{"id":1305,"date":"2012-09-20T12:35:00","date_gmt":"2012-09-20T19:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/?p=1305"},"modified":"2014-02-02T02:11:48","modified_gmt":"2014-02-02T09:11:48","slug":"flesh-made-light-investigating-x-ray-films","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/flesh-made-light-investigating-x-ray-films\/","title":{"rendered":"Flesh made light: investigating X-ray films"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Still<\/a>
Still from Barbara Hammer’s Sanctus, courtesy of the Medical Film Symposium<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I’m flying back from a trip to the George Eastman House (in Rochester, New York), where I did a couple days of archival research. I thought I’d write a bit about what I was doing there and what I found, in the hope that capturing the experience here will help me organize my thoughts about it later.<\/p>\n

I was interested in a physician-filmmaker named James Sibley Watson, Jr., who made a number of striking cinefluorographic (X-ray) films. I’ve been hoping that Watson will be the basis of a fourth chapter of my book, Depth Perception<\/em>, which is about medical filmmaking. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of what, together, we think constitutes a body: mind, anatomy, disease, and, with the addition of this fourth chapter, skin. My argument is that it’s surprisingly difficult to make a medicalized body cohere on film. It takes tons of editing tricks, special effects, and dedicated equipment. In fact, it’s so difficult, I argue, that we should pause to consider whether the medicalized body exists at all.<\/p>\n

I first encountered Watson’s films in a 2010 presentation by the filmmaker Barbara Hammer, whose experimental short film Sanctus<\/em><\/a>\u00a0is constructed from Watson’s X-ray films. I was struck by the haunting quality of Watson’s work, as well as some other facts Hammer related about the physician. The only son of a wealthy Rochester family, Watson graduated from medical school in 1921, but maintained a keen interest in modernist literature and film. With a partner, he edited and published\u00a0The Dial<\/em><\/a>, the modernist literary magazine, publishing work by E. E. Cummings, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and many others. He also made two well-regarded experimental films: The Fall of the House of Usher<\/em>\u00a0(1928) and Lot in Sodom<\/em>\u00a0(1932). In the mid-1940s, however, Watson turned his attention to radiology, joining the faculty of the University of Rochester’s School of Medicine and filming (according the Eastman House’s finding aid) more than 10,000 cinefluorographic exams.<\/p>\n