-
Head and Shoulder Hunting in the Americas
I’ve posted a number of times about Walter Freeman, the lobotomist, and his photographs of his patients. I presented on the subject for a Film Studies colloquium here at Emory, and you can view a recording of that presentation here. (See this bibliography for sources.) I’ve noticed some distortion in this Flash video; you can…
-
Walter Freeman’s photographic forebears
Walter Freeman, the psychiatrist who popularized lobotomy, called photography his “magnificent obsession.” There’s no doubt that Freeman loved to shock, and his lobotomy photographs and films were part of Freeman’s arsenal of attention-getters. But Freeman was also part of a long tradition of looking at a patient’s face and body in order to deduce the…
-
Writing about lobotomy photographs
It often seems to me that writing history is an exercise in hubris. I never felt that more than when trying to write about Walter Freeman’s photographs of the people he lobotomized. These are really difficult photographs: difficult to see, difficult to analyze, and difficult to talk about. Lobotomy has become a kind of joke…
-
Only fair!
Here’s a curiosity I can’t resist sharing: the first National Science Fair in 1950 had a girls’ division and a boys’ division.
-
The internet worked again!
I was thinking about my last post, in which I said my experience with The Temple of Moloch was my first encounter with Internet-ty Scholarly Synergy. I remembered, though, that this is actually untrue. Back when I worked at the Museum of the Moving Image, I had an awesome and totally nerdy online encounter with…
-
As film studies goes digital
I don’t think it’s any secret (among those who care about such things) that the Film Studies program at Yale is at something of a crossroads. Film studies as a discipline has been increasingly turning into media studies, and Yale’s program, like a lot of programs, is having to decide how much it wants to…
-
When in doubt, ask a real person
Web-based research is great and all, but sometimes nothing beats talking to a real person. One of my favorite tricks when researching an obscure topic (like a certain kind of microphone) is to pick up the phone and call someone. In my experience, if you get in touch with the right person, he or she…