interictal

<h4>Diagnostic note</h4> In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “hysteria” and “epilepsy” were closely tied, their etiologies delineated not only in parallel but in conversation. But self-awareness was the key point at which these diagnoses diverged. Patients were more likely to be labeled hysteric when they were capable of retrospectively narrating their own “fits” to a degree that epileptics could not.<sup><a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a></sup> As Jeannette Stirling notes, “of all the voices that articulate epilepsy” in both medical and literary language, the voice “that cannot register … is the voice of the subject with epilepsy.”<sup><a href="#fn2" id="ref2">2</a></sup> As clinicians disentangled epilepsy and hysteria, the hysteric moved to Freud's domain of personal narrative,<sup><a href="#fn3" id="ref3">3</a></sup> while the voiceless epileptic remained captured by Charcot's visio-centric lens. In contemporary study of hysteria across fields there is a reoccurring effort to (re)attribute agency to the hysteric, sometimes even to the point of partially recuperating Charcot’s system of signs. The projects of Lisa Cartwright, Felicia McCarren, Georges Didi-Huberman and Jonathan W. Marshall seek out instances of autonomous self-expression in the archives of hysteria. Arguing that the “capacity of the hysterical body to generate forms, poses, and gestures renders hysterics as consummate artists, and their bodies as media,"<sup><a href="#fn4" id="ref4">4</a></sup> Marshall’s attempt to restore the agency of the hysteric in the archive depends on insisting upon the voluntariness of a hysteric’s convulsive movements. The hysteric in the archive may be recuperated, even elevated, by attributing to her movement some agential intent - whether self-expressive or cannily performative. For the epileptic in the archive this is impossible. [[Continue|ER Video]] <sup id="fn1">1. Faber, Diana P. "Jean-Martin Charcot and the epilepsy/hysteria relationship." <i>Journal of the History of the Neurosciences,</i> 6.3 (1997): 275-90. <a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a></sup> <sup id="fn2">2. Stirling, Jeannette. <i>Representing Epilepsy: Myth and Matter.</i> Liverpool: Liverpool University Press (2010). <a href="#ref2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text.">↩</a></sup> <sup id="fn3">3. McCarren, Felicia M. <i>Dance Pathologies: performance, poetics, medicine.</i> Redwood City: Stanford University Press (1998): 31 <a href="#ref3" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text.">↩</a></sup> <sup id="fn4">4. Marshall, Jonathan W. "Traumatic Dances of 'The Non-Self.'" <i>Performing Hysteria: Images and Imaginations of Hysteria</i>, ed. Johanna Braun. Leuven: Leuven University Press (2020): 69. <a href="#ref4" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text.">↩</a>

<img src="http://majnoon.hosting.nyu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/3-Figure2-1.png" width="617" height="653"></img> A Salpêtrière photograph (c. 1885-90) <sup><a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a></sup> shows an attack of “masculine hysteria,” the man’s body stretching into an arc de cercle. His spine is bent to its extreme, with his palms and the soles of his feet anchored to the ground, and his pelvis as the highest point in the arch. In his open-backed, untucked undershirt he is not fully clothed, but mostly covered. His billowing sleeve entirely obscures his face, anonymizing him, and in fact the true subject of the photograph may be the man standing behind the patient – Albert Londe, in one of his occasional appearances in front of the camera. Londe poses a perfect contrast to the patient. He stands upright and straight-backed, hands tucked casually into the pocket at the front of his long apron, its clean lines and the fitted cut of his short jacket creating a sharp rectangular silhouette. He is upright where the patient is prostrate, straight where the patient is bent, forward where the patient is in profile, composed where the patient is disarrayed. He makes eye contact with the camera and smiles, as if sharing a joke with his fellow photographer, while the patient’s face is totally obscured. While the <i>Iconographie</i> compiles only photographs of the patients themselves, typically close-cropped, cataloging representative examples of the movement vocabulary, the larger photographic corpus of the Salpêtrière shows the context of the patients in the clinic, often with clinicians in the frame. If viewers of the Iconographie are invited to learn a new language, to learn to see and interpret as the clinician does, viewers of these documentary clinical photographs are invited to more concretely imagine themselves in the clinician’s role. The clinician’s daily activities are depicted almost as play, with seizing bodies among other toys, including the cameras themselves. [[Continue|Arc Bourgeois]] <sup id="fn1">1. Eidenbenz, Céline. "L’âme renversée. L’arc hystérique et ses corps à rebours autour de 1900," <i>Pulsion(s). Art et déraison.</i> Waterloo: Renaissance du livre (2012): 53-89. <a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a></sup>

<h4>Whose body language?</h4> Not in spite of but because of the epileptic's voicelessness, the choreography of seizures remains a cultural touchstone grounding the idea that gesture is innately expressive. If a body that cannot possibly be <i>communicating</i> still <i>says something,</i> the subjective testimony of the person to whom that body belongs can be marginalized as, at best, a supplement to the innate meaning of nonagential movement. Convulsion is invested with meaning at the discretion of the clinician-filmmaker. As a result the seizure is an overdetermined sign. But my concern here is not the interpretation of the system of signs, as pathology or possession, but rather the interception of seizure movement as a system of signs in the first place. [[Continue|Maud Video]]

Epileptiform convulsion constituted the raw material of the gestural vocabulary of hysteria, and from these gestures the cultural image of the epileptic seizure was choreographed. The tonic clonic seizure is not really constructed from a fixed vocabulary of gestures, of course. Nor does it originate in the improvisational creativity of the individual. It is therefore non-choreographic movement, by most uses of the term "choreography." The seizure itself cannot be construed as “invented” in the same way Didi-Huberman construes of hysteria as invented. However, in order to be translatable to both the medical and the larger cultural gaze, the movements of the tonic clonic seizure had to first be regimented into a vocabulary. Each seizure is actually a totally unique event, not connected to others even by a universal interior cause, far less a universal underlying logic of body movement. But under the clinical gaze these cohesive and unique events were overlaid with each other and parceled out into gestures. Consequently the <i>icon</i> of the seizure can be conjured through a set of gestures that are remarkably consistent across individual instances in media, although they are inconsistent across individual instances of seizures. To coherently establish <i>the seizure</i> as an identifiable visual spectacle, the real incoherence of <i>seizures</i> had to be replaced with an underlying logic that is the opposite of that reality. This replacement was accomplished systematically and actively through the clinician’s use of the mediating technology of the camera, and continues to be cemented culturally through that same medium, in spite of medical knowledge that contradicts this medical-cultural ideal. Cartwright argues that the unruliness of tonic-clonic seizures thwarts the neurological gaze’s attempts to rationalize body movement.<sup><a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a></sup> However, this analysis fails to recognize that neurology defined–and continues to define–epilepsy by that very unruliness; the chaos of the seizure is circumscribed by the diagnosis. Critical interpretations of disorderliness and opacity as agential resistance to control fall short in analyses of seizure movement, which is unavoidably nonagential. Interpreting the seizing body’s movements as resistance to the medical gaze is itself a rhetorical exploitation of those movements. The disorderliness of seizure movement cannot pose a challenge to medical institutional control when that disorderliness is the very justification for that control. In these analyses there remains a reluctance to allow bodies to be bodies, rather than works of critical theory, poetry, autobiography, or radical polemic. (unless: (history:) contains "Intro Doc")[<a href="https://majnoon.neocities.org/postictal.html"><b>Exit</b></a>] (if:(history:) contains "Intro Doc")[[[Continue|S8 Doc]]] <sup id="fn1">1. Cartwright, Lisa. "An Etiology of the Neurological Gaze." <i>Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture.</i> Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (1995): 47-80. <a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a></sup>

<img alt="A golden metallic sculpture of a headless body in an exaggerated arc de cercle." src="https://www.moma.org/d/assets/W1siZiIsIjIwMTcvMDkvMTIvOWx2ZWl5dmxtcV8zNDUuanBnIl0sWyJwIiwiY29udmVydCIsIi1xdWFsaXR5IDkwIC1yZXNpemUgMjAwMHgyMDAwXHUwMDNlIl1d/345.jpg?sha=9040115e785ecccf" width="520"></img> <p style="line-height:1">“The hanging arch figure is actually a cast of my body. Louise had me lie down on a curved mound to get this shape, and then the body was in a plaster mold, which she then cut up to make this curve. To Louise the state of hanging was this idea of fragility, because it meant that the body could turn, it could pivot, it could spin, so it wasn't a stable kind of thing.” Jerry Gorovoy, via MoMA <a href="https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/42/681" title="External link to source">↗</a></p> Louise Bourgeois’ sculpture <i>Arch of Hysteria</i> (1993) extends the arc to almost a full cercle, the form of a body stretched well beyond the possible, literally sculpted into an icon. This image takes the arc to the opposite extreme from our studio practice, emphasizing the unreality of the icon in order to expose its violence. But the technical physical possibility of the arc is part of what lets it do its ideological work–and its violence is physical, not disembodied. This is a choreographic vocabulary, not just a visual vocabulary. The body makes the image possible–not the figurative body-as-idea, but the body as muscle, fat, bone, cartilage, nerves, neurochemicals. Felicia McCarren writes that “the dance itself–the dilation of the body into images–is impossible without the anchoring structure of bone and muscle.”<sup><a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a></sup> (129). Like the dance, the seizure cannot be processed into a series of images before the exertion of that anchoring structure. The “hysteric” epileptic body is a body laboring, not just a body shaped. However, Bourgeois uses the gallery installation format to highlight a feature of the arc difficult to capture in other media: the calculated pseudo-intercorporeal encounter between the processed and petrified corporeal image and the corporeally active viewer. Jerry Gorovoy recalls that “Louise wanted this figure to have a high polish so that the viewer’s face is caught inside the body of this contorted figure. So it brings the viewer into the picture.”<sup><a href="#fn2" id="ref1">2</a></sup> This involves the moving viewer as a second dancer responding to a gesture typically choreographed for a single body. Bourgeois reverses the dynamic I observe between the seizing and non-seizing characters in horror films, in which the seizing body moves while the non-seizing character observes unmoving. In <i>Arch of Hysteria</i> the arc returns the slightest movement of the viewer's body back to the viewer's observation. The use of the arc de cercle in the films I discuss rejects Bourgeois' influential appropriation of the posture into an explicitly feminist artistic project, and restores the dynamic of one-sided surveillance choreographed by Charcot. [[Surveilling the arc|Arc Surveillance]] <sup id="fn1">1. McCarren, Felicia. <i>Dance Pathologies: Performance, Poetics, Medicine.</i> Stanford: Stanford University Press (1998): 129. <a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a></sup> <sup id="fn1">2. MoMA, "Louise Bourgeois: An Unfolding Portrait," 2017-18. Web.<a href="#ref2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text.">↩</a></sup>

In these films seizures in general, and arc de cercles in particular, are observed by characters in close social contact with the seizing person–parents, children, siblings, classmates, teachers, lovers. The arc is almost never shown without an observer, but that observer is never a medical professional. Those close to the seizing person are turned into surrogate clinicians, and social networks become networks of medical surveillance, a constant monitoring and interpretation of seizure posture and gesture. Charcot wrote that he had among his patients “the best possible police, that of women over women.” <sup><a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a></sup> The first seizure in <i>Gwen</i> (2018) is choreographed as a sustained arc de cercle with lateral rocking from the hips and secondary movement of the limbs. Much like the photograph of Londe, the seizing body’s face is obscured, while Gwen’s face dominates the frame as much as her mother’s body does. But unlike Londe’s smile, Gwen appears disturbed and frightened. A similar reaction is seen to the arc in <i>Emily Rose</i> and <i>The Witch.</i> The aesthetic impact of the arc is tempered by in-narrative reactions that resituate the iconic posture in the horror genre. Unlike Londe and Charcot, viewers are not entreated to photograph the arc, or pose beside it, or induce it, or treat it. By recontextualizing it as an object of fear and revulsion for another character, the arc is severed from an immediate clinical context and incorporated into genre conventions. But the way the arc is choreographed and shot remains strikingly similar to clinical photographs. The viewer is not shown the same arc that the character reacts to. The viewer is invited to make something of the arc; offered the icon as raw visual cultural material, largely unchanged from its origins. These films use an established vocabulary to write in a new genre, and in turn they pass that vocabulary to viewers, asking them to participate in the interpretive act of making meaning from film, but also empowering them to continue reorganizing the vocabulary in their own time, to continue wringing meaning from the elongated spine. [[Continue|Dancers, Hysterics, and Epileptics]] <sup id="fn1">1. Charcot, Jean-Martin. <i>Clinical lectures on the diseases of the nervous system: delivered at the infirmary of La Salpetriere</i>, trans. Thomas Savill, London: The New Sydenham Society (1889): 235. <a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a></sup>

What I find to be primary is not the interpretation of the signs, as pathology or possession, but the interception of seizure movement as a system of signs in the first place. At stake is not the conflict between natural and supernatural; in this context both interpretations share an investment in the reification of the same worldview, the same horizon, the same subject. The differentiation between the “old” supernatural and “modern” scientific is a smokescreen. [[Continue|ER and Ex Video]]

Seizure choreography in horror film makes use of a preexisting movement vocabulary solidified through over a century of medical-visual-cultural interpretation of seizures, a project that shaped not only the discipline of neurology but the discipline of film itself. Film made some of its earliest technological and aesthetic advances through the photography of seizing bodies, and the medical and cultural vision of the seizure was in turn shaped by these photographic experiments, such that the way we look at film and the way we look at seizures remain informed by each other. I find that 21st century horror has not invented a new way of representing seizures, nor of representing through seizures. In addition to consistency in the tonic-clonic qualities of the movement, we see in these films a consistent vocabulary of posture and gesture. The performers are not simply jerking around, they are jerking into poses recognizable from a larger visual cultural context. Rather than making the seizure choreography appear more stylized, the use of preexisting movement vocabulary is crucial to conveying “seizureness” to viewers. I argue that this is because the choreography of seizures participates in a larger medical-visual-cultural history beginning from the concretization of a gestural vocabulary. This need not be intentional on the part of filmmakers in order to warrant critical consideration. [[Consider it|Witch Hands Video]]

The stillness of tonic spasms and cataleptic episodes afforded Charcot and his image-makers not only an opportunity to capture clear photographs of epileptic hysteria patients, but also to cast their bodies in plaster and wax. While Charcot’s public demonstrations were ephemeral, these 3D models filled a museum.<sup><a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a></sup> While Charcot’s clinical practice was confined to the Salpêtrière with his institutionalized patients, 3D models could travel with him, as when he brought a life-sized full body wax model to the 1881 International Medical Congress in London.<sup><a href="#fn2" id="ref2">2</a></sup> He displayed the model of his former patient Berthelot–capturing her in a state of extreme emaciation–alongside photographs of her "attitudes," and her preserved skeleton. <img src="https://majnoon.neocities.org/ataxia.jpg" width=480></img> <p style="line-height:1"><sup>Charcot demonstrates locomotor ataxia in a patient I inconclusively believe to be Berthelot, c. 1875-80, via Olivier Walusinski, "Jean-Martin Charcot," <i>European Neurology</i> 78 (2017): 297.</sup></p> Charcot and his collaborators’ deadly exploitation of patients was a transmedia project; their choreography of convulsions could never be fully documented through any single medium available to them. Although they created still images, their work pursued movement, anticipating Eadweard Muybridge’s proto-cinematic images of epilepsy patients in <i>Animal Locomotion</i> (1885-7), only a few years after the publication of the <i>Iconographie</i>'s final volume (1880). <img src="https://woodmereartmuseum.org/images/stories/flexicontent/m_Muybridge_2004.8_WEB-1.jpg" width=480></img> <p style="line-height:1"><sup>Muybridge, "Epilepsy, Walking,"<i> Animal Locomotion</i>, via Woodmere Art Museum.</sup></p> When the Salpêtrière’s seizure choreography resurfaces in 21st century horror, the narrative film medium combines in a single object the temporal mobility and affective immediacy of staged demonstrations; the spatial mobility and dimensionality of models; the information density of text; the editorial control of photography. I find that narrative cinema reproduces the multimodality of Charcot’s practice more comprehensively than any other single medium. In so doing, it retraces the contours of the 19th century encounter between seizure movement and camera technology; an encounter that I argue reverberated through medical and popular visual culture, influencing interpretations of body movement as well as filmmaking methodologies. [[Continue|Suspirias Video]] <sup id="fn1">1. Didi-Huberman, Georges. <i>Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière</i>, trans. Alisa Hartz. Cambridge: MIT Press (2003): 123-4.<a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a></sup> <sup id="fn2">2. <i>Transactions of the Seventh Session of the International Medical Congress</i>, eds. William MacCormac and George Henry Makins. London: Ballantyne, Hanson and Co. (1881): 128.<a href="#ref2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text.">↩</a></sup>

<img alt="Gif of MRI slides moving on and off a projector, then reflected in a man's glasses." src="https://majnoon.neocities.org/exorcist%20mri.gif"></src> <sup>Regan's MRI in <i>The Exorcist</i> (1973)</sup> Neuroimaging is part of the visual language of <i>The Exorcist</i>, but although unspecified diagnostic tests are verbally referenced in <i>Emily Rose</i>, we never see a rendering of her brain. Comparing <i>The Exorcist</i> and <i>Emily Rose,</i> in the film where the possessed person’s brain is of less narrative concern, we see far more of it. The imaging technologies available in 1973 were both more revolutionary and more invasive, providing never before seen visualizations of neural activity bought with the uncomfortable price of a spinal tap. But the spectacles of progress and pain can still be found in the neuroimaging of 2005. The absence of visualizations of the brain in Emily Rose is not because the technologies had lost their fascination, but because the naked eye’s view of the body–the moving corpus, not the neuroelectric mechanics that animate it–is of more use to the film. The emphasis on body movement would be weakened by the introduction of a non-choreographic way of visualizing the seizure. The collaborating authorities of the camera’s lens and viewer’s eye would be weakened by the incursion of another means of measurement. Moreover, the introduction of neuroimaging technology would undermine the semiotic logic that makes choreography equivalent to a seizure. (if:(history:) contains "S3")[[[Continue|S4 Pho]]] (if:(history:) contains "Intro Doc")[[[Continue|Choreo and chorea]]] (if:(history:) contains "S5 N")[[[Continue|S8 Pat]]] (if:(history:) contains "S5 Y")[[[Continue|Choreo and chorea]]]

What is a “convulsion”? Is it choreography? Is it horror? Is it pathology? What does it mean to choreograph something that is meant to appear unintentional and nonagential? Possession horror has now so fully absorbed the movement vocabulary of the tonic-clonic seizure that it appears even as a non-sequitur to the main action, more a punctuation mark than a plot point. Although <i>The Conjuring 2</i> (2016) largely follows the model of <i>The Exorcist</i> (1973), conveying demonic presence through external chaos and expressive outbursts, a narratively unmotivated seizure occurs halfway through the film, invoking the seizure’s cultural resonance without lingering on it. [[Continue|Sus18 Video]]

We finally severed the sequence from these initial emotional associations by abstracting the lines of movement drawn by Caleb’s head and hands off of a single body and onto multiple bodies. We had previously referenced the original film as well as mannequin animations of the sequences. This time, we referenced a simple animation of the lines of motion, created by anchoring tracers to the wrists and chin. <img alt="Short gif of three moving lines on a white background." src="https://majnoon.neocities.org/witch%20tracer.gif"></img> We distributed the roles of right hand (Anna), left hand (Seren), and chin (Michelle), to replicate the visual composition of trajectories through space while abstracting them from the parts of a single body, and instead creating a dance for three. The only fixed score for the trio was to match the original trajectories and relationships of each line to the others; they improvised collaboratively in order to meet that score. <img alt="Sped-up gif of three dancers in a rehearsal studio moving throughout the room to draw spatial lines closely matching the gif above." src="https://majnoon.neocities.org/trajectory%20trio.gif"> We created a close match for the original sequence’s spatial composition from a long shot of three bodies rather than a close up on three body parts. The resulting dance is compositionally similar, and therefore arguably choreographically and cinematically similar, but constructed from dramatically different movement vocabulary. It was directly derived as an adaptation, but is not recognizable as an adaptation. This initially seems to suggest that what connects the original sequence to the Salpêtrière attitudes, and activates emotional associations, is dependent on anchoring it to a single body. <img alt="The same sequence as above, but with a fourth dancer seated in the front, moving only their hands and chin." src="https://majnoon.neocities.org/trajectory%20quartet.gif"></img> To test this supposition, after transforming the solo into a trio we returned the trajectories to a single dancer’s chin and hands. Josiah performed a sequence based on reference both to the original tracer animation and to the trio’s composition. Surprisingly, returning these trajectories to a single dancer did not restore the individuated emotional associations so pronounced in the original, or in our prior solo experiments with the original. This suggests that the qualia of the original sequence is based as much on staging a particular encounter–an upright, aware individual watching an unaware, convulsing body–as it is on the gestures themselves. [[Continue|Awareness and Narration]]

Epilepsy is historically a flashpoint for discourses of subjectivity, interiority and consciousness. The use of seizures in horror films invokes these discourses. To the outside observer the seizure troubles the relationship between awareness and action; this is the root of its horror and fascination. The horror is not simply the spectacle of a seizing body; this choreography invokes anxieties about the nature of the self and its place in public life that are not only thematized by but were themselves provoked by the distinctive phenomenology of epilepsy. The apparent contradiction between an excess of movement and an absence of intention fundamentally troubles any formulations of subjectivity as a coherence of body and mind. Nima Bassiri argues that it was from this trouble that the modern construction of the self emerged. When 19th century studies of the seizure revealed that it was not a response to an internal invasion, but an atypical function of typical physiology, the prevailing European understanding of the divide between sane and insane was discredited. Bassiri argues that the identification of epilepsy’s physiological origin was crucial to radical new philosophies of mind, and the formation of a “neural subject.” <sup><a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a></sup> Jeanette Stirling similarly writes that in the 19th century epilepsy was emblematic of the “borderlands between abnormality and normality.” <sup><a href="#fn2" id="ref2">2</a></sup> <img src="https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/L0011295/full/1338%2C/0/default.jpg" width="500"></img> <sup>Epileptic patient, <i>Des maladies mentales</i>, via Wellcome Collection, University of London. <a href="https://wellcomecollection.org/works/dh2xhuph?wellcomeImagesUrl=/indexplus/image/L0011295.html" title="External link to source">↗</a></sup> <p style="line-height:1">“The fury of epileptic patients … is of a very dangerous kind, blind, and in some degree automatic. Nothing can tame it; neither the sight of powerful instruments of restraint, nor moral influences, which means generally succeed with ordinary maniacs.” <br><small>Jean-Etienne Dominique Esquirol, <i>Des maladies mentales</i> (1838), qtd. “Epileptic Mania,” <i>The Lancet,</i> October 1851.</small></p> Stirling argues that a 19th century obsession with epilepsy was symptomatic of the return of the repressed—the latent epileptic potential within every body crossing over the normal/abnormal boundary. <sup><a href="#fn3" id="ref3">3</a></sup> But rather than the neural subject emerging in exclusion of a haunting potentially-epileptic shadow-self already located on the far side of a preexisting normal/abnormal boundary, I understand that boundary as an outcome of the intercorporeal encounter—played out under the social magnifying glass of the medical photographic lens—with actual epileptic persons. This encounter catalyzed a negotiation of the narrative horizon of the ordinary; <sup><a href="#fn4" id="ref4">4</a></sup> a negotiation unevenly weighted by medical and criminal-legal institutions of social control. In response to an ongoing cultural contestation of that outcome, the films I discuss simulate the initial encounter in order to reassert the same horizon and reproduce the same normative subject. In horror, disabled characters are often dehumanized to the point of animality or monstrosity. <sup><a href="#fn5" id="ref5">5</a></sup> I argue that the dehumanization of seizing bodies goes beyond that point. The seizing character is not really a character so much as an event, equivalent to a gory murder in slasher films—not the murdered or murdering person, but the murder itself. [[Continue|Conversation of Gestures]] <sup id="fn1">1. Bassiri, Nima, "Epileptic Insanity and Personal Identity: John Hughlings Jackson and the Formations of the Neuropathic Self." <i>Plasticity and Pathology: On the Formation of the Neural Subject,</i> eds. Bassiri and David Bates. New York: Fordham University Press (2016): 83<a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a></sup> <sup id="fn2">2. Stirling, Jeannette. <i>Representing Epilepsy: Myth and Matter.</i> Liverpool: Liverpool University Press (2010): 76<a href="#ref2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text.">↩</a></sup> <sup id="fn3">3. Ibid.</i> 113<a href="#ref3" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text.">↩</a></sup> <sup id="fn4">4. Weiss, Gail. <i>Refiguring the Ordinary,</i> Bloomington: Indiana University Press (2008). <a href="#ref4" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text.">↩</a></sup> <sup id="fn5"> 5. Cheyne, Ria. “Horror: Fearful Bodyminds,” <i>Disability, Literature, Genre: Representation and Affect in Contemporary Fiction</i> Liverpool: Liverpool University Press (2019). <a href="#ref5" title="Jump back to footnote 5 in the text.">↩</a></sup>

In phenomenological terms, the encounter with a seizing body rehearsed in these films is a monologic conversation of gestures,<sup><a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a></sup> a one-sided meeting in which the upright, abled self solidifies their own subjectivity in relation to the seizing other, without the vulnerability of reversibility<sup><a href="#fn2" id="ref2">2</a></sup> or reciprocity. While visibly embodied, the seizing other is not encountered as another person experiencing a phenomenon, but as the phenomenon to be experienced by the spectating normative self. In <i>The Witch</i>, the protagonist Thomasin is visibly emotionally impacted by her brother Caleb’s convulsions, but not undone; her emotional responsiveness conveys her individuality and affirms her subjectivity. The choreography of the seizing body is fractured by reaction shots of Thomasin, transferring the immediate embodied qualia of the scene from the body in motion to the body observing motion. <img alt="Nine stills of close, medium, and far reaction shots suggesting disgust, fear, and sadness." src="http://majnoon.hosting.nyu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Screenshot-29.png" width="720"></img> While performed by Caleb’s actor, the choreography becomes vital not for Caleb’s body, but for Thomasin’s. Caleb’s embodiment becomes Thomasin’s experience. While visibly embodied, the seizing other is not encountered as another self experiencing a phenomenon, but as the phenomenon to be experienced by the spectating normative self. The phenomenon of “witnessing a seizure” totally excludes the person who seizes. Thomasin’s characteristic self-awareness and autonomous thinking takes shape in monologic relation to Caleb’s unaware and uncontrollable motion. When the viewer is exorcised from the seizing character, the act of viewing ceases to be a reversible encounter and becomes a one-sided extraction—not only in terms of how the viewer views the character, but also how the viewer views the film. With their possible points of perspective diminished, the viewer’s view is bound to the camera’s view. I find that horror films cleave closely to the formal characteristics of early medical films and photography. As with the medical instructional film, the viewer’s way of seeing is turned toward the visual and mechanical dimensions, and away from the somatic and experiential dimensions, of movement. [[Look in the archive|Chase]] <sup id="fn1">1. Mead, George Herbert. <i>Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist,</i> Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1934): 47-50. <a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a></sup> <sup id="fn2">2. My use of phenomenology here is indebted to the disability-informed work of Gail Weiss, especially <i>Refiguring the Ordinary,</i> Bloomington: Indiana University Press (2008).<a href="#ref2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text.">↩</a></sup>

In 1905, neurologist Walter Chase visited New York’s Craig Colony for Epileptics, gathered over one hundred patients under the hot sun, stripped many of them naked and waited for them to seize, ready with a camera to capture their convulsions.<sup><a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a></sup> The Craig Colony films served not only to document seizures for classroom study, but also to initiate medical students into their profession by modeling a relationship to patients. I argue that the nurses at Craig Colony, not the seizing patients, are the protagonists of Chase’s films. Although they stand at the edges of the frame they are far from peripheral to the action. Their agential action is necessary to give the non-agential action of the seizure its shape, its narrative structure – not simply by manipulating the bodies of the patients, but by performing a role of their own. Chase’s films served to contrast the unruly epileptic body against the nurse as a subject entrusted with the management of institutionalized undesirables. <img alt="Black and white film still of three uniformed nurses grasping a patient's clothes to lift him from the ground." src="http://majnoon.hosting.nyu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Screenshot-13.png" width="492"></img> Just as medical instructional films present a particular relationship between nurses and epileptic patients which student viewers are instructed to emulate, in horror films, the lapse in awareness during the seizure is exploited to stage a particular subject position for other characters and by extension for the viewer in relation to the seizing body. [[Continue|Horror Etiologies]] <sup id="fn1">1. Chase, Walter. “Demonstration on the Use of the Biograph in Medicine,” <i>Transactions of the Medico-Chirurgical Society of Edinburgh,</i> 25 (1906). <a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a></sup>

<img alt="Close-up on hands holding a clipboard and pen. The intake form on the clipboard warps with a glitch effect. The person has pale skin, black nail polish, and a black dress." src="https://majnoon.neocities.org/intake.gif" width=520></img> <b>Date:</b> (current-date:) <b>Date of last seizure:</b> <label><input type="radio">Within the last 6 months</label> <label><input type="radio">More than 6 months ago</label> <label><input type="radio">Unknown</label> [[Submit|Waiting Room]]

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