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Rediagnosing A Matter of Life and Death
Lecturer in the Department of Historical and Critical Studies, The Glasgow School of Art. He received his PhD, on Cinema, Photography and Gilles Deleuze, from the University of Glasgow. He has published articles on Cindy Sherman and Gladiator, and most recently for Screen on the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers
Exhaustive research and analysis has been carried out on this cornerstone text in the development of British film studies. Yet from the intervening years have emerged new theories (as well as developments of old ones) that cast new light on this classic example of filmmaking and later critique. Beginning with a new ‘diagnosis’ of epilepsy and Cotard's syndrome in Peter Carter, the article then reviews the film as a narrative of trauma that uses its central character to work through the social issue of the returned (maimed) soldier to society. However, underlying this ‘rediagnosis’ is the treatment of time developed in analyses of both temporal lobe epilepsy and traumatic memory. The article suggests that both conditions act to expose the ordinary operation of past and present as simultaneous co-existence, developed theoretically by Henri Bergson and others, that we normally experience as the passing of time (chronology). This is brilliantly illustrated in the film in the scenes in which time stops, and Carter experiences a duration as long or as short as his perception requires it to be, and which unfolds to the limits of his memory and imagination.