Pretty on the Inside

A medical film fest wants to get under your skin.

by Shaun Brady

The Medical Film Symposium examines the relationship between moving images and medical science.

The titles, inscribed in the blown-out whites and antic scratches of decades-old film stock, are cold and clinical; so are the doctors, or what appears of them — white lab coats, rubber gloves, all seen from the neck down. The children at the center of the frames, however, are anything but; their eyes look out past 80 years of separation with a haunting pain, writhing against the anonymous hands that hold them down or attempt to force medicine into their straining throats.

The film is Human Rabies, documenting four boys bitten by rabid dogs and brought to hospitals too late to help. Created purely for educational purposes in 1929, it is impossible to view as anything but horrifying.

"It's simple documentation, but 10 years later these images were burned into my mind," says Dwight Swanson, co-curator of this week's Medical Film Symposium, presented in conjunction with several of the city's film and medical institutions. "I had never thought about medical films, but I was doing a research project on educational films from the '30s and wanted to watch one medical film for comparison. I'd been watching Trout Fishing in Alaska and things like that, and I pulled this without much thought and it was so direct. My feeling about film is, the more direct and raw, the better."

If the Medical Film Symposium was conceived during that screening, it underwent a lengthy gestation before finally being born. The four-day-long event, intended to examine the relationship between moving images and medical science, came together when Swanson and co-curator Joanna Poses, both film archivists who together founded Philly's Community Screen, discovered a mutual interest in the subject and a corresponding lack of available information.

"I was hoping that I could just go to a book and read the history of medical films and that would satisfy my curiosity," Swanson says, "but that one book really isn't out there. You really have to search through obscure old journals to find any information at all."

So the two decided to bring together medical and film scholars, filmmakers, archivists and programmers to explore the widely defined genre, which encompasses experimental and narrative films, educational pieces, medical imaging and documentations of actual medical procedures.

Saturday's daylong symposium at the College of Physicians offers presentations on everything from X-ray films, fascinating but ultimately deadly to their irradiated subjects; to famed poverty-row auteur Edgar G. Ulmer's shorts for the National Tuberculosis Association; and Bell Labs' contributions to high-speed cinematography and laryngoscopy, among other topics. Only those with the scholarly bent to register for the presentations will be admitted to what will surely be the week's visual highlight, a multimedia projection piece presented by Andrew Lampert and Greg Pierce in Pennsylvania Hospital's historic surgical amphitheater.

There are three programs of screenings open to the general public, none of which promise the soul-searing of Human Rabies or even much of the squirm-inducing imagery conjured by the idea of medical films.

In a way, such films have grown increasingly abstract over the decades — at least to those not trained to recognize the interior of the body in extreme close-up, as the procedures documented have changed from ethically questionable studies like Human Rabies to sundry snaking scopes.

"The films that are more internal feel far less graphic than ones where you're not really sure what the role of the doctor is," Poses says. "There's material where incredibly sadistic things are going on and oftentimes they don't give you any context within the film. That actually feels much more invasive to me than watching documentation of surgery. There's an evolution from silent films to endoscopic procedures, where you don't even know what you're watching from the outside. You can interact with it as pure image."

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The event kicks off with its most accessible film, Garson Kanin's 1938 portrait of a small-town doctor continually at odds with the local elites — a blend of Capra-esque folksiness and Hollywood 10 propaganda (it was penned by Dalton Trumbo) distressingly relevant to the ongoing health care debate.

The second program consists of several experimental shorts curated by Barbara Hammer, whose A Horse Is Not a Metaphor frankly documents her own chemotherapy sessions. Most of the program is focused on first-person revelations of medical trauma, from Emily Mode's Qualia Diaries, tracking her odyssey through medication trial-and-error after a diagnosis of seizure disorder, to Karen Aqua's Twist of Fate, a hypnotic animated whirlwind meant to evoke her own struggle with cancer. And then there's Brina Thurston's Colon Karaoke, whose title is more literal than anyone probably expects or hopes.

The final program is an offering of educational shorts curated by the Secret Cinema's Jay Schwartz and Skip Elsheimer of North Carolina's A/V Geeks, featuring titles like Feet and Posture and Achieving Sexual Maturity — along with Secret Cinema Halloween perennial Non-Syphilitic Venereal Disease.

"The program is not completely coherent, but that's part of the point," Poses says. "Medical care itself is so diverse that the representations are equally scattered, everything from how the body works, to disease, to medical care. This is really meant to be a sampling of what's out there and why it's interesting, and each of the presenters has a different take on it."

(editorial@citypaper.net)

Medical Film Symposium runs Wed.-Sat., Jan. 20-23, $7-$8 per screening or $80 for a symposium pass, various locations, medicalfilmsymposium.com.