BIOE 5710 Bioethics and Film

In reality and metaphorically, cinema has served for generations of moviegoers as a site of communal congregation, pedogogical dissemination, and sometimes disease infection. Accordingly, how and where we watch films are just as important as what films have to say about doctors, disease, and death. This course will consider the epidemiological and cultural implications of cinema on bioethics, including how movies and movie theaters themselves have functioned as spaces of contentious discourse regarding public health. Bearing in mind the recent scholarship of film and medical theorists such as Lisa Cartwright, Paula Triechler, and David Serlin, we will study not only the possibility for film to register and comment on cultural understandings of the clinic, but also the ways cinema itself works out, reimagines, and even changes how the clinic is put into practice. Focusing on themes such as quarantine, vaccination, sexual health, end of life care, professional competence, and globalization, we will be watching and discussing public health films and feature-length films by directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, David Croneberg, Tamara Jenkins, and Todd Haynes. No background in either cinema studies or bioethics is required for this course.