Tag: film
-
Movie review: Première Année (The Freshmen)
Howard FischerUppsala, Sweden “Never memorize something you can look up.” – Albert Einstein“If you’re going through hell, keep going.” – Winston Churchill Première Année (literally “First Year”) is a 2018 French film. In it, we meet and follow two young men in their first year of medical school. Benjamin, like most of his classmates, enters…
-
Medicine and cinema—A cultural symbiosis
Arpan K. BanerjeeSolihull, United Kingdom For doctors and lovers of cinema, 1895 was an important year. On November 8, 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen, a fifty-year-old professor of physics, discovered X-rays in his laboratory in Wurzburg, Germany. On March 22 1895, the Lumiere brothers presented the first film on a screen to an audience of 200 in…
-
Prisoners on leave: Vietnam veterans and the Golden Age Western
Edward Harvey Missoula, Montana, United States “I think we all died a little in that damn war.”—The Outlaw Josey Wales “So…what have you been up to?” When screening combat Vietnam veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder, I will often ask them about their hobbies or interests, since PTSD often manifests as an inability to find pleasure in…
-
The bedside manners of Ingmar Bergman’s celluloid physicians
Eelco WijdicksRochester, Minnesota, United States The great humanitarian filmmaker and auteur Ingmar Bergman used physicians in his films much more frequently than his peers. Bergman’s full filmography, including two films (Thirst and Brink of Life) directed by but not written by Bergman, features sixteen physicians in thirteen films. Excluding the family doctor in Fanny and…
-
Bad blood: The drama of bloodshed
Emily BoyleDublin, Ireland In some professions, bloodstained clothing is a normal part of the job. The two jobs that come to mind principally are a butcher and a vascular surgeon, although the latter would probably prefer not to be associated with the former! In vascular surgery not every operation results in bloodstained scrubs, although for…
-
Madness and gender in Gregory Doran’s Hamlet
Sarah BahrIndianapolis, Indiana, United States In director Gregory Doran’s 2009 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, David Tennant’s Hamlet becomes a bawdy lunatic who consciously or unconsciously uncouples himself from reality. The intentionality of Hamlet’s madness is more muddled than in Shakespeare’s text because of the confrontational quality Tennant lends to the prince’s mental angst. Tennant…
-
Screenwriting: psychiatry in reverse
Stephen PottsEdinburgh, United Kingdom Introduction The subject matter of medicine is inherently dramatic. Decisions taken by professionals who are highly skilled, but still human and therefore flawed, are applied to suffering patients in situations of pressure and can have radically diverse outcomes: life or death; disability or cure: a healthy baby born to a healthy…