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.

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