Captives: Three Portraits of the Asylum (and One of its Decline)

Join us on Tuesday, June 10, 2025 for “Captives: Three Portraits of the Asylum (and One of its Decline),” guest programmed and presented by Seth Barry Watter.

Watter writes:

“Madhouse, mental hospital, or psychiatric facility: whatever we choose to call it, the asylum is a defining feature of the landscape of our modernity. Its waning as a form over the last fifty years has been met with repeated calls to bring it back upon the scene. Crumbling wards can still be seen across Europe and North America and in their former colonies, client states, and imitators. Popular culture, for its part, keeps the asylum alive as a setting for countless narratives on film and TV. From its origins in the sporadic efforts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the large-scale confinement of the mad in the nineteenth, finally to the opening of mega-hospitals in the twentieth, a visual culture of the asylum has steadily emerged and led a sensational life of its own. But documentary footage has been relatively sparse due to the sealed-off nature of most institutions—and much of what exists was made by the staffs themselves, for teaching and research and sometimes propaganda.

The titles in this program present rare views of the asylum from outside perspectives and in a variety of national contexts. Three were produced in the first half of the 1960s, at the peak of institutional culture before its rapid decline. Walls of Skin by Martin Spinelli, Arthur Plutzer, and Rita Mitra (1964, 19 minutes) is a harrowing portrait of alienation in the children’s unit of a psychiatric institute for research in Philadelphia. No Man is a Stranger by Erica Anderson (1961, 25 minutes), though distributed by a drug company, overcomes its sponsorship to provide an astonishing survey of neglect and care in Haiti. Captive Feast by Mario Ruspoli (1962, 17 minutes) is a verité-style depiction of a festival for patients at the French asylum Saint-Alban, where François Tosquelles and other radical psychiatrists practiced on the renovated grounds of a former feudal castle. Finally, Ode to Seekers 2012 by Andrew Norman Wilson (2016, 9 minutes), partially filmed in the abandoned wards of a New York state hospital, suggests an extension of the logic of these enclosures into the new reality of digital extraction.”

This 70-minute program will be preceded by a short lecture by Watter on the genre of the asylum film and the place of these films within it.

This event is part of the ongoing lecture series Film Beyond Film: Art and the Moving Image at e-flux Screening Room by researchers whose work has formed the discourse at the intersection of art and cinema, situating moving-image within broader aesthetic, political, and economic contexts.

Seth Barry Watter is a film and media historian. He is the author of The Human Figure on Film: Natural, Pictorial, Institutional, Fictional (SUNY, 2023) and of articles in Grey Room, Camera Obscura, Millennium Film Journal, History of the Human Sciences, and elsewhere. He lives and teaches in New York.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.

Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to program [​at​] e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave (garage door) leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom with no steps between the event space and this bathroom.