Fractures: an inquiry into the figure of the medical doctor in films set in African conflict zones

Abstract

This thesis is part of a creative arts PhD which explores the cinematic figure of the medical doctor in African conflict zones. It is presented along with a fictional feature film screenplay entitled Across the River. The discursive component of this research is not intended as an explanation of the screenplay but rather as a contribution to the discourse around the representation of the medical doctor in the cinematic imagination of a filmed Africa, of which little is written about in film research. This emblematic figure appears at the centre of the selected film narratives about humanitarian intervention in the imagined African conflict zone. The research is significant beyond the locality of the films under consideration because of the pervasive nature of emergencies in our contemporary understanding of the world. The conceptual application of the medical term ‘triage ’— a system used for the sorting of casualties for treatment in resource-scarce areas — offers unique insights into the authority and power vested in the doctor figure within the imagined conflict zone. A framework based on political and legal theories is also applied to an understanding of emergencies and humanitarian crises. This considers there presentation of the doctor figure as part of new world order shaped by emergency and the uncomfortable overlap of military and humanitarian operations in the filmed conflict zone. In response to these new conceptions, this study approaches African film practice through less conventional theoretical perspectives. It critiques canonised texts of African film theory which define African filmmaking from the perspective of race, geography and ideology. Rather than ignoring the complexities of film production as many theorists do in favour of a purely textual reading, this study considers the system of inputs and exchanges that situates African filmmaking practice within a globalised film economy using a film services approach. A Metzian framework is applied in considering the cinematic fact—the industrial and economic conditions of the production and distribution of the film—along side the filmic fact with its focus on the interpretation of meaning contained in the film text. Meshing film theory with political concepts derived from the social sciences, the study investigates how emergencies operate and influence the cinematic construction of the humanitarian gaze. In choosing to focus on films that relocate the doctor from the traditional setting of the ordered institutional confines of the hospital, the study investigates how this fictional figure becomes a site of fracture and is transformed in significant ways within the conflict zone. This research finds that while this conception of the doctor at the masthead of modern humanitarian intervention in the African conflict zone might appear freed of its colonial past, certain inescapable associations endure in therapeutic actions through the exertion of power over life itself. Finally, the study shifts the conflict zone to the interior world of the doctor character and considers the emotional and psychological dimensions of the wounded healer, which informs the main character in the feature film screenplay component of this PhD