“Motion Pictures, the latest and best cure for insanity!” Along with the golf cure, the color cure, and the Yuletide department store cure, cinema promised to provide a salve for modernity’s shock-addled sensorium. More than a neurological metaphor, the “movie cure” was widely adopted across the US as the federal government threw money at the film industry to install projection equipment in asylums, which were riddled with scandals of abuse, overpopulation, and dehumanizing treatment. Slapstick comedy had pride of place over all other genres, celebrating the cathartic display of unruly bodies to mitigate cinema’s own implication in mass moral panic about destructive modernity. Meanwhile, neurologists such as Theodore Weisenburg and Arthur Van Gehuchten cultivated empirical uses of moving images to capture wayward symptoms for the purpose of research and teaching. In this presentation, I draw on early film historiographies of medical cinematography, critical theories of slapstick laughter, and recent scholarship in disability studies on mad rights methodology. To invoke the eponym of this whole shebang, Kracauer (and his interlocutors) had complicated views on whether laughter itself was “sufferable” in hysterical times of nervous upheaval and escalating despair. These formative entanglements between film aesthetics and neurodivergent experience, I argue, hold vital implications for our current conjuncture of non-stop spectacle, crisis-ridden politics, permanent carnival, and mad rights awakening.

Workshop 21.06.2022 14 Uhr IG Farben 1.301