The Null Device
Last night's Splodge film night was a good one, with a slightly psychoceramic
theme. They had a 1960 documentary (produced in England with funding from
drug company SmithKline) titled Seven Ages of Psychiatry, showing how
mental illness was perceived by different civilisations (from primitive
shamanism to mediæval witch hunts to the "modern" day, albeit one in
which patients were still lobotomised regularly); this reminded me a little
of Haxan, the 1920s Swedish documentary about witchcraft, which
equated it with the "modern" mental disorder of hysteria.
Then they had a 1963 film titled Shock Corridor, in which a journalist
has himself committed to a mental hospital to track down a murderer,
mingles with the patients (including a black man who thinks he's the Grand
Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and an ex-POW obsessed with the Civil War),
and ends up losing his grip on sanity as he gets closer to his goal.
Not a bad film, with interesting portrayals
of mental illness and its treatment, and commentaries on postwar American
society.