The Oyster Effect

Using as a starting point parts of archive footage shot by the anthropologist De Martino’s team whilst researching the phenomenon of Tarantism, “The Oyster Effect” develops into a collage of historical references as narrating voices over a visual journey.

In the film, the portrayal of women and hysteria is shown as a series of parallels between built environments, architectural spaces, landscape and their narration.

The viewer travels through foreign languages and non-descriptive locations, in a journey that challenges linearity and historicity.

The attempt to bridge the specific representations of women’s subjectivity as products of their cultural environments, in the north and southern Europe, is persistently negated by the conflicting relation between image and narrating voice.

A letter written by Bertha Pappenheimer, the young lady of Jewish origin who became famous under the name of Anna O, and who was diagnosed with hysteria by Breuer and Freud, describes one of the symptoms of her illness, her temporary inability to speak her mother language.

The letter is read and played over images of an architectural space that could vaguely be associated with an early 20th century modernist building.

While Anna O talks about her condition, the camera subtly moves into the space of a church, and specifically the Church of San Pietro and Paolo, in Galatina, dedicated to the cult of Saint Paul and to the memory of Tarantism.

The journey continues will a long shot of a car travelling through a semi-deserted landscape, hit by heavy rain.

The lack of information on this rural geographic location clashes against the voice of Le Corbusier lecturing on the necessity of changing the modes of planning for the industrial city, to cope with the needs of a new generation of urban population..

While the journey unfolds to reveal clearer geographic coordinates, a field recording of an audio book plays on the radio against excerpts of archive footage from the film troupe that worked with the De Martino, between Basilicata and Puglia.

Shots of mentally unstable women in altered states of consciousness being treated through dance in San Paolo's church in Galatina, are accompanied by a voice over narrating fragments of a love story.