BERGSTROM, Janet, Endless Night

«The cinema has almost always failed to make psychic interiority meaningful on the screen.
First touch me, astonish me, tear me apart, startle me, make me cry...
You will please my eye afterward if you can. Diderot
Excess is a familiar term in contemporary film theory, a term most frequently invoked, I think, in discussion of melodrama.» (13)

GILMAN L. Sander, Seeing the Insane

"(The relation mind-body) is the key to the understanding of all early theories of the appearance of mentally ill. By the Renaissance the theories have given way a radical monistic view of the body dominating and forming the mind and soul (...) The appearance of the individual is seen as a classificable, interpretable reference to his mental state." (6)

GILMAN L. Sander, Seeing the Insane

"The relationship between the realities that are being described and the mode of description extends into any historical definition of insanity. The madman is individual seen as "other" by a culture. Thus the image of reality shifts, depending on the time and orientation. Madness includes at one time or another all of the traditional tripartite classifications of anentia, dementia and melancolia. No distinction can be made between somatic and emotional illness if both are understood as subcategories of insanity." (Introduction, iii)

GILMAN L. Sander, Seeing the Insane

"We learn to perceive the world through those cultural artifacts which preserve a society's stereotypes of its environment. We do not see the world, rather we are taught by representations of the world about us to conceive of it in a culturally acceptable manner. It is not merely flora and fauna, sunset and seascape which are seen through the prism of culture. We also see man in his infinite variety through the filters of stereotypical perspective. Throughout the history of any given culture the structure most often applied to categories of man is that of the polar opposite. Each category is perceived as either the embodiment or the antithesis of the group which has provided the category." (Introduction, i)