Szpital jako przestrzeń filmowa
Hospital as a film space

Author(s): Barbara Kita
Subject(s): Studies of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Summary/Abstract: Hospital as a multi‑faceted and ambivalent space enables manifestation of different forms of protagonist identity and opens various possibilities of film representations. It was only the postmodern discourse, open to the types of characters and groups which had been nonexistent in the mainstream cultural reflections, that enabled meaningful presence of the diseased. Thus ‘the alien’, ‘the other’, ‘the untypical’ — that which does not fit in the modern order of reality — has been demarginalized. Three films created the basis for my observations on hospital as an institution of supervision, on hospital space as an ambivalent space of passage and, at the same time, a place of closure and exclusion, of peculiar dehumanization of a hospital subject — a human being. An inspiration for this reflection, along with the film examples whose action takes place in a psychiatric hospital (which is very significant), are Michel Foucault’s thoughts on the nature of panopticon and madness, as well as Zygmunt Bauman’s writings on the condition of the diseased in the postmodern world. The hospital space, apart from being conditioned by a closed and imposing order institution, can also be seen as an ambivalent space owing to extreme emotions it evokes.

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