The Porous Body

Still from The Porous Body | Moving image - work in progress

I'm currently editing a simple four-minute DIY film called The Porous Body. It's the first iteration of a larger moving image project about female mediums in the late 19th and early 20th century.

This first film focuses on materialising mediums (ie those that summoned physical materials, voices and objects to the seance room) and their brush with science. It's a tangled story of faith and rationality, the limited power that women held in a highly patriarchal society, and the obsession of the Victorians with pushing at the frontiers of scientific discovery.

Investigations into these women are well documented* (though the opinions and feelings of the women themselves are rarely noted). All available technologies (eg flash photography, wax cylinder recordings, microscopes) were deployed in an attempt to capture, measure and analyse their powers. Often treated like scientific specimens, they were subjected to intrusive examinations and troubling experiments in order to demonstrate their integrity. It's true, some of their manifestations of ectoplasmic matter do look a lot like cut paper and wet muslin, but many people who witnessed their activities first-hand found them compelling.

*I've based my work on accounts of investigations into mediums published in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, the Quarterly Transactions of the British College of Psychic Science and the Phenomena of Materialisation: a contribution to the investigation of mediumistic teleplastics by Albert von Schrenk-Notzing.