Authors

Anna Toropova¹;  ¹ University of Warwick, UK

Discussion

The cinematic medium emerged as a significant ‘resource’ for psychiatrists and neurologists in the early Soviet Union. Much like medical specialists in the West, Soviet psychiatrists were drawn to cinema as a means of visually documenting cases of mental disorder and bodily dysfunction. Cinema came to be seen as a vital technology for recording, analysing and reproducing the atypical gestures and involuntary movements of the nervously ill. This paper will trace the evolution of filmic portrayals of pathological psycho-physiology in the early Soviet period. I will begin by exploring how 1920s educational films such as Mechanics of the Brain (1925) and The Nervously Ill (1926) sought to delimitate the ‘healthy’ and the ‘abnormal’, linking mental and neurological disorders to the pre-revolutionary legacy. The paper will proceed to explore the influence of German psychiatric filmmaking in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, particularly the work of the Frankfurt Psychiatric Clinic headed by Karl Kleist. Stalin-era efforts to emulate Western psychiatric film laboratories culminated, I seek to show, in the Soviet Commissariat of Health’s proposal to construct a film studio at Yakovenko Psychiatric Hospital in the late 1930s. Exploring such techniques of recording psychiatric patients, the paper asks whether Soviet socialised medicine gave rise to modes of seeing and picturing mental illness that were distinct from the observational practices of Western medicine.