Augustine was the most extensively photographed of the young women hysterics at the Salpêtrière in Paris of the 1870's. She was 'the Sarah Bernhardt' of the asylum. This is her story.
Charming Augustine is inspired by series of photographs and texts on hysteria published by the great insane asylum in Paris in the 1880’s under the title of the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière. It is an experimental narrative based on the case of a young patient, Augustine. At fifteen she was admitted to the hospital suffering from hysterical paralysis. The doctors were captivated by her hysterical attacks that appeared extraordinarily theatrical and photogenic. She became the star of the asylum. Yet at the same she was deeply disturbed. She had visions and heard voices.
The film explores connections between attempts to document her mental states and the prehistory of narrative film. The role of the motion studies by Marey and Muybridge in the birth of cinema is well known. However while they attempted to study the mechanics of the body, the doctors at the Salpêtrière, working with similar cameras, aimed to unlock the secrets of their patient’s minds. I wish to show how patients like Augustine supplied the psychic drive that would come to flower in the works of D.W. Griffith.
I shot the film in a stereoscopic format to suggest a different direction that cinema might have taken had it been invented in the 1870’s. Ultimately what I wish to convey is a fragile, spectral, what if…a moment in time when the moving image was on the brink of existence in a form not yet standardized.
Note: DVD is not in 3D. For a public screening in 3D 16mm contact zoe@zoebeloff.com
CAST & CREW
Producer(s): Zoe Beloff
Writer(s): Zoe Beloff
Actor(s): Tea Alagic, Greg Mehrten, Josh Stark, Steven Rattazi, Kevin Maher, Eileen White, Eliza Fernbach
ADDITIONAL CREDITS
Original Music: Miguel Frasconi, Lighting: Eric Muzzy
AWARDS
Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival, Festival Nouveau Cinéma, Montreal, The Images Festival of Independent Film & Video, Toronto, Festival of Women’s Film and Media Arts, National Museum of Women in the Arts, MadCat Film Festival, San Francisco
