Medicine and Cinema - A Masterclass with Professor Peter Barta

Friday 7 March 2025, 2pm - 5pm, UWA Institute of Advanced Studies
Attendance is Free, but pre-registration is essential via the REGISTRATION FORM

This Masterclass will comprise three parts. Part one will focus on the relationship between the cinematic genre and psychoanalysis, the affinities between artistic films and dreaming. Cinema relies on narratives, however it draws on the dramatic arts just as much. The film’s plot evolves via an illusion of three-dimensional reality enacted by actors within dialogues. The role of the storyteller is relegated to the film’s director, whom the viewers neither hear nor see. Cinema does not discuss or analyse: it displays and shows instead in its highly artificial, constructed world. Although film has a far greater potential to guide the interpretation of its audience— than does the novel or the short story, it also has unique strengths in defamiliarising and estranging viewers from their supposedly routine lived experiences of daily life whose illusion it depicts on the screen.

The second part of the class will entail the showing of Thomas Liliti’s film, The Country Doctor (102 minutes, 2016). The third and most substantial part of the class will be devoted to discussing the elaborate web of issues concerning medical care in a developed Western setting in our time. The film projects, among other issues, concerns about medical care away from large urban centres, sexism that female doctors still face, the experience of being terminally ill for the doctor who combines being a cancer patient and an active general practitioner; the concern about hospital or home care for old people who are no longer capable of looking after themselves; and the confrontation between physicians and medically unqualified bureaucrats who make decisions about healthcare. 

It is expected that the audience of students and instructors of medicine and the medical sciences will engage in a lively discussion. Therein lies the relevance of Medical Humanities with a focus on nurses and doctors who provide patient care: discussions of cultural products related to healthcare create a space for them to address issues they are also troubled by but have no time or opportunity to verbalise and share with their colleagues.

Peter I. Barta is Professor Emeritus in the School of English and Languages at the University of Surrey, UK and teaches literature and medical humanities at Texas Tech University. His recent research has focused on medical humanities. His volume, Read Watch Listen: Using Stories to Improve Healthcare (2022) led to a grant from the British Academy and the Wellcome Trust to fund the conference ‘Laughter and Medicine’ held at the University of Birmingham in November 2024. He is currently editing a volume based on the conference that will be published in the British Academy series with Oxford University Press.

Professor Barta is a UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow, working with Associate Professor Nahal Mavaddat, Head, General Practice and Lead, UWA Medical Humanities Network and Dr Brid Phillips, Senior Lecturer (Nursing), UWA School of Allied Health .

Dr Nicholas Cole is an expert in both digital humanities and constitutional law at Pembroke College, University of Oxford.

In this Masterclass he will place the writing of Australia’s federal constitution in a global context, examining its connections to the long history of democratic constitution-writing and describing how modern research technologies are being used to illuminate the drafting process as part of a new research collaboration between Oxford and UWA. He will draw on his experience of founding and directing Quill, a leading digital humanities project at the University of Oxford, to address both the problems of digital project design and the creation of tools needed in twenty-first century scholarship.

Dr Cole is a UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow. During his Fellowship at UWA he will work with host Associate Professor Murray Wesson and colleagues in the UWA Law School.

DETAILS:  TUESDAY 8 APRIL 2025, 10am-12 noon | Institute of Advanced Studies

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