Cinemas of Therapeutic Activism: Depression and the Politics of Existence

The hegemonic meaning of depression as a universal mental illness embodied by an individualized subject is propped up by psychiatry’s clinical gaze. Cinemas of Therapeutic Activism turns to the work of contemporary filmmakers who express a shared concern for mental health under global capitalism to explore how else depression can be perceived. In taking their critical visions as intercessors for thought, Adam Szymanski proposes a thoroughly relational understanding of depression attentive to eventful, collective and contingent qualities of subjectivity. What emerges is a melancholy aesthetics attuned to the existential contours and political stakes of health.,
Cinemas of Therapeutic Activism adventurously builds affinities across the lines of national, linguistic and cultural difference. The films of Angela Schanelec, Kelly Reichardt, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Kanakan Balintagos are grouped together for the first time, constituting a polystylistic common front of artist-physicians who live, work, and create on the belief that life can be more liveable. Cinemas of Therapeutic Activism offers a novel conception of political aesthetics in the discipline of film studies which takes mental health into consideration. It will be the first to situate Fourth Cinema (the category of global Indigenous feature filmmaking) within the landscape of global art cinema. The book will also creates a bridge between the contemporary neurodiversity movement and the historical sensibility of anti-psychiatry which was important for French theory in the 1970s.

Adam Szymanski is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago.