Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: film

  • Movie review: Première Année (The Freshmen)

    Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   “Never memorize something you can look up.” – Albert Einstein “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” – Winston Churchill   Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash. Première Année (literally “First Year”) is a 2018 French film. In it, we meet and follow two young men in their first year of…

  • The Joker and his Frankenstein

    Snaiha Iyer Narayan India   The Joker & His Frankenstein, 14th September 2021. By Snaiha Iyer Narayan. In recent decades, cinematic portrayals of medical conditions have garnered variant review. The Joker has been an iconic film in popular culture in part because of its portrayal of mental illness and depiction of societal stereotypes. An often disregarded…

  • Medicine and cinema—A cultural symbiosis

    Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, United Kingdom   Fig 1. Poster for Chaplin film City Lights. 1931. Via Wikimedia. Public domain. 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…

  • Prisoners on leave: Vietnam veterans and the Golden Age Western

    Edward Harvey  Missoula, Montana, United States   Vietnam War – Hue, 17 Feb 1968 – US Marines Approaching Movie Theater Displays – Photo by Nik Wheeler. Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS. Via Flickr. “I think we all died a little in that damn war.” – The Outlaw Josey Wales   “So…what have you been up to?” When…

  • 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 Bahr Indianapolis, Indiana, United States   John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851-52, Tate Britain, London. 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…

  • Screenwriting: psychiatry in reverse

    Stephen Potts Edinburgh, United Kingdom   Introduction Good Will Hunting publicity poster 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:…