This thesis uses feminist film theory and filmmaking practices as an entry point to investigate Geschwind's syndrome, a set of symptoms accompanying temporal lobe epilepsy that I suffer from. Geschwind's syndrome has been hypothesized to be responsible for cases of hypergraphia, a form of compulsive documentation in writing or drawing, as well as hyperreligiosity, states of euphoria, deja and jamais vu, and altered sexuality (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, and various figures of religious importance are speculated to have suffered from the condition, with their works marking the influence of some of these experiences)(LaPlante 2016).
Deja vu is an experience familiar to many, whereas jamais vu –the phenomenon of being suddenly unable to recognize familiar locations, faces, and objects – is more rare. The sudden appearance of such states introduces bumps, slips, skips, and loops into one’s sense of linear time. While these kinds of experiences are present in all human encounters to some degree, one finds them intensified in both the Geschwind Syndrome and cinema, with regard to cinema’s ability to convey ecstatic or heightened affective states, warped perceptions of time, and the desire for self-documentation in distinctive ways. Taking this connection as a starting point, this paper explores what the Geschwind Syndrome and cinema can learn from one another by interrogating the affordances of mental and audiovisual intensification for understanding how humanity comes to terms with time and mortality. On a more speculative note, it also asks whether cinema is itself a manifestation of
the Geschwind Syndrome or of the desire to transcend the looming end of our mortal perception. Skeuomorphs, my thesis film, works to relate hypergraphia to various complex affective states, including nostalgia, disembodiment, and reflectiveness. "Skeuomorphs" investigates how we document and understand time, and how the technology we use to do so interacts with our inborn senses of the sacred and the sentimental.