Guest Curator: Lisa Cartwright "We suffered from the pseudo-scientific prejudice, the essence of modernism, which makes people believe that each medium of expression can and should be isolated and purified just as a chemical compound is isolated in the laboratory." When James Sibley Watson, Jr. made this claim, he intended it as a criticism of the modernist aesthetic which informed his avant-garde film practice of the late 1920s and early 1930s. By 1946, Watson was engaged in the production of X-ray motion pictures, extending modernism's "aesthetics" of science into "pure" science. A physician and publisher of a modernist literary journal during the 1920s, Watson worked with art historian and poet Melville Folsom Webber to complete a film version of Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher (1929, 14 mins, B&W, 16mm). The themes of incest and fratricide extend the project of dissecting filmic space to a dismemberment of heterosexual and familial structures--a theme amplified in Watson and Webber's Lot in Sodom (1933, 26 mins, B&W, 16mm). This film places sexual politics, power and desire openly within the context of the U.S. literary and film avant-garde. Watson's film work included industrial promotionals produced for Bausch and Lomb (The Eyes of Science, 1930) and for Eastman Kodak (Highlights and Shadows, 1937, 44 mins, B&W, 35mm). From 1946 through the 1960s, Watson headed a team which produced hundreds of X-ray motion studies of animal and human physiology (c. 8 mins, Silent, B&W, 35mm). Ostensibly produced for research and diagnosis, these films converged with media spectacle, appearing as part of Paramount's newsreel series, "The Inside Story." Watson's X-ray cinematography makes clear the extent to which science is implicated in a modernist agenda which cannot free itself from questions of power and knowledge and their constellation of visuality, sexuality and "aesthetic" pleasures. --Lisa Cartwright In local filmmaker Barbara Hammer's recent film, Sanctus, X-ray film originally shot by Dr. Watson and his colleagues is rephotographed and manipulated. (Sound composition by Neil B. Rolnick, 1990, 19 mins, B&W/Color, 16mm, Print from the Artist)