Elephant Man Research Articles

Lo abyecto y lo siniestro en el horror corporal. Una perspectiva psicoanalítica y afectiva.

This article studies the film genre of body horror from the categories of the abject and sinister in relation to the image and technical elements of cinema. David Lynch's The Elephant Man (1980) and David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986) are used as a source of analysis. The categories of the abject and the sinister will trace the intimate relationship that exists between the spectator and the film genre, giving the opportunity for an analysis that revolves around psychoanalytical and affective perspectives. The physical resignation of the abject will reveals qualities that the human desires to forget, while the sinister will emerge from the ignorance of the body itself.

The Translation of “The Elephant Man”: Exploring the Trends and Perspectives

This paper highlights the translation of Tim Vicary’s book, The Elephant Man, into the Arabic language. The Elephant Man is a wonderful but tragic story, based on real life events, about an unfortunate but noble man named Joseph Merrick. That is, Merrick had significant physical deformities, which made many recoils in horror when first seeing him. At the same time, however, Merrick was also an intelligent and caring man, with a depth and humanity that was readily recognizable to those who took the time to get to know him. Merrick’s life history is thus an important reminder that you should not judge someone by their appearance, but instead by the content of their character.

A study of the effects of mobile media on L2 text processing: Beyond offline comprehension accuracy measures

Recent research on the processing effects of mobile media has incorporated offline research methods to demonstrate that reading on mobile media is as effective as reading on computers or paper in accuracy of text comprehension. The present study uses an eye-tracking methodology to compare the effects of reading on mobile media (mobile phone and tablet) and traditional media (paper and computer) on cognitive processing behaviours as well as on accuracy. Chinese L2 learners of English (n = 156) read an English novel, The Elephant Man, in one of the four reading conditions (mobile phone: 41, tablet: 39, computer: 38, and paper: 38) while their eye movements were recorded. Between-condition comparisons showed that mobile-assisted reading performance was equally accurate, fast and efficient to process texts, and fast to respond to posttests. Statistically significantly shorter mean fixation duration of mobile-assisted than computer-assisted reading suggests slightly more efficiency in cognitive processing. The overall findings of the present study add to other strong evidence that mobile-assisted reading is effective in text processing. We discuss the implications of our results and provide directions for future research and insights into mobile-assisted language learning, including online learning, e.g., during the COVID-19 global pandemic.

'Waiting with Bated Breath'

'Waiting with Bated Breath'

‘I Kinda Like to Go Off the Track’: Finding David Lynch in the Middle World of Dune

Abstract For many scholars of David Lynch’s work, Dune is considered a spectacular failure, a costly creative misstep on the way to Blue Velvet. While it may not be regarded as one of his signature films, Dune contains enough of Lynch’s creative personality to warrant a critical re-examination. The purpose of this study is to place Dune within the context of his earlier work, namely Eraserhead and The Elephant Man, and to mine it for those tropes with which Lynch has become synonymous: enabling the grotesque, interiority and the unconscious mind, and the relationship between industry and flesh. By the director’s own admission, Dune forced him into an aesthetic middle world, wedging him between the midnight movie and mainstream cinema. Using Thomas Leitch’s theory of adaptation in both an archival and teleological reading of Dune, I demonstrate how Lynch asserts himself in this middle world, how he succeeds in honouring the source material while also meeting his authorial desire to reinvent it, to decouple from the archive and ‘go off the track’.

The beauty in the beast and the beast in the beauty. The voyeur’s view

This paper would like to analyse two films, The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1981) and Blow up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966) and one classic myth, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, through the very poignant figure of the voyeur. We will investigate this observer of the unnamable focusing on two characters, two eyewitnesses: the scientist who discovers John Merrick and the photographer who becomes obsessed with finding a corpse in an amplified picture. Both these voyeurs seem to be in search of the bewitching and sublime darkness that lies within, a search that in a way is inaugurated by the Promethean doctor at the break of Modernity. The corporeal distance between monster and voyeur creates the unbearable morbidity that devours our gaze. And at that exact point, the figures are reversed and the voyeur becomes the actual monster. Soon enough, we discover that their perspective as voyeurs becomes ours, because through the cinematic experience the spectator becomes witness of the crime, part of the freak show, morbid viewer of the abject. Lynch and Antonioni, together with Shelley’s creature and creator, put the question of the body through a microscope and dare us spectators to look inside, to find the morbidity of truth and the limits of art.

From the Elephant Man to Barbie Girl: Dissecting the Freak from the Margins to the Mainstream

From the Elephant Man to Barbie Girl: Dissecting the Freak from the Margins to the Mainstream

The Elephant Man Meets Pulmonary Hypertension. A Cautionary Tale

The Elephant Man Meets Pulmonary Hypertension. A Cautionary Tale

The Role of Mutations on Genes AKT1, PTEN, GPC3, PIK3CA, In Proteus Syndrome

Proteus syndrome is a rare condition that can be loosely categorized as a hamartomatous disorder. It is a complex disorder with multisystem involvement and great clinical variability. Once thought to have neurofibromatosis, Joseph Merrick (also known as “the elephant man” and studied by Treves in the 19th century) is now, in retrospect, thought by clinical experts to actually have had Proteus syndrome. This condition is characterized by various cutaneous and subcutaneous lesions, including vascular malformations, lipomas, hyperpigmentation, and several types of nevi.

“We understand each other, my friend”. The freak show and Victorian medicine in "The Elephant Man"

A large part of David Lynch’s oeuvre centres around corporeal anxieties and grotesque, divergent bodies drawing attention to their own biological nature. One such example is the 1980 feature "The Elephant Man", focusing on John Merrick, a freak show performer severely afflicted with a disfiguring disease. The film juxtaposes key characters in the film and moves between their different perspectives: that of Merrick, a freak show performer; Doctor Treves, a man of science; Bytes, an entertainer; and finally, a number of peripheral observers from both the high and low classes of Victorian society. The titular Elephant Man’s disfigured body becomes the object of spectacle both in a freak show and in a medical lecture theatre. This paper compares scenes presenting Merrick’s body as an exhibit and argues that Lynch draws parallels between the domain of sensational entertainment (Merrick as a carnival monster) and scientific analysis (Merrick as a medical specimen). In this way, the film highlights the similarities between the perception of the body in those two seemingly incongruous discourses. I suggest that the exhibition of a monstrous body in The Elephant Man, both in the context of a sideshow and Victorian medical lecture, are consciously theatrical.

O sound design de Alan Splet para David Lynch sob a perspectiva do horror fílmico

Resumo O sound designer americano Alan Splet (1939-1994) participou da produção de 25 filmes. Com o diretor David Lynch, criou efeitos sonoros e ambiências mais livres de vínculos com a verossimilhança. Eles trabalharam juntos no curta-metragem The grandmother (1970) e nos longas-metragens Eraserhead (1977), O homem elefante (The elephant man, 1980), Duna (Dune, 1984) e Veludo azul (Blue velvet, 1986). A forte influência surrealista na filmografia de Lynch estimulou soluções de Splet que se assemelham ao trabalho de som do gênero cinematográfico do horror, o que se reconhece até na recente temporada de 2017 da série de TV Twin Peaks, com direção e sound design do próprio cineasta. Este artigo aborda os procedimentos de edição de som mais usuais na filmografia desse gênero, comparados à edição de efeitos sonoros desse sound designer.

Spaces of normality, pictures of monstrosity: Socio-spatial configurations of the abnormal in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man

David Lynch’s film The Elephant Man (1980), provides a narrative to explore concepts of normality and abnormality, specifically, how each is shaped by and in return shapes social space, scientific discourse, and institutional power. Against the socio-historical background of Victorian London around 1880, the article draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the narrative chronotope to analyse the cinematic framing and systemic challenge presented by the extraordinary life of ‘abnormal’ titular hero John Merrick. Investigating spaces like the hospital, freak show, and theatre, this article argues that Lynch’s film transcends its historical subject matter by fostering awareness about how we conceive of and are governed by socio-spatial and institutional configurations of (ab)normality.

Tel qu’en lui-même enfin l’Eternité le change. Notes sur le soi/non-soi et les avatars de David Bowie

IntroductionAs a contribution to a metapsychology of art, the author proposes a dynamic analysis of David Bowie's pluralistic and subversive artistic practice. The purpose is to illustrate the dialectic tension between me/not-me as developed by Donald W. Winnicott (1953) who determined, in the early development of the child, the first distinctions between me and not-me that contribute to the construction of the transitional object and alongside to that of cultural activity. MethodIn order to discuss the concept, the author analyses the art corpus of David Bowie (1949–2016) – one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, combining artistic practices as varied as that of singer, composer, musician, songwriter, dancer, movie and theatre actor, and painter. ResultsAfter examining four aspects of the dynamics me/not-me for this artist, – his avatars in Nicolas Roeg's cult movie The man who fell to earth (1978), his theatre adaptation of Elephant Man (1980), and his clip Lazarus (2015), it appears to be the dialectic tension between me/not-me that fuels David Bowie's multifaceted art corpus. DiscussionAs a matrix of later object distinctions, Winnicott's “me/not-me” could be heuristic in our further understanding of the creative process and its psychic dynamics. ConclusionMore research is required on other corpuses to test these first hypotheses.

Early history of the different forms of neurofibromatosis from ancient Egypt to the British Empire and beyond: First descriptions, medical curiosities, misconceptions, landmarks, and the persons behind the syndromes.

The earliest examples of neurofibromatosis (in this case type 1, NF1) can be traced in the Ebers Papyrus (Ancient Egypt, 1.500 B.C.), in a Hellenistic statuette (Smyrna, 323 B.C.), in the coinage of the Parthians kings (247 B.C.) and in some 13th century monks' drawings. These earlier examples are somewhat less well defined as compared to the most recent better defined reports credited as having NF1 including an Inca child mummy (1480-1650 AD), Ulisse Aldrovandi's homuncio ("Monstrorum Historia", 1592 A.D.) with mosaic NF1 or the illustrations seen in the 18th century "Buffon's Histoire Naturelle" and "Cruveilhier's Anatomie Pathologique du Corps Human". The first English language report on NF1 was made by Akenside in 1768 and the first systematic review by Robert William Smith in 1849, while Virchow's pupil, Friedrich Daniel von Recklinghausen, in 1882, was the first to understand the origin of skin tumors and to name them neurofibromas. The touching story of Joseph C. Merrick (the "Elephant man," (who had Proteus syndrome and not NF1), in 1884, played an important role in the later misconception of NF1, as did the novel by Vicotr Hugo on the hunchback Quasimodo. The studies by van der Hoeve (1921), Yakovlev and Guthrie (1931), and Van Bogaert (1935), categorized "von Recklinghausen's" neurofibromatosis among the phakomatoses and the neurocutaneous syndromes. The first known mention of an acoustic neuroma (at autopsy) is attributed to Eduard Sandifort (1777 AD) while John H. Wishart made the earliest autoptic description of neurofibromatosis type 2 (NF2), in 1822, in a 21-year-old man with bilateral acoustic neuromas, who manifested signs since his infancy (Wishart subtype NF2). Smith likely described the first case of schwannomatosis in 1849. Older, Virchow, von Recklinghausen, and Verocay first classified "neuromas" and Masson and Penfield first used the word "schwannoma" taking it from Theodore Schwann's works. In 1903 Henneberg and Koch described NF2 in detail. Young, Eldridge, and Gardner, in the late '70, established NF2 as a distinct familial entity (Gardner subtype NF2). Schwannomatosis, the late entry of the different forms of neurofibromatosis, was credited in the middle '90.

The Creation of Mood in The Elephant Man

The Creation of Mood in The Elephant Man

A cinema for the unborn: moving pictures, mental pictures and Electra Sparks's New Thought film theory.

In the 1910s, New York suffragette Electra Sparks wrote a series of essays in the Moving Picture News that advocated for cine-therapy treatments for pregnant women. Film was, in her view, the great democratizer of beautiful images, providing high-cultural access to the city's poor. These positive 'mental pictures' were important for her because, she claimed, in order to produce an attractive, healthy child, the mother must be exposed to quality cultural material. Sparks's championing of cinema during its 'second birth' was founded upon the premise of New Thought. This metaphysical Christian doctrine existed alongside the self-help and esoteric publishing domains and testified, above all, to the possibility of the 'mind-cure' of the body through the positive application of 'mental pictures'. Physiologically, their method began best in the womb, where the thoughts of the mother were of utmost importance: the eventual difference between birthing an Elephant Man or an Adonis. This positive maternal impression was commonplace in New Thought literature; it was Sparks's innovation to apply it to cinema. Investigating Sparks's film theory, practice and programming reveals her to be a harbinger of the abiding analogy between mind and motion picture that occupies film theorists to this day.

Aporias of Rock Art Interpretation

Aporias of Rock Art Interpretation

Breath and the Body of the Voice in Cinema

The four articles in this special volume of Music, Sound, and the Moving Image investigate the bodily qualities of the vocal utterances that accompany the cinematic experience, whether these emerge from the soundtrack of the film itself or from the audience watching it. Rather than following the tendency in film studies to privilege the linguistic properties of speech, the articles explore the significance of 'non-semantic' vocalisations, such as sighing, gasping, sobbing, shouting, screaming, and laughing. Breathing, in a number of different registers, is a particular focus of attention and, as such, Davina Quinlivan's The Place of Breath in Cinema (2012) provides a reference point that cuts across the different lines of enquiry. More broadly, the volume makes a film-specific contribution to the critical study of voice, a field that has become ever more attuned to the voice's material qualities, such as those interrogated in the analyses that follow.Taken together, the articles consider non-semantic vocal sound through the different phases of the film experience: that is to say, through production, exhibition, and reception. Liz Greene's analysis of breathing in The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980) and Rising Sun (Philip Kaufman, 1993) is heavily informed by her insight into the production history of both films, evidenced, in particular, through reference to the sound effects archive Sound Mountain. Meredith Ward is similarly interested in the aural consequences of production decisions, this time in the context of the design of the spaces of film exhibition. Her article provides a wealth of historical evidence demonstrating how cinema designers adhered to a code of 'architectural acoustics' that sought to cleanse the space of unwanted vocal sound, whether emitted from the audience or from the cinema's speakers. Ward shows how this attempt to provide a transcendent listening experience was always subject to challenge, compromised by the irrepressible noisiness of the spectators' sounding bodies.Philippa Lovatt holds her focus on what is heard and seen onscreen, offering an extremely sensitive reading of subjective vocal sounds in Bashu, The Little Stranger (Bahram Beizai, 1990) and Turtles Can Fly (Bahman Ghobadi, 2004), two Iranian films that record the experience of war from a civilian perspective. This involves the expression of a point of audition that is suppressed in the dominant modes of the war film, which tend to align the viewer/auditor with the figure of the soldier.Finally, Ian Garwood considers the usefulness of attending to non-semantic vocal sound in a specific context of critical reception: that is to say, the very common circumstance in which a critic wishes to write about a film whose characters are speaking a language he or she can only understand through recourse to subtitles. In this situation, Garwood argues that attention to non-semantic vocal sound may offer some compensation to the critic for her/his incomplete access to the words being spoken. This provides a rationale for tuning the ear in especially to such sounds, and the other contributors to this edition also demonstrate an interest in identifying the circumstances in which vocal utterances that might otherwise go unnoticed demand critical attention. In the films they discuss Greene and Lovatt both identify moments of asynchronicity that denaturalise particular sounds, thereby bestowing on them a particular expressive significance. Ward, meanwhile, describes a situation where, perversely, the more cinema designers strove to silence the bodies of the audiences that filled their auditoria the more likely it was that spectators would become acutely aware of the fundamental sounds of breathing that registered their presence. …

The Labour of Breath

The presence of breath in fiction film is a conscious choice by filmmakers. Since the introduction of Dolby sound in the mid-1970s we have experienced a significant development in the quality of playback systems in cinemas, which means that we are now more clearly able to hear the breathing performance of an actor. The inclusion of breath offers a technologically enhanced aural close-up of characters within the story. This article will consider two ostensibly different examples, The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980) and Rising Sun (Philip Kaufman, 1993); both films are the work of the sound designer Alan Splet. Drawing from these films and archival material from the Sound Mountain sound effects library, this article seeks to address the role of breathing within these films, considering issues such as: the actor’s breathing performance; breathing and disability; the gendering of breath; and the depiction of differing industrial (nineteenth-century England) and technological (twentieth-century America) environments, both of which are associated with different levels of air quality. The archival material will broaden out the discussion of these elements, illustrating the post-production design of breath and air in these fiction films.

The warped mirror: the reflection of the ableist stare in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man

David Lynch’s The Elephant Man tells the story of Joseph Merrick – called John Merrick in the film – a man who lived in Victorian England and who was exhibited in ‘freak’ shows under the moniker ‘The Elephant Man.’ One of Lynch’s central concerns in the film is visuality – how Merrick’s disabled body is seen and looked at, both by the characters in the film and by the film’s audience. Ultimately, at both the narrative level and the cinematic level, Lynch exposes the insidious power of forms of looking at the disabled body that collude with and reinforce ableist social hegemony. Using Lacanian and Foucauldian theory and building on the work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Todd McGowan, this article examines exactly how Lynch is able to achieve this anti-ableist work.