Cinema and mental health

Enunciation and representations in short films produced in the asylum

Abstract

This article will focus in a socio-semiotic analysis (Verón, 1993) of three short films: “Las paredes son nuestras”, “Regatos Salvajes” and “Un lunes de miércoles”; filmed in an artistic-therapeutic device called “AtraBesados”. This device is configured as a space for audiovisual training at the Hospital Neuropsiquiátrico Provincial of Córdoba, Argentina. The people who participated in the device have gone through a psychiatrization process in the hospital and at the time of production they were either in a period of hospitalization or outpatient treatment.

We will focus, in the analysis of the representational level, understanding that what the camera records are “real things” and perceived or imagined by the entire film-making team, so they cannot be considered more than as “representations”. Our analysis is based on how people show themselves, how they represent their realities, identities and territories, through the audiovisual device. 

We then ask ourselves: What audiovisual resources appear, and how are they used in the shorts films? What voices appear in these discourses produced in an institutional mental health context? What representations in relation to mental health and madness appears there?

We will try to approach to the figure of the enunciator through the analysis of the enunciation device (Verón, 1993) that functions in each short film.

The objective is to unravel the audiovisual device to glimpse whether it materializes as a discursivity that enables expression and subjectivity, or not.