Article ID: CBB746930703

A Cinema for the Unborn: Moving Pictures, Mental pictures and Electra Sparks's New Thought Film Theory (2017)

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In the 1910s, New York suffragette Electra Sparks wrote a series of essays in the Moving Picture News that advocated for cine-therapy treatments for pregnant women. Film was, in her view, the great democratizer of beautiful images, providing high-cultural access to the city's poor. These positive ‘mental pictures’ were important for her because, she claimed, in order to produce an attractive, healthy child, the mother must be exposed to quality cultural material. Sparks's championing of cinema during its ‘second birth’ was founded upon the premise of New Thought. This metaphysical Christian doctrine existed alongside the self-help and esoteric publishing domains and testified, above all, to the possibility of the ‘mind-cure’ of the body through the positive application of ‘mental pictures’. Physiologically, their method began best in the womb, where the thoughts of the mother were of utmost importance: the eventual difference between birthing an Elephant Man or an Adonis. This positive maternal impression was commonplace in New Thought literature; it was Sparks's innovation to apply it to cinema. Investigating Sparks's film theory, practice and programming reveals her to be a harbinger of the abiding analogy between mind and motion picture that occupies film theorists to this day.

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Authors & Contributors
Olszynko-Gryn, Jesse
Patrick Ellis
Arena, Francesca
Michelle Millar Fisher
Muigai, Wangui
Roth, Cassia
Concepts
Childbirth
Obstetrics and pregnancy
Science and film
Medicine and culture
Reproductive medicine
Film and media studies
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
16th century
Early modern
Renaissance
Places
United States
England
Georgia (U.S.)
South Africa
Germany
Europe
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