Charming Augustine

A film inspired by the Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere, a series of photographs and case studies of female hysterics in residence at the Salpetriere lunatic asylum in Paris in the 1880s. Augustine _________, whose theatrical & photogenic hysterics held a particular fascination for la Salpetriere's doctors, was the most photographed woman in the Iconographie. At the same time that Marey & Muybridge's motion studies attempted to study the mechanics of the body, the doctors at la Salpetriere, working with similar cameras, aimed to unlock the secrets of their patients' minds. "Charming Augustine" suggests a different direction that cinema might have taken had it been invented in the 1880s: a spectral "what if?" moment in history when the moving image was on the brink of existence in a form not yet standardized.

Director: Zoe Beloff. DVD format, 40 minutes, B&W.
Exclusively available through The Museum of Jurassic Technology. Also by Zoe Beloff: "Shadow Land, or Light from the Other Side."