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United States National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health
 
 
When: 6:00 p.m., Thursday nights, March 16 – April 6, 2006
 
Where: National Library of Medicine
   Lister Hill Auditorium, Bldg. 38A
   8600 Rockville Pike
   Bethesda, Maryland 20894
 
Admission: FREE and open to all. Refreshments will be served in the lobby.
FREE PARKING in front of Lister Hill Auditorium.
 
How to get to the NLM:
Metro - MEDICAL CENTER stop, Red Line
Car - SOUTH DRIVE entrance
 

  • March 16 , 2006: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (unrated)

    (Dir. Alfred Werker, 1939; 85 min.) featuring Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Ida Lupino
    The first, and perhaps finest, film to feature Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, this 1939 effort is based on a popular early 20th-century stage play. Like most Sherlock Holmes movies—and unlike Conan Doyle’s stories—it contains only a little forensic science and no detailed examination of the dead. The story: Accompanied by the buffoonish Dr. Watson, the brilliant Sherlock Holmes comes to the aid of a beautiful young socialite whose brother has been murdered, and thwarts the evil Professor Moriarity’s plan to steal the British Crown Jewels.
    • Special guest: film and television historian Lester Friedman, PhD, author of Cultural Sutures: Medicine and the Media (Duke University Press, 2004)

  • March 23, 2006: Mystery Street (unrated)

    (Dir. John Sturges, 1950; 93 min.) featuring Ricardo Montalban, Elsa Lanchester
    Unusually for its time, this rarely-seen MGM mystery, highlights the contributions of forensic medicine to the solution of a puzzling murder case. Vivian, a B-girl working at "The Grass Skirt," is brushed off by her rich, married boyfriend. On an impulse, she hijacks drunken customer Henry Shanway and his car from Boston to Cape Cod, where she strands him, and goes to confront her husband. Vivian then disappears from view. Months later, a set of human remains, without clothes or obvious accompanying clues, washes up on a Cape Cod beach. With the help of Harvard forensic specialist Dr. McAdoo (who is based on George Burgess Magrath, the chair of the university’s celebrated Department of Legal Medicine), police lieutenant Pete Morales must work from the bones to discover the victim's identity, history, and killer.
    • Special guest: physician and film historian Peter Dans, MD, author of Doctors in the Movies (Medi-Ed Press, 2000)

  • March 30 : Citizen X (R)

    (Dir. Chris Gerolmo, 1995; 103 min.) featuring Stephen Rea, Donald Sutherland, Imelda Taunton, Max von Sydow.
    This HBO production is based on the true story of a Soviet serial killer who murdered over 50 people. Hampered by Communist Party bureaucracy, under-funding, lack of training, and an ideological line which insisted that serial killings could only occur in capitalist societies, the forensic investigation which could have solved the case moved forward haltingly, as the killings continued over several years. Told from the point of view of the obsessively dedicated forensic investigator who challenges the bureaucracy and solves the case, Citizen X uses this forensic story to portray the moral bankruptcy of the Soviet regime and the opening of Russian life after Glasnost and the dissolution of the U.S.S.R.

  • April 6 : Sleepy Hollow (R)

    (Dir. Tim Burton, 1995; 105 min.) featuring Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, Christopher Walken, Michael Gambon, Miranda Richardson.
    Oddball director Tim Burton retells Washington Irving’s "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" as a forensic fable. The year is 1799. Ichabod Crane is not a gangly village schoolteacher, but a New York City constable who wants to replace traditional methods of crime investigation, which depend on the torture of suspects, with modern scientific crime-scene investigation and autopsy. Unfortunately, Crane’s superiors resent his efforts and send him away to investigate some murders in the remote hamlet of Sleepy Hollow, where several people have been decapitated. The villagers believe the murders to be the work of a legendary Headless Horseman. Crane at first dismisses their belief as superstition, but soon discovers there are forces of darkness that can overpower the rationalism of forensic science.

    Special guest: film historian Lalitha Gopalan, PhD, author of Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (2002)
 

About the Film Series

To help celebrate the opening of Visible Proofs: Forensic Views of the Body, an exhibition on the history of forensic medicine, this March the National Library of Medicine presents Screen Forensics, a series of entertainment movies with forensic themes.

Forensic medicine has always had theatrical elements. To command attention and gain acceptance, over the centuries scientists have dramatized their findings and credentials, and presented themselves as authorities in courts of scientific opinion and courts of law.

And from the very inception of forensics as a field, writers and publishers, and later directors and producers, have made murder and the dead body, and the procedures of forensics, visible to a wider public — in the form of entertaining non-fictional and fictional narratives.

Cinematic murder mysteries, with some forensic elements, date from the earliest days of entertainment film, but for a long time there was a taboo on graphic depictions of the dead body. Forensic stories with more detailed views of death, decomposition and mutilation began appearing with some frequency in the mid-1990s, first in movies and on cable television, then on broadcast television. Millions of film- and TV-viewers have found such stories enormously appealing. Forensic narratives stage and interpret death and the dead body for us. They set the distress, disorder, excitement and moral rupture of murder within a reassuring legal and scientific order. Within the forensic formula, narratives and views of violent death become pleasurable.

Each evening will consist of…
  • introductory remarks by historians, film critics, or NIH scientists
  • the feature presentation
  • a moderated discussion

Admission is FREE and open to all. Refreshments will be served in the lobby. The starting time is 6:00 p.m.

All movies will be shown with captions. Sign Language Interpreters will be provided for the film introduction and discussion. Individuals with disabilities who need reasonable accommodation to participate should contact Jiwon Kim, Exhibition Program at 301-496-5963 or the Federal Relay 1-800-877-8339.

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Last reviewed: 09 April 2008
Last updated: 03 April 2006
First published: 03 August 2005
Metadata| Permanence level: Permanence Not Guaranteed