This is a past event
Ostensibly a tale about Victorian London, David Lynch's The Elephant Man (1980) became a modern parable of tragic ugliness and inner beauty at a time when disfigurement was being redefined as a disability, and disability was being recognized as a civil rights issue.
The film, and wider elephant man phenomenon, tapped into contemporary anxieties about genetic mutation and monstrous birth and informed the way neurofibromatosis and other potentially disfiguring conditions were seen: as a “curse” that could finally be broken by modern medicine.
Taking The Elephant Man as an object lesson, this paper explores some of the challenges of using films as historical documents, and begins to plot a history of disfigurement as a cinematic trope.
Suzannah Biernoff (Birkbeck, University of London)Co-hosted by the George Washington Wilson Centre for Visual Culture and CHPSTM
Bio: Suzannah Biernoff is a Reader in Visual Culture in the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London, and co-director of Birkbeck’s Medical Humanities Research Group.
Her publications, focusing on histories of the body, faciality and ways of seeing, include Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages and Portraits of Violence: War and the Aesthetics of Disfigurement. Her current research, on cinema and the unbeautiful, investigates the ways in which film has created, perpetuated and challenged stereotypes of facial difference over the past century.
Supported by Aberdeen City Council's Creative Funding programme and the University of Aberdeen
- Speaker
- Suzannah Biernoff (Birkbeck, University of London)
- Venue
- via Zoom