10.54103/2036-461X/17898
The connection between images and anorexia, orthorexia, bulimia, binge eating, and other forms of food consumption deemed ‘disordered’ is controversial and often over-simplified. Frequently it is reduced to the idea that glamorous images, particularly the heroin chic style of the 1990s, create a dangerous imaginary that young women - statistically the main target of eating disorders - emulate. This article wants to challenge this issue by exploring three aspects of the intricate relationship between eating disorders and images: 1) The fear of contagion that haunts images exposing bodies that suffer by eating disorders; 2) As a time-based medium, film offers a privileged set of perceptive tools to account for the ways eating disorders interfere with time – as perceived, lived, shared; 3) One more aspect that is relevant to observe since it predominately occupies the current debate is the question of the right way to represent certain medical conditions and their experience. The reasons at the core of this debate are extremely vital and prove how photos and moving images have tragically contributed to building and constructing gender and racial bias as well as the stigmatization of certain diseases. Though when speaking of misrepresentation there is the risk of embracing a deceptive idea of good mimesis at the cost of the ambivalence that the experience of certain conditions inherently carry and which should not disappear in the fictional dimension.
application/pdf
2036-461X
17898
39
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Clio Nicastro
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Film
Symptomatic Images/Contagious Images: The Ambivalence of Visual Narratives of Eating Disorders
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
22
Thematic issue / Section thématique
2023-01-24
2022-05-16
2023-01-24
2023-01-24
37-51
Cinéma & Cie
Clio Nicastro
2022
10.54103/2036-461X/17898
37
Bard College Berlin / ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry
2036-461X
39
Film
en
51
Symptomatic Images/Contagious Images: The Ambivalence of Visual Narratives of Eating Disorders
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/17898/17537
22
                                                                                       Symptomatic Images/
                                                                                       Contagious Images:
                                                                                       The Ambivalence of Visual Narratives
                                                                                       of Eating Disorders
                                                                                       Clio Nicastro, Bard College Berlin/
                                                                                       ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry



                                                                                       The connection between images and anorexia, orthorexia, bulimia, binge eating, and                      Keywords
                                                                                       other forms of food consumption deemed ‘disordered’ is controversial and often over-
                                                                                                                                                                                                 Anorexia
                                                                                       simplified. Frequently it is reduced to the idea that glamorous images, particularly the
                                                                                       heroin chic style of the 1990s, create a dangerous imaginary that young women - stati-                     Bulimia
                                                                                       stically the main target of eating disorders - emulate. This article wants to challenge this         Moara Passoni
                                                                                       issue by exploring three aspects of the intricate relationship between eating disorders                Dysmorphia
                                                                                       and images: 1) the fear of contagion that haunts images exposing bodies that suffer by                        Film
                                                                                       eating disorders; 2) As a time-based medium, film offers a privileged set of perceptive
                                                                                                                                                                                                      DOI
                                                                                       tools to account for the ways eating disorders interfere with time – as perceived, lived,
                                                                                                                                                                                              https://doi.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License




                                                                                       shared; 3) One more aspect that is relevant to observe since it predominately occupies
                                                                                       the current debate is the question of the right way to represent certain medical condi-        org/10.54103/2036-
                                                                                       tions and their experience. The reasons at the core of this debate are extremely vital                 461X/17898
                                                                                       and prove how photos and moving images have tragically contributed to building and
                                                                                       constructing gender and racial bias as well as the stigmatization of certain diseases.
                                                                                       Though when speaking of misrepresentation there is the risk of embracing a decepti-
                                                                                       ve idea of good mimesis at the cost of the ambivalence that the experience of certain
                                                                                       conditions inherently carry and which should not disappear in the fictional dimension.




                                                                                                 For others, who look from without, my ideas, my feelings have a
                                                                                                 nose. My nose. And they have a pair of eyes, my eyes, which I do not
                                                                                                 see but which they see. What relation is there between my ideas
                                                                                                 and my nose? For me, none whatever. I do not think with my nose,
                                                                                                 nor am I conscious of my nose when I think. But others? Others,
                                                                                                 who cannot see my ideas within me, but who see my nose without?
                                                                                                 For others, there is so intimate a relation between my ideas and
                                                                                                 my nose.
                                                                                                            (Luigi Pirandello, One, None, and a Hundred Thousand)



                                                                                       INTRO
                                                                                         In this article I want to reflect on the intricate link between images and eating
                                                                                       disorders. In recent years the question of the visual representations of medical
                                                                                       issues — a subject that has been inaugurated by authors such as Sander Gilman
                                                                                       and Stuart Hall — has been gaining more and more attention within cultural


                                                                                       Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                             37
     studies, gender studies, and medical humanities. If the two-way relationship
     between medical conditions and their visual narratives is generally crucial for
     all medical categories, I believe that eating disorders constitute a peculiar case
     study as their constellation of symptoms, their definition, and their epidemic
     nature appear to be strictly related to both the construction/rejection of the
     image of the self as well as to the circulation of glamourous photos and beauty
     ideals that are supposed to trigger the disorders. Furthermore, a careful
     analysis of bodily dysmorphia, which features both anorexia and bulimia,
     allows to expand the investigation of images from the visual aspects only to ‘the
     embodied perceptual experience that also involves the other senses’ — as Fiona
     Johnstone proposes in her Manifesto for a Visual Medical Humanities.1 In this
     respect, I find compelling to engage with the filmic narratives of eating disorders
     at least for three reasons that I will start to unpack in this contribution: 1) Films
     need to confront the fear of contagion that haunts images exposing bodies that
     suffer by eating disorders (this hesitation is confirmed by the little filmography
     that exists on this subject despite the sadly increasing proliferation of these
     disorders); 2) Temporality is a dimension that I consider particularly significant
     in the analysis of cinematic narratives of eating disorders. As a time-based
     medium, film offers a privileged set of perceptive tools to account for the ways
     eating disorders interfere with time — as perceived, lived, shared. For instance,
     how they sabotage the conventional subdivision of the day into mealtimes and
     their ritualistic and social value. Moreover, time of food obsession confronts
     that of intersubjectivity, which often functions as a hindrance in the context of
     days devoted to food: avoiding it, buying it, consuming it, weighing it, thinking
     about it. What is sacrificed therefore is the time of shared routine, which in
     this case coincides with the physiological time of nutrition; 3) One more aspect,
     which does not only concern narratives of eating disorders, but that I believe is
     important to discuss since it predominately occupies the current debate (both
     academic and mainstream) is the question of the right way to represent certain
     medical conditions and their direct experience. The reasons at the core of this
     debate are extremely vital and valid, and prove how photos and moving images
     have tragically contributed to building and constructing gender and racial
     bias as well as the stigmatization of people diagnosed with diseases such as
     hysteria2 and, more recently, HIV. Though when speaking of misrepresentation
     there is the risk of oversimplifying the discourse and embracing a deceptive
     idea of ‘good mimesis’ at the cost of the ambivalence that the experience of
     certain conditions inherently carry and which should not, therefore, disappear
     in the fictional dimension.3



     A SCENE OFF-TOPIC
       A thin young woman moves nervously in a room with large horizontal windows.
     She stares at the landscape outside — house roofs and electricity pylons — after
     having checked her phone, scrolling up and down with her index finger. The



38                                    Nicastro, Symptomatic Images/Contagious Images
long silence of this scene is only broken by the heels of her shoes when she
walks down the staircase to exit the flat and sit for a moment on a bench in
the sun. The camera lingers inside, on the first floor, and zooms in from above,
through the door glass, on her hesitant body. She rests only few seconds, then
she goes back inside, climbing the stair towards the camera. She stops on the
top step, and not even the close-up can help disclosing her thoughts. She turns
her head, gives the boney back to the camera, and obsessively starts to walk
up and down the stairs: first slowly, with a calm serious expression on her face,
then quicker, lending rhythm to the automatic movement. A slight, enigmatic,
bodily joy pushes her lips. Is she smiling?
   This woman is one of the characters who participate in the choral story, Grass
(2018), created by Korean director Hong Sangsoo. The black and white film
revolves around the guests of a café and her owner, Areum, who sits all day
long at her laptop observing and writing down the conversations, the actions
— fights, frictions, and love encounters — of the persons eating and drinking in
the room. We are not sure whether Areum is the screenwriter or a witness of
this net of daily experiences that the guests bring with them at the table. An
undecipherable role in line with the absence of clear temporal references that
features the entire movie. The repetitive gesture of the woman walking the
stairs with no purpose other than going up and down bespeaks Hong Sangsoo’s
attempt to move so close to actions, reactions, and words, that the temporal
borders lose their framing function. The short, apparently irrelevant, sequence
contains a similar kind of marginal yet symptomatic gestures that filmmaker
and theorist Domietta Torlasco so accurately and poignantly describes in her
film essay Philosophy of the Kitchen (2014).4 By retracing the presence of (paid
and unpaid) domestic work in the history of European film, Torlasco picks up
Cesare Casarino’s thesis in Images for Housework5 to prove how cinema of
duration—long takes, repetitive gestures, protracted silences — was born in the
kitchen. The exhaustion of the (house)working women on the screen contrasts
with a cinematic dead time where ‘nothing happens’.6 In the Italian neorealist
film Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica, 1952) — one of the films Torlasco includes in
her video essay — a young pregnant maid sits on a chair while grinding coffee:
she is exhausted from cleaning, preparing food, tidying up. But suddenly,
something extraordinary happens, she extends her leg, stretches her foot, and
closes the kitchen door with the tip of her toe only because she can do it.7
Philosophy of the Kitchen reflects on female reproductive labour foregrounding
its power in affecting forms and technics of time-based cinematic medium —
almost a revenge against its marginalization as an activity worth neither to
be paid nor to be shown [Fig. 1]. Insisting on the marginal minor gestures is
here, then, not a romantic celebration of the mundane and its little details
but a way to point out the significance of these interruptions, which do not
immediately correspond to a signified, yet they ask to be listened to, despite the
possible risks of misinterpretation. We can deem these images symptomatic8
by keeping in mind Freud’s definition of symptoms as ‘acts detrimental or at
least useless to the subjects’.9 The fact that symptoms would neither speak


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                    39
                           for themselves nor display their meaning, presented a compelling challenge
                           where alternative forms of understanding could only be found in an in-between
                           zone, by exposing both the patient and the therapist to the rich and impervious
                           space of transference. As George Didi-Huberman pointed out,10 Aby Warburg’s
                           unfinished project for his Mnemosyne Atlas11 is built on the idea that certain
                           images are symptoms of the intricacy of human multi-layered temporality, made
                           of interruptions, resumptions, inversions, regressions, stops, and accelerations.
                           Warburg recognized in the artistic crystallization of expressive gestures
                           and forms the physical embodiment of this ungraspable and discontinuous
                           fluctuation of time, which he named Dynamogram. These were for Warburg new
                           parameters to rethink and rewrite art history and to thus reject a conception
                           of art history that aestheticized art works. He was rather concerned with art
                           as trace of human gestures and expression (what he calls Pathosformeln): a
                           history of moving bodies and affects. Images are not only generated by the
                           clash between feelings and reflective thought, they also embody the symptoms
                           of this conflict. They do not provide a solution, they interrogate time condensed
                           in bodily gestures.




Fig. 1
Still from Grass (Hong
Sang Soo, 2018)

Fig. 2
Still from Philosophy in
The Kitchen (Domietta
Torlasco, 2014)



40                                                         Nicastro, Symptomatic Images/Contagious Images
   What makes, in this sense, the sequence from Grass so special? The scene
of the woman in the staircase exceeds the seeming banality of empty motion
precisely because it goes off-topic- to quote Lea Melandri’s provocative
definition of those topics that historically were not considered theoretically
relevant despite being at the core of women’s life, desires, and struggles
[Fig. 2].12 If Grass is not at all film about eating disorders, something in this
repetitive action — off-topic and out of time — offers a (moving) Pathosformel to
elaborate on the imaginary that films (especially fiction films, tv series, and web
series) on anorexia, bulimia, binge, and orthorexia create, support, or dismiss.
Hong Sangsoo manages to capture a powerful moment without going after its
meaning. The thin hectic body of the protagonist climbing the stairs alone in
her flat visually resonates with the obsession for the control on the body, which
is at stake in eating disorders where one’s body seems to constitute the only
possible battlefield to project the external world onto. Different forms of eating
disorders reveal a common anxiety for the porosity of the body as if the skin
could not contain the interior: if anorexia is marked by agoraphobic anxieties,
bulimia is linked to claustrophobia.13 These two seemingly opposite reactions
arise from the same difficulty to deal with the intense demands of the body and
from the conviction that there are only two options to cope with it, namely to
create a ‘no-entry system of defenses’14 or to let everything in (and then expel
it). Bodies pervaded by what Julia Kristeva describes as ‘abjection’,15 those
‘violent, dark revolt of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate
from an exorbitant outside and inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible,
the tolerable, the thinkable’.16
   In 2016, the writer and artist Jessie Kahnweiler directed the webseries The
Skinny 17 to sensitize people to those eating disorders like bulimia that tend to be
less commonly represented than anorexia, because, despite their exponential
rise, they are less conspicuous, that is, they cannot be recognized as easily on
the patient’s body. Kahnweiler, who herself has been suffering for many years
from bulimia, points out how films about eating disorders are not at all realistic
since they don’t reveal the disgusting and shameful aspects of binging, purging,
and throwing up. Her attempt to move the issue out of the clinical space and into
daily life by showing eating disorders in their ordinary, mundane environment,
where they become invisible — yet very present in the daily schedule of the
protagonist — is a remarkable alternative to plots with compulsively happy
endings. An aspect that she stresses by calling Relapse the first episode of The
Skinny. Nonetheless, visibility and eating disorders are much more entangled
than Kahnweiler brings to light in her intentionally grotesque depiction of
bulimia. If Kahnweiler’s provocation draws attention to shame and secrecy by
overexposing bulimia symptoms, she does so by relying on ‘authenticity’ as the
key solution to reach her audience, and uncovers only some of the numerous
elements at stake in analysing eating disorders through both an individual and
socio-political lens [Fig. 3].




Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                      41
Fig. 3
Still from The Skynny
(Jessie Kahnweiler, 2016)




                            CONTAGIOUS IMAGES?
                             The connection between images and anorexia, bulimia, binge eating, and
                            other forms of food consumption deemed disordered is controversial and not
                            yet deeply explored in all its manyfold levels. Mostly because it is reduced to
                            the idea that glamorous images, particularly the heroin chic style of the 1990s,18
                            create a dangerous imaginary that young women, who statistically are the main
                            target of eating disorders,19 admire and imitate. On its own, such a perspective
                            fuels the risk of considering women tendentially narcissistic subjects, passive
                            victims of the ideals of beauty promoted by the media.20 Since the 1980s at
                            least, feminist theorists and activists have been fighting against the idea of
                            women as subjects with narcissistic tendencies and tried instead to retrace
                            the production process behind certain beauty ideals.21 Their approaches often
                            lead to a conception of eating disorders as forms of active resistance, refusing
                            ‘a culturally defined role’ by attempting to regain control over the body when
                            faced with a ‘confusing social reality’ of oppressive and multiple expectations.22
                            Other feminists have historically taken a more critical stance towards women’s
                            obsession with the body as a form of submission to patriarchy and its ideals
                            of beauty. In recent years, academics from the social sciences,23 cultural and
                            gender studies,24 and media studies25 have significantly contributed to zooming
                            out from the sole individual psychological components of eating disorders and
                            have shed light upon their socio-political context. Specifically, it is crucial to
                            look at the role aesthetics might play in the encounter between visual mass
                            media and eating disorders, especially when that aesthetics communicates
                            a sense of purported neutrality, both medical and political. Visual media not
                            only, indeed, record reality but they contribute to its symbolic transformation
                            and comprehension. Precisely because eating disorders are shaped to such an



42                                                          Nicastro, Symptomatic Images/Contagious Images
extreme degree by their socio-cultural context, and due to their increasingly
pervasive nature, they are an emblematic case study for the analysis of affects
that are both representative of and most problematic in contemporary society.
Eating disorders as a medical category were born and established roots in the
industrialized West. In 1873 in Great Britain, Sir William Withney Gull defined the
phenomenon of self-starvation among young women as ‘anorexia nervosa’. In
the same year in France, Ernest-Charles Lasègue named the same kind of food
behaviour as ‘anorexia hystérique’. In the nineties of the 19th Century, having
established themselves as a viral phenomenon that directly correlates with
wellbeing, industrial, and economic development in the West, eating disorders
traverse geographical borders and expand, especially into Japan, China, South
Korea, South Africa, Nigeria, Argentina, Chile and India. Coinciding with the
birth of the moving image and public health in the late 19th Century, eating
disorders expand symbiotically with visual media, as the latter circulate ever-
more globally with the rise of the internet at the beginning of the 21th Century.
Despite visual culture having been acknowledged as being partly responsible
for promoting dangerous ideals of beauty that trigger eating disorders, the
nature of the contagious nature of images in the proliferation of eating disorders
is characterized by many elements. This supposed contagious power concerns
not only the emulation of beauty ideals embodied by fashion images but also
the symptoms themselves, as suspected by the doctor who first defined bulimia
nervosa. After 1979, when psychiatrist Gerald Russel diagnosed ‘Bulimia
Nervosa’ for the first time, he worried that his description of the symptoms had
contributed to the dramatic spread of the pathology itself.26 This is of course an
impossible but frequent enigma regarding all new medical categories: if it is the
symptoms that proliferate or the diagnosis. In his reflections on the contagious
nature of desire, René Girard explains the proliferation of eating disorders and
the obsession for thinness as an extreme drive to competition — mostly among
women.27
  The idea of being exposed to the dangerous emulative power of images
seems to contradict the curious experiments of Hugh Welch Diamond, one of
the pioneers of psychiatric photography, who was convinced that showing his
patients a picture of their own face during an acute crisis could have a beneficial
influence, healing them by its shock therapy effect.28 Further experiments had
then called into question that it was not the subject of the photograph that
generated the shock, but rather the very nature of the new technological
medium: the camera, which was born at the time when Diamond was training
as a psychiatrist. The portrait of a landscape was in this sense as effective and
healing as that of a portrait. After all, the birth of photography is, as is well
known, what made possible the controversial diagnosis of hysteria perfected
by Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière, the medical category that by
definition was based on staging the symptom, on making the symptoms of the
patients of the Parisian hospital — all women — a spectacle for the eyes of an
audience of doctors — almost exclusively men — and for the lens of a passionate
photographer like Charcot.


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                     43
       The current discourse about eating disorders and emulation does not,
     however, only find its roots in the fashion style of the early 1990s but it has been
     also strongly affected by the advent of the digital space. Around the beginning
     of the 2000s, a new eating-disorders community showed up on the internet. It
     was not, as one might expect, meant to support and share a healing process
     from these increasingly widespread issues, but rather to glorify anorexia as
     a lifestyle. Under the hashtag #Thinspiration, members of the pro-ana (*pro-
     anorexia) community posted photos that depicted skinny women and close-ups
     of slender bodies (such as hip bones, thigh gaps, shoulders) as well as aspects
     of their anorexic experience. Consistently appearing on pro-ana bulletin boards,
     websites, blogs, social network sites, email and WhatsApp groups, these images
     were and continue to function as a motivating tool to become a true and pure
     anorexic. Pro-ana is a community whose attempt to create a free space to
     confront raw feelings and thoughts about eating disorders is intertwined with a
     quasi-religious sectarian approach: Anorexia is identified with ‘Ana the Goddess’
     and hierarchy among members is defined by degrees of ‘purity’ (with anorexics
     placed at the top, while bulimics are at the bottom). To be included in the groups
     one must be either an ‘authentic’ anorexic or an ‘authentic’ bulimic. Authenticity
     is what produces identity by excluding, for instance, wannarexics, the ultimate
     insult to describe people that fail at their weight-loss goals29 or that join pro-ana
     communities merely to find dieting tips.
       In this context, a set of ten commandments encouraging thinness and perfection
     constitutes the core of a long list of strategies and advice that (mostly) young
     women give to each other in order to fast, to kill hunger, to purge, and to finally
     lose weight: one must believe in control through starvation as ‘the only force
     mighty enough to bring order in the chaos that is my world’ (Anastart website).
     The predominately female religious/sectarian self-organization, congregating
     around an almighty goddess interestingly resonates with the rejection of food in
     female mystics, which has been divergently investigated by Rudolph Bell30 and
     by Caroline Walker Bynum.31 As soon as it received general public attention, the
     pro-ana phenomenon caused astonishment and fear among teenagers’ parents,
     health professionals, teachers, and institutions; eventually, all online platforms
     that instigate suicide by exalting both anorexia and bulimia (pro-mia) were shut
     down. Pro-eating-disorders communities have, however, migrated from these
     websites, which tended to be static, strictly moderated, and password-protected
     to social media such as Facebook or Instagram, to platforms, in other words,
     which are more visual, less hierarchical, and more difficult to moderate due
     to the large number of posted images. On new social media like Instagram
     and tiktok the phenomenon has mostly lost its communitarian aspect and its
     recognizability and took instead the shape of an obsession for sharing one’s
     daily meal — either to show the small intake of food or to be proud of a fast
     metabolism. In both cases, the aspect of exposing oneself to the images of a
     desirable body is here replaced by a more voyeuristic gratification as well as by
     a more or less subtle pleasure for generating envy. An emblematic example is
     tiktok’s ‘What I eat in a day’, which is in principle only meant to document eating



44                                    Nicastro, Symptomatic Images/Contagious Images
habit presenting what users eat in a given day. The videos usually begin with
the person showing her body, followed by clips of the snacks, drinks and meals
they consume.
  How can cinematic narratives respond at the same time to the proliferation of
both disordered eating and images that mirror or ‘reproduce’ these behaviours?



DYSMORPHIC TEMPORALITIES:
MOARA PASSONI’S ECSTASY
  If every type of eating disorder appears to give life to different temporal
forms and dynamics, it is nonetheless possible, despite these divergences or
affective polarities, to recognise a common denominator in the effort to control
and contain time. Time here is defined not only as lived time, but also the
physiological time of cellular ageing, or of those activities that conventionally
punctuate the everyday. Eating — or abstaining from it — is a form of time
travel32 and food is the instrument with which to move as one wishes amongst
the dimensions of past, present and future. It is simultaneously an emergency
brake and an accelerator, allowing access to passions and desires before time
crumbles them or after it has indefinitely archived them.
  The privation of anorexia nervosa, the compulsive overeating of binge eating,
or that of bulimia, followed by compensatory behaviour, can therefore adopt
the semblance of a protective armour against collision with emotions, affects,
discomforts. By building a wall, just in time, it disallows the interior world from
crashing into, interacting with or simply dispersing into external reality, that
‘not-I’ whose most immediately recognisable limit is marked by the body. The
relationship to food can constitute one of these barricades, through modalities
that are heterogeneous and often invisible, either because they don’t leave their
marks on the body, or because they accord with societal norms — such as diets
and obsessive healthy eating. The anxiety/control affective polarity in anorexia:
a form of resistance to time through abstinence from nutrition in order to freeze
any process of growing and transformation. The anesthetisation of emotions
during binge eating and the bulimic ritual of filling up and emptying out. Here,
time is suspended in a loop that consists of the ethereal time of unexpressed
desire and organic time, heavy and corporeal, articulated through chewing,
rumination, compensatory vomit and purging. During this dietary ritual, one
is consumed by the illusion of being able to dominate time and fantasies of
unlimited coexisting possibilities that trigger a short-circuit between past,
present and future, whose continuity is inevitably fragmented by sudden mood
swings.
  The common aspect of the perception of time which features in eating
disorders seems to be the sensation of being condemned to a not yet, uprooted
from narrative temporality and disallowed from recognising one’s self as part
of a story in the name of a phantasmal true self to reach.33


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                     45
                                  Anorexia is a lived experience, a process, an episode, a way of
                                  being, not a tool. I gradually pieced together a routine. My day was
                                  divided up into the time to eat, time to exercise, time to study, time
                                  to sleep, all very precisely delineated. In between these slices of
                                  day, I couldn’t relax, and if anyone tried to interrupt this routine
                                  I would bawl them right out of the room. The repetition of this
                                  regime, and the stemming of the body’s vital fluxes — I didn’t eat,
                                  didn’t menstruate… — ended up creating a sense of eternal time, to
                                  the point that I lost all track of what happened when between the
                                  ages of 12 and 18. It was as if those six years were a static blur.34

                          This is how Brazilian filmmaker Moara Passoni describes her personal
                        experience of anorexia she depicted in the experimental feature film Ecstasy,
                        which was premiered in the CPH:DOX main competition in 2020.35 When
                        Passoni began writing the film the main challenge for her was to unhinge
                        visual language which that media and culture conventionally use to represent
                        eating disorders and that often spectacularize them, oscillating between the
                        stigmatisation and victimisation of those affected by the disorder. Passoni is not
                        interested in restoring a more faithful, more stable, more recognisable account
                        of anorexia, as this would be a vain challenge. It is not a question of restoring
                        an alleged identity of the disease betrayed by filmic narratives but to rather try
                        to recompose a story that is as fragmented as the protagonist’s perception of
                        her body [Fig. 4].




Fig. 4
Still from Ecstasy
(Moara Passoni, 2020)




                          By following the story of the development of Clara’s anorexia, from her
                        childhood to her late teens, Ecstasy shows the political changes in Brazil during
                        the 1990s, a time when the country had its first democratically elected president
                        since 1964 [Fig. 5]. Clara’s character is partly autobiographical, partly the result



46                                                       Nicastro, Symptomatic Images/Contagious Images
of interviews Passoni conducted with women affected by eating disorders, a
way to step out from the solitary obsession with self-observation and find relief
in the communality of the symptoms. Ecstasy is a biography inscribed on a body
that refuses and questions its shape and its identity. Biology and history meet
from the very beginning of the film where Passoni uses archival photos of the
protests that took place in Brazil in 1970s and ih the 1980s. We see a portrait
of Passoni’s mother, the leader of one of the movements participating in these
protests. She is pregnant and the voice over speaks about the foetus absorbing
the adrenaline released by the mother. The story of Clara’s relationship with food
is depicted as immersed in and indistinguishable from her own environment.
In exploring anorexia, Passoni considers not only the individual psychological
components of her main character, but also the socio-political contest as well
as the religious one the girl grew up with in Brazil. None of these elements
alone constitutes an explanation for Clara’s food behaviour, but they rather
provide a complex net through which to look at eating disorders. An approach
that mirrors the difficulty of understanding the nature of these issues: as Susan
Bordo has pointed out, the medical attempt to find subcategories to define new
forms of eating disorders and to try to capture their features satisfies fantasies
of precision and unification of phenomena that in fact have become less and
less amenable to scientific clarity and distinctness.36
  When she started writing Ecstasy, Passoni’s main concern was to find a
language that didn’t fulfill the expectations of the audience according to the
conventional visual stereotypes about eating disorders. How to use images to
account for issues that are thought to be affected by the circulation of contagious
                                                                                      Fig. 5
images that generate emulation? To what extent would it be possible to follow         Still from Ecstasy
Clara in her ecstatic process, so strongly marked by the death drive?                 (Moara Passoni, 2020)




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       Passoni was firstly tempted by an iconoclastic solution: to leave bodies out of
     the frame, to avoid the spectacularization of anorexia (often criticized in films
     about eating disorders — I am thinking for example of To the Bone (2017) by Marti
     Noxon).37 In doing so, Passoni tried to make an ‘anorectic’ film by re-ducing the
     presence of visual (living) elements and delegating the story of a bodily struggle
     mainly to the voice over. But something was missing from this first cut and in
     the final version the risk of overexposing the frailty of Clara’s body is avoided by
     a careful account of Clara’s dysmorphic perception of herself and the external
     world. Instead of omitting her body, Moara paradoxically presents Clara’s
     subjective experience, her (self)objectification, by making visible her phantasies
     and desires, her idiosyncrasies and her fears. Clara’s alienation from her body
     and its fragmentation, her struggle against a living body affected by time and
     space, is rendered through the use of close up and extreme close up, which
     convey the obsessive love for detail that is defined as ‘the geometry of hunger’.
     Eating disorders are linked to the obsession with control and often this control
     is linked to perfectionism, and automatically to beauty, good behavior, and
     ambition. In Ecstasy the need for control carries different nuances, revealing a
     complex relationship with pleasure: there is, for instance, an immense pleasure
     for details and for images, as Passoni poignantly shows, by presenting ecstasy
     as a contemplation of organs, flesh, bones, their beauty and their repulsiveness.
     Film editing mirrors Clara’s morbid need to re-edit reality by cutting it in little
     pieces — as she does with the food. Clara seems to be either too close or too far
     from the other. In the struggle to find an in between space, the camera reminds
     us that the body is the primary seat for the development of the sense of self as
     well as the primary site for meeting the other.
       The overused and often obscure word ‘dysmorphia’ in relation to eating
     disorders takes in Ecstasy multiple forms and speaks for both the concern to
     see oneself and being seen at the same time. In Passoni’s film, dysmorphia
     affects Clara’s body as well as the world around her: it also takes the shape of
     two imaginary friends/enemies of Clara: Mr. Egg, whom Clara meets for the first
     time when they move to Brasilia where her mother got a job as a representative
     of the Federal District. The second friend (a sort of alter ego of the Egg) is a Blue
     dot, which appears on Clara’s plate to hide the forbidden object of desire: food.
     Mr Egg teaches Clara the ‘magical game’ of self-control or rather, self tyranny.
     This character together with the Blue Dot introduce another important aspect of
     eating disorders: magical thinking as a tool to transform the world into a safe,
     predictable space.
       As a medical category, dysmorphia defines an excessive preoccupation with
     the body, the entire body or one single part; the struggle to accept one’s body,
     the need to modify it, the feeling that it doesn’t (yet) coincide with one’s identity.38
     ‘Subjects with dysmorphic disorders often show problematic narratives about
     their life and display a general deprecation not only towards their body but also
     with respect to themselves as individuals’.39 It is proved that the experience of
     one’s own body affects the representation of the body and shapes a different
     narrative about the self. Bodily experiences and body image are reciprocally



48                                     Nicastro, Symptomatic Images/Contagious Images
linked to the narratives employed by an individual in depicting herself.40 In
Ecstasy anorexia is a way of moving in and looking at the world, not only at
oneself, and it is only when the camera turns towards the fear for a reality,
which is transformed by time and motion, that dysmorphia ceases to be just an
image reflected in the mirror, it not only affects Clara’s body but also everything
she touches, (not) tastes, observes and listens to.
   Films do not heal like medicaments, they disclose unforeseen scenarios,
they move us, push us forward or backward where we had not been before.
The case of eating disorders is particularly ambivalent and challenging to
confront, because images are at the core of these issues, which are structured
by imitation and concealment. The possibility to make something visible (or
invisible), which inherently constitutes the cinematic medium, is challenged by
the ambiguous relationship with (self)visibility that eating disorders manifest
through dysmorphia: every form is not yet the good one, every shot has not
yet the right distance. Oftentimes, people who are affected by eating disorders
are in search of an imaginary that can help understanding their obscure and
exhausting constellation of symptoms and that can bring to light what they
most of the time live hide and live in secret. In this respect, one asks images
to show, to exhibit what one does not have the courage to say and what one is
not yet able to see. Images are therefore not asked to be faithful, but rather to
both exhibit and escape the repetition, the reproduction of certain gestures and
behaviors one is trapped in.




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Notes
   *This article is part of the research Contagious Images? Visual Representations of Eating Disorders, which
I am currently carrying out at ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry thanks to the VolkswagenStiftung
grant ‘Original isn’t it? Special thanks to Dr Claudia Peppel. The outcome of this project will be published in
a forthcoming monograph by the same title.
   1
     Fiona Johnstone, ‘Manifesto for a Visual Medical Humanities’ in The Medical Humanities blog, July 2018,
https://blogs.bmj.com/medical-humanities/2018/07/31/manifesto-for-a-visual-medical-humanities/
[accessed 25 August 2022]
   2
     See George Didi-Huberman and Alisa Trans Hartz, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic
Iconography of the Salpêtrière (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Sander Gilman and others, Hysteria
Beyond Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical
Epidemics and Modern Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
   3
      In the recent conference ‘Violence, Care, Cure: (Self)perceptions within the Medical Encounter’ I co-
organized at ICI Berlin together with Marta-Laura Cenedese, we explored visual and literary narratives that
deal with the ambiguities of the concepts ‘care’, ‘cure’, and ‘violence’ within medical settings.
   4
        Domietta Torlasco, ‘Philosophy in the Kitchen’, World Picture, 11 (Summer 2016), http://
worldpicturejournal.com/WP_11/Torlasco_11.html [Accessed 25 August 2022]
   5
     Cesare Casarino, ‘Images for Housework: On the Time of Domestic Labor in Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy
of the Cinema’, differences, 28.3 (2017), 67-92.
   6
     I here borrow the title of Ivone Margulies’s seminal book on Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday
(Durham, NC ; London: Duke University Press , 1996).
   7
     Cf. voice over commenting this scene in Domietta Torlasco, ‘Philosophy in the Kitchen’.
   8
      In his book The Surviving Image. Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History
of Time (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), George Didi-Huberman dedicates a
session to the image as symptom.
   9
     Sigmund Freud, The Paths to the Formations of Symptoms. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works (SE), 16 vols (London: Vintage Press, 2017), 358.
   10
       George Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image.
   11
       Aby M. Warburg and Martin Warnke, Der bilderatlas mnemosyne (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000).
   12
       Cf. Lea Melandri, Alfabeto d’origine (Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 2017).
   13
      Cf. Marilyn Charles, ‘Meaning, metaphor, and metabolization: the case of eating disorders’, The American
Journal of Psychoanalysis, 81.4 (2021), 448..
   14
       Ibidem.
   15
       Julia Kristeva, Powers of horror (Columbia, Princeton: University Press of California, 1982).
   16
       Ibidem, 1.
   17
       https://jessiekahnweiler.com/category/the-skinny/
   18
       ‘Heroin chic’ defines the style of 1990s top model such as Gia Garangi and Kate Moss (especially from
the famous Calvin Klein underwear campaign in 1991) and which features extremely thin physique, pale
skin, dark undereye circles, and disheveled hair and clothing.
   19
       Heike Bartel has conducted precious research on eating disorders in men, the outcome of which has
recently been published in her monograph Men Writing Eating Disorders Autobiographical Writing and
Illness Experience in English and German Narratives (Bingley: Emerald, 2020).
   20
       Cf. Abigail Bray, ‘The Anorexic Body: Reading Disorders’, Cultural Studies, 10.3 (1996), 413-429.
   21
       See Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993); Susie Orbach,
Fat is a Feminist Issue (New York: Arrow, 1978).
   22
       See Ibidem; Chris Kraus, Aliens & Anorexie (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz Verlag, 2021).
   23
       See Eating Disorders and Cultures in Transition, ed. by. Mervat Nasser and others (New York: Brunner-
Routledge, 2001).
   24
       See Gitte Marianne, Femininity, Self-harm and Eating Disorders in Japan. Navigating contradiction in
narrative and visual culture (London, New York: Routledge, 2016); Helen Malson, Maree Burns, Critical
Femist Approaches to Eating Dis/Orders (London, New York: Routledge, 2009).
   25
       See Karin Eli, Stanley Ulijaszek, Obesity, Eating Disorders and the Media (Farnham: Asghate, 2014).



50                                                           Nicastro, Symptomatic Images/Contagious Images
 26
     See the interview to Gerald Russel conducted by Lee Daniel Kravetz in his book Strange contagion: Inside
the surprising science of infectious behaviors and viral emotions and what they tell us about ourselves
(Glasgow: HarperCollins, 2017).
  27
     Cf. Girard, René, Anorexia and Mimetic Desire (East Lancing: Michigan State University Press, 2013).
  28
     Sander L. Gilman, The face of madness: Hugh W. Diamond and the origin of psychiatric photography
(New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1976).
  29
     Boero Natalie and Cheri Jo Pascoe, ‘Pro-anorexia communities and online interaction: Bringing the pro-
ana body online’, Body & Society, 18.2 (2012), 27-57.
  30
     Rudolph M. Bell, Holy anorexia (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
  31
     Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy feast and holy fast: The religious significance of food to medieval women,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
  32
     Marco Casonato, Immaginazione e metafora. Psicodinamica, psicopatologia, psicoterapia (Bari: Laterza,
2003).
  33
      On the question of authenticity in anorexia see Tony Hope and others, ‘Anorexia nervosa and the
language of authenticity’, Hastings Center Report, 41.6 (2011), 19-29; In their research on proana online
communities Boero and Pascoe also provide a compelling analysis of the role of authenticity for the pro-ana
communities, see Boero Natalie, and Cheri Jo Pascoe, ‘Pro-anorexia communities and online interaction’, cit.
  34
     P. Gomes, ‘Êxtase The Film. “She didn’t feel time nor people, what she felt was ecstasy’ in Wall Street
International, 2020, https://wsimag.com/entertainment/61892-extase-the-film.
  35
      On Ecstasy I wrote the article ‘Biografia di un sintomo: Ecstasy di Moara Passoni’, Fata Morgana.
Quadrimestrale di Cinema e Visioni, 46 (2022).
  36
     Susan Bordo, ‘Eating disorders: The feminist challenge to the concept of pathology’, in The Body in
Medical Thought and Practice, ed. by Drew Leder (Dordrecht: Springer, 1992), 197-213.
  37
     See Clio Nicastro, ‘Recovery’, in Re-: An Errant Glossary, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzey, Arnd Wedemeyer
(Berlin: Ici Berlin, 2019), 49-56.
  38
     See Alessandra Lemma, Under the skin: A psychoanalytic study of body modification (London, New York:
Routledge, 2010).
  39
      Antonella Tramacere, Angelica Kaufmann, ‘Bodily self-narratives and the experience of disliking
ourselves’, submitted to Journal of Consciousness Studies. I want to thank Antonella Tramacere for having
shared her research with me.
  40
     Ibidem.




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