Performing the pathologized body as a spectacle of excess: Reading the medical documentaries of the Films Division, India

Abstract

This article studies select documentary films on health and illness produced and distributed by the Films Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, in the late twentieth century. I argue that these medical documentaries narrativize the experience and treatment of illness and simultaneously encode particular notions of ‘health’, ‘illness’ and ‘restitution/recovery’. The documentary visualizes the presence of disease in individualized, local instances by moving between scientific/indexical and affective modes of narration. This enables the representation of ‘embeddedness’, which the documentary constructs as an inevitable characteristic of all bodies and thereby makes vulnerability to disease relevant in a general context. The article will demonstrate the processes through which the individual, ailing body is imagined for the viewer through the representation of pathological excess as a spectacle and ‘instructive example’, and the inculcation of a particular sensibility towards the identification and treatment of illness/disease.