Project News
Seminar Highlight
We are delighted to share that Anna Toropova took part in an international seminar on Cinematic Representations of Medicine in Socialist Societies at the University of Warsaw on 9 October 2026.
Her paper, ‘Early Soviet Cinema and the Neurological Gaze’, explored how Soviet specialists used film to document a range of neurological conditions and movement disorders. These medical film projects fit within a broader Western neuropsychiatric tradition that prioritised visual evidence and looked to the body’s surface for signs of disease. Yet, as the paper shows, Soviet specialists also sought to move away from understanding madness as a form of ‘degeneracy’ expressed in the body and took an interest in unique case histories and the verbal expressions of individual patients.