Event

Seth Watter

House of Wax: Filming Catatonia since 1925

Catatonia, or “tension insanity,” is among the most remarkable of all psychiatric illnesses. It was also one of the most filmed, if only because it lends itself so well to filming. Silent, rigid, hardly moving from the spot, the catatonic subject is wholly at the camera’s mercy. Since its isolation as a clinical entity by Karl Kahlbaum in the 1870s, absorbed by the 1890s into the genus of schizophrenia, catatonia became a symbol of the closed and mysterious world of the mental institution, or asylums as they were called. It represented the extreme of alienation that mental illness could effect vis-a-vis the world outside. Especially fascinating for early psychiatric filmmakers was the cerea flexibilitas, or “waxy flexibility,” which permitted the demonstrator to place the subject’s body in grotesque and extraordinary positions that were then sustained. Film after film shows much the same thing, a doctor playing puppetmaster with a life-sized marionette. Unlike case histories, which track change over time, almost no reference is made in the early films to the place of this symptom within the course of the disease. Thus the viewer can simply gape at the incredible shapes displayed. One is often put in mind of the tableau vivant and the static tableaux of popular theater. At times, however, we sense a frustration with the stasis and negativism of catatonic subjects; they do not change enough to satisfy the camera. Films of catatonia emerge within a genre we might call, for convenience, “diagnostic cinema,” whose aim is to help clinicians recognize symptoms in the same way that an atlas is an aid to botanists.

Seth Barry Watter is adjunct assistant professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Prior to this he taught at Sarah Lawrence and Brooklyn College. In 2020 he received a NOMIS Postdoctoral Fellowship from the eikones Center, University of Basel to research the history of the behavioral sciences. He is also working on a study of the former Rockland State Hospital in Orangeburg, NY as an “institutional medium” and occasional object of representation. He is the author of The Human Figure on Film: Natural, Pictorial, Institutional, Fictional (SUNY Press, 2023) and of articles in Grey Room, History of the Human Sciences, Camera Obscura, Film International, and elsewhere.