Michelle Williams Gamaker

An island of madness: the social force of mental fortresses – a visual essay

Madness is an island. Like geographical islands, it isolates. Mad people have been, and still are frequently locked up in asylums. As Foucault had told us, these are often converted leprosy colonies, which were outside the cities in order to avoid contagion. Similarly but unreflectively, the isolating gesture towards the mad comes out of fear of contamination. Thus, the rupturing of social bonds that caused the madness in the first place is reiterated. This is our vision of madness. To turn this vision into a film, we have filmed on an island, Seili, off the coast of Turku, Finland. Seili is part of an archipelago of some thousand islands. Founded in 1619 as a Leper Colony, the last leper died there in 1785. It continued to serve as a hospital for the mentally ill until 1962. On this history-heavy island, we set a number of scenes to use in our film A Long History of Madness (Cinema Suitcase 2011). This is a textual-visual essay, consisting of photographs and video stills that demonstrate the isolating quality of the island as an ‘island of madness’.

Towards a Babel Ontology

This article presents a few issues in the making of our film A Long History of Madness that pertain to the ‘Babylonic’. Spoken in 12 languages, ranging across six centuries, and shot in five countries, the film possesses an inherent Babylonism. It makes a case for a multilingual mode of communicating. Yet, beyond the obvious need for verbal communication, for which subtitles are necessary but insufficient, the film presents other reasons for extending the concept of translation. The knot of potential confusion and the need for ‘translation’ are the ontological uncertainties surrounding ‘madness’ itself. The key questions are: are people mad? Do they perform madness, or do others perceive them as mad because they are too dissimilar from them to be accepted as ‘normal’? This fundamental uncertainty affects all forms of alterity. Translation becomes, then, a tool to negotiate alterity under the terms of the acceptance of this ontological uncertainty.