Cinematic Prophylaxis : Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
A timely contribution to the fields of film history, visual cultures, and globalization studies, Cinematic Prophylaxis provides essential historical information about how the representation of biological contagion has affected understandings of the origins and vectors of disease. Kirsten Ostherr tracks modes of visually representing the contamination of bodies through a range of media, including 1940s public health films; entertainment films such as 1950s alien invasion movies and the 1995 blockbuster Outbreak; television in the 1980s, during the early years of the aids epidemic; and the cyber-virus plagued Internet. In so doing, she charts the changes—and the alarming continuities—in popular understandings of the connection between pathologized bodies and the global spread of disease.Ostherr presents the first in-depth analysis of the public health films produced in the period between World War II and the 1960s that popularized the ideals of world health and taught viewers to imagine the presence of invisible contaminants all around them. She examines not only the content of specific films but also their techniques for making invisible contaminants visible. By identifying the central aesthetic strategies in films produced by the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, and other institutions, she reveals how ideas about racial impurity and sexual degeneracy underlay messages ostensibly about world health. Situating these films in relation to those that preceded and followed them, Ostherr shows how during the postwar era, ideas about contagion were explicitly connected to the global circulation of bodies. While postwar public health films embraced the ideals of world health, they invoked a distinct and deeply anxious mode of representing the spread of disease across national borders.
From the Publisher
"My copy of Cinematic Prophylaxis will quickly be well-worn with use in teaching and research consultation. It is a valuable and much-needed contribution to the intersecting histories of U.S. cinema and public health."-Lisa Cartwright, author of Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture
"Cinematic Prophylaxis offers a very sophisticated and original interpretation of a fascinating topic: the emergence of the logic of contagion in world health ‘education' practices and in U.S. mainstream cinema. Kirsten Ostherr links the discourse of contagion and public health with the development of cinema and the rise of visuality, problems of modernity, and the logic of conspiracy, ultimately tying all of these to the problem of globalization. Her argument is utterly original; I haven't seen anything else like it."-Melani McAlister, author of Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945
Cinematic Prophylaxis : Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health
Cinematic Prophylaxis : Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health,Kirsten Ostherr,Duke University Press,0822336480,Cinema/Film: Book,Disease Outbreaks,Diseases in motion pictures,Film & Video - History & Criticism,History and criticism,Performing Arts,Pop Arts / Pop Culture,Public Health,Science fiction films,Sociology - General,prevention & control,American Studies,Film & Television Studies,MEDICINE & MEDICAL HUMANITIES
Fun Book:
Recommended Books