective.

- The performativity of the sick body: portraying the disease has often 
been a real challenge for actors. The need to empathize with others in 
order to portray the illness is one of the most problematic areas in 
terms of directing and performative creativity.
- Biopolitical figurations of the sick body: ways in which the ideas of 
Michel Foucault are displayed in contemporary film and in light of the 
ethical and aesthetic consequences of Covid-19.

- Invisibilities of the sick female body: some of the most common 
diseases in women have frequently been edited out of cinema’s visual 
discourses. Pioneering experiences and possible breakthroughs.


Deadline for submission of papers (RACO platform): 01/09/2023

Publication: Fall 2023


Bibliography

Elsaesser, Thomas. 2021. The Mind-Game Film. Distributed Agency, Time 
Travel, and Productive Pathology. New York: Routledge.

Font, Domènec. 2002. Cuerpo a cuerpo. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg.

Imbert, Gérard. 2019. Crisis de valores en el cine posmoderno. Madrid: 
Cátedra.

Preciado, Paul B. 2022. Dysphoria Mundi. Barcelona: Anagrama.

Rancière, Jacques. 2021. “¿Una buena ocasión?” In Pandémik, edited by 
Javier Bassas and Laura Llevadot. Barcelona: Ned Ediciones.

Ruiz Rodríguez, Paula Arantzazu. 2016. “Operar el fotograma: 
intervenciones en el género del cine médico del Novecento y la Primera 
Guerra Mundial en Oh! Uomo, de Yervant Gianikian y Angela Ricci-Lucchi.” 
L'Atalante. Revista de estudios cinematográficos, 21: 81−92.


Contact

(comparativecinema /at/ upf.edu)
(alan.salvado /at/ udg.edu)

(angel.quintana /at/ udg.edu)

(daniel.perez /at/ udg.edu)

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