AUTOPSIES RESEARCH GROUP

To put you in the mood for the upcoming Found Footage Film Night, hosted by the Autopsies group on 9 December, don't miss Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (L'Enfer), currently showing in selected cinemas.

Began in 1964, l'Enfer had an unlimited budget, an all star cast, and Clouzot as a director obsessed with creating a new visual language for cinema. After scores of screen tests and three weeks of location shooting the film was never completed, and the 185 reels of film produced were left abandoned for decades. The present release is a documentary that tells the story of the film that never was, and mixes interviews with the original crew with a montage of Clouzot's 35mm rushes.

The story line of the intended is film was never going to change the course of cinema history, but the visual treatment may have, as the quite extraordinary sequence of experiments with colour and sound shows. The documentary's reconstruction of the film, occasionally adding sound to the rushes, and recreating key dialogue with actors reading the original script, is subtle and well judged, leaving the shimmering found film footage to take centre stage.

Further information from BFI Southbank: http://bit.ly/8MbTef

Jacob Paskins

"Object Retrieval was a mass participation art project that took place from 15-21 October 2009 on a converted Routemaster bus in the main UCL (University College London) Quad on Gower Street, London. A single object from the UCL Pathology Collection was exhibited on the bus and explored by thousands of people from their own personal or professional perspective for 7 days, 24 hours a day. The response was extraordinary as you can see for yourself from the enormous amount of information uploaded on the Object Biography page. Contributions ranged from the hyper-scientific to childhood memories via the Gospels, Jack Kerouac, Psychoanalysis and pretty much everything in between. While Object Retrieval has finished, the website will remain open to your further contributions surrounding this simple object, this toy car that once belonged to a 4 year old boy."

This is the description by the curator and artist of the Object Retrieval Project on the website devoted to the project.

The Autopsies Group took up the invitation to research and think about the little car exhibited in this project.  That car, depicted above and below in photographs taken by Jann Matlock during our work sessions at the Routemaster bus, on 21 October 2009, was a tiny toy car, modelled after the Ford Galaxie Sunliner, that entered the UCL Pathology Collection in 1963 in relation to a case of lead poisoning involving a 4 year-old boy.  The case notes are reproduced here.

In these case notes, that justify the "appropriation" of the object today in the Object Retrieval Project, and its display in the Pathology Collection that originally housed it, the little boy was diagnosed in three ways: as a "case of mental retardation" (possibly relating to his lead poisoning as Rebecca Harrison notes in her contribution), as having "pica"--or the propensity to eat things that were not destined to be eaten--not so much a disease as a symptom, but at the very least an attribute that was part of a strange discourse of blaming victims as both Karolina Kendall-Bush and Harrison dicuss below; and being different, in this case, of "non-European extraction."  Despite our best efforts, we do not know what happened to the child or even whether follow-up studies were done on any of the children studied by Dr. Moncrieff in 1963 about whom he published an article reproduced on the Object Retrieval site.  We do know that this little boy was not one of the specific cases detailed in that study.  We can also assume, from the evidence of his lead poisoning levels, and the diagnosis of severe learning disabilities, that he may not have had the future that other children born in 1959 would today enjoy.  If he is alive today, he would be 50.  In the year that he entered the Greater Ormond Street Hospital, Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream Speech" (on 28 August 1963).  Also that fall, on 23 october 1963, Bob Dylan recorded an important political ballad, "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll."  That song, which told the story of one of the most tragic injustices of the civil rights era in the U.S., detailed how the scion of wealthy tobacco farmers killed a black woman with his cane because she was slow in bringing him a drink--and then was given the minimal penalty of only six months in jail for manslaughter:

William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel society gath'rin'.
And the cops were called in and his weapon took from him
As they rode him in custody down to the station
And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder.
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Take the rag away from your face.
Now ain't the time for your tears.

Dylan tells the whole story, in his way, almost as if he's providing a newspaper account of the murder that occurred in February 1963. The version below is from a public domain appearance on the Steve Allen show in 1964.

Zantzinger's story is relevant to the Object Retrieval Project for two reasons: first because his victim, like the little boy in the Object Retrieval Project, was of another background than European and justice was dispensed on the basis of that racial, ethnic difference. Second, because Zantzinger left jail to become a major slumlord in Maryland and in the Washington D.C. area. See this account in The Guardian, (and in some slightly more anecdotal accounts here). 

Arrested in 1991 on charges of fraud and deceptive business practices, Zantzinger was like the slumlords who in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and even today, refused to do anything about the lead paint in the apartments they rent.  He was also like the lead paint companies that have fought tooth and nail all attempts to force them to indemnify their victims for pretending--well into the 1970s--that lead paint was safe and for claiming, even today, that their paint was no more to blame than other things in the environment.  See these examples from Life Magazine: [1] [2] [3] (1967!) Pencils, pottery, and yes, little toy cars, have taken the fall for an industry that has chosen not to participate in the clean-up of the home environments they promised to make sparkling and safe.

William Zantzinger died in January 2009. For a contemporary activist's account of the era, read this.

Tragically enough, in 2009 as well, on July 2, the Rhode Island Supreme Court reversed a legal decision that would have forced the three big lead paint firms to pay to help clean up the housing that their paint has made toxic.  After more than 30 years of hiding the health risks of their lead paint, Sherwin-Williams, NL Industries, and Milennial Holdings were set to begin paying billions to repair the damage to housing where lead paint risks still persist.  Cases are pending in California and Ohio, where courts could still make the lead firms share in the cost of making homes safe.  Until then, justice for the millions of children who suffer from lead paint poisoning, will remain as elusive as for Hattie Carroll.

This is why the Autopsies Research Group played Bob Dylan's song at the end of our research visit to the Routemaster bus in the UCL quad on 21 October 2009.  While we would rather remember 1963 for Martin Luther King's dreams, we also want to remember the injustices committed by slumlords like Zantzinger and by the lead paint companies both of whom profited from little boys such as the one who once loved a little toy Ford Galaxie Sunliner.

Wherever he is, we hope he is not alone.
--Jann Matlock

The features that distinguished the toy car of the Object Retrieval project have been worn away, but we can still identify it as a toy modelled upon the Ford Sunliner Convertible. From the early 1950s, many different models of the Ford Sunliner were made. The first in line was the Ford Crestline Sunliner. The hood of this model is distinctively arched. The boy who owned the toy exhibited by the Object Retrieval project was hospitalised in 1963, so the toy car was modelled on the Ford Galaxie Sunliner, which was first produced in 1960. The Ford Galaxie Sunliner differs from all previous models. The front of the car is flatter, and has the name of Ford written in capital letters on the front, with Sunliner written on the side of the car. 

The Ford Sunliner was markedly present in the late 1950s and early 1960s French cinema. There it represents an American way of life. In a number of important French films of the 1960s, Ford Sunliners are owned by men aspiring to be like the gangsters of 1950s American films. In Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1962 Le Doulos, it is Jean-Paul Belmondo’s character, Silien, who possesses a Ford Sunliner. All the main characters in Le Doulos drive different brands of cars, but all of them drive American cars. Silien has a Ford Sunliner; Faugel acquires towards the end a Mercury Monterey; and the character played by Michel Piccoli drives a white Chevrolet Bel Air. At the end of the film as Silien returns to his newly acquired country house, he is driving a white Ford Sunliner convertible, unaware that death awaits him. Faugel - who arrived before him to the counrty house to warn Silien of the danger - is driving a Mercury.

The Ford Sunliner also features at the end of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1962 film, Vivre sa vie. As the main character, Nana, is sold by her pimp to another group of pimps, it is interesting to note that Nana’s pimp owns a Peugeot, and she is being sold to the new up-and-coming gang who owns a Ford Sunliner Convertible. The travelling shot between the two cars in the last sequence of the film accentuates the flagrant differences between the two gangs through their respective cars. Nana’s pimp owns a black, hard-top Peugeot 404, whereas the new gang have a white Ford Sunliner Convertible. The owners of the white convertible, however, shoot Nana, after which Nana’s pimp shoots her again before driving off. 

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 Alphaville begins and ends with Lemmy Caution, the main character, driving a white car as he enters and departs the eponymous science-fiction city. Critics have sometimes assumed that the film features a Ford Galaxie Sunliner - in part because Lemmy lies and says his car is a Galaxie. The car Lemmy drives at the opening of the film is, however, a Ford Mustang. The car he takes to leave with Anna Karina is not the same car but it is not anymore than the first one the Galaxie he has claimed to have. That second car has the name Valiant visibly written on the front. It looks to be a white 1963 Plymouth Valiant. Caution’s reference to the Galaxie seems significant because it suggests the way the futuristic film could be occurring in another galaxy and seems to suggest that Caution associates his vehicle with a spaceship as well as with the gangster lifestyle: like the French gangsters who drive Sunliners elsewhere in this era’s cinema, Caution not only wears a trenchcoat but is not afraid to use his gun. In part because Caution survives, the Ford Galaxie he pretends to have ultimately serves as an imaginary spaceship for his escape - even though no Galaxie is ever to be physically seen in the film. 

In the French films from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, all the men who own or claim to own Ford Sunliners have the same behavioural pattern. First of all, they all have the same dress code: a trench coat, which is rarely taken off, a matching hat, and of course, a gun. The ultimate accessory is, however, the Ford Sunliner. 

Although the toy car exhibited by the Object Retrieval was modelled after the Ford Sunliner, its features remain generic, less marked than the type of car it is representing. Many brands used similar designs for their cars around the 1960s. Just have a look at the Cadillac models of the time, the Chrysler New Yorker, or the Chevrolet Impala. The design of these cars is distinctively American. By evoking these cars and these images of "modern" Americana, the French cinema raises questions about aesthetics, modernity, the future, and especially, the past. The widest cars ever built, Sunliners are about excess but they are also, in representation, about masculinity, about European anxieties about the past and future, and about crime. What did the little boy of the Object retrieved by the Pathology Museum know about those things? One can only guess, and hope that, like Lemmy Caution, he escaped.


Sheena Scott

The case-study notes placed next to the toy car displayed as part of the UCL "Object Retrieval" project observe that the four-year-old child who licked the car clean of its white paint, and was supposedly poisoned by the lead in its red paint, was of "Non-European extraction." Whether the child was (or was not) European would at first seem a strangely irrelevant detail to be included in clinical case notes that offer few other clues to the child’s history. However, as historian Christian Warren has demonstrated, lead poisoning, especially in the years leading up to the end of World War II, was regularly assumed to be a social problem blamed on those who suffered from it: children were assumed to be inherently "backward"; their parents "ignorant" and guilty of neglect or bad parenting. Lead poisoning joined a legion of "ghetto problems" attributed to those living in "bad housing" while the lead paint industry and the landlords who employed its paint were largely ignored (Christian Warren, "Little Pamphlets and Big Lies: Federal Authorities Respond to Childhood Lead Poisoning, 1935-2003," Public Health, 120 [May-June 2005], 324). Although Warren’s essay considers a U.S. context, as opposed to the British one of the Object Retrieval child, his work highlights how poor, non-white children were presumed to be most at risk. It also demonstrates how questions of social and racial background entered into discussions surrounding lead poisoning in children, thus shedding some light on why a child’s "non-European" background would seem worthy of note (see Warren, 325).

In recent years, issues of race and immigration have again arisen in connection to cases of lead poisoning in children. In 2003, in response to a bill put before the New York City Council that sought to make landlords liable for lead problems in their buildings, the New York Times reported on the high occurrence, in specific New York neighbourhoods, of lead poisoning in children born outside the United States (Kirk Johnson, New York Times, 30 September 2003, p.1). Claiming that these children often came from countries and regions where lead exposure was endemic, Dr. Jessica Leighton, an assistant commissioner in the city’s Health Department, commented that it was hard to ascertain whether the source of poisoning was from the children’s housing or their country of origin (Johnson, NYT, 30 September 2003, p.1). Despite great changes in their populations, the neighbourhoods with the highest poisoning rates had, however, remained largely stable. This would indicate that poor-quality housing with widespread lead paint in the U.S. domestic environment--and not the children’s countries of origin--were the source of poisoning. It is significant that so many years after the 1963 case notes about the boy admitted to Great Ormond Street Hospital for lead poisoning, that when lead poisoning in children reaches epidemic proportions, it is still the child’s "foreign-born" or "non-European" origins that come under scrutiny and not the lead industry or irresponsible landlords.
  
--Karolina Kendall-Bush

The brief medical history that accompanied the Object Retrieval exhibit at UCL stated that the white paint on the car contained no lead traces, while the red paint on the car contained lead at 6%. The notes also tell us that the child in question was "originally admitted two years and three months previously, as a case of mental retardation." 

Was this miniature Ford Galaxie Sunliner really the culprit in the child’s lead poisoning?

Until 1978, when the use of lead was banned in domestic products in the U.S., the metal was prevalent in household paints, plumbing/pipes, gasoline, and pencils (an article in Life from 1972 reveals that ‘pencils, paint and pottery can give you lead poisoning’). Life, "Consumer Watch," June 2, 1972, p.45.

Until 1955 the levels of lead acceptably found in household paints remained as high as 50%. Even in 2004, a U.S. report noted that "Faucets and plumbing fittings may legally contain up to 8% lead." Note that even this lesser percentage of lead exposure is 2% higher than that found in the red toy paint in the 1960s toy of the Object Retrieval Project--paint to which the child’s severe lead poisoning was attributed (ARC, "Child Lead Poisoning Prevention" Report. February 2004). 

Lead poisoning is a cumulative process. In children, who absorb far more of the lead they ingest than their adult counterparts, lead poisoning can have disastrous consequences. In an investigative report into the compensation paid out by manufacturers in cases of lead poisoning, Laura Greenberg describes the effects of exposure to lead on children:

High levels of exposure can cause kidney failure and brain swelling that can lead to coma or death. High exposure can also result in neurological damage, mental retardation, cerebral palsy, seizures, and behavioral problems. Lower levels of exposure can cause reduced IQ, cognitive difficulties, deficits in speech and language processing, attention deficit disorder, and full or partial hearing loss. ("Compensating the Lead Poisoned Child: Proposals for Mitigating Discriminatory Damage Awards"). 

Is medical science missing a trick in laying the blame for the child’s lead poisoning at the much-licked door of the toy car?

The child displayed symptoms of lead poisoning two years and three months before he was admitted for lead poisoning. When he was admitted to Great Ormond Street Hospital, he was characterized as a case of "mental retardation." Could this have been an unacknowledged case of lead poisoning caused by the ingestion of paint from the walls of his home, the water in his formula that ran through the pipe of his house, or the decorative patterns on the containers used to store his food?

Pica was often the diagnosis for children who put objects in their mouths and then showed symptoms of lead poisoning. The diagnosis was an effective way of laying the blame for children’s illness at the door of lower-class, low-income families who could not control their children. (As described by in Jane E. Brody, "Aggressiveness and Delinquency in Boys is Linked to Lead in Bones," New York Times, February 7 1996).

As historian Christian Warren argued:
In most cities, lead poisoning’s status as a disease of poverty left the iceberg submerged. Cultural assumptions about the poor shifted blame from the toxin to the victim, inhibiting the discovery of the true scope of childhood plumbism and postponing indefinitely its eradication (Brush with Death: A Social History of Lead Poisoning [Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2000], 182).

Warren cites lead company shill Robert Kehoe using the fantasmatic language of the medical diagnosis of "pica" to blame children and their parents: "unwanted and unloved," these "children develop aberrant apetites, interests and habits of eating (pica), and tend to deviate psychologically from those with more favourable social and physical environments" ("The Harben Lectures," 1961, cited in Warren, 186). The discourse that attributed the blame to children and their parents repeatedly characterized lead poisoning as the result of the "disease" of "pica"--"when little kids put stupid things in their mouths and eat them" (Dr. Vincent Guinee in NY in the 1970s, cited in Warren, 186).

The little boy of the Object Retrieval Project was therefore implicitly blamed for his own condition by being told he "had" pica. 

This car is therefore, ironically, a manifestation of pica as a misdiagnosis. It signifies how much the fantasy of the disease of "pica" deterred from blaming the lead paint companies themselves. In suggesting the car as a likely source of lead poisoning, one ignores the evidence that the child may have had been suffering over two years before.his admission to the hospital--and maybe long before he ever saw the toy car. Was there any attempt to record his bone lead levels, which would have shown the cumulative level of poisoning, rather than just that immediate to the blood test? The real culprit in the case most likely gets away.

What is striking about the car itself is that all the white, non-toxic paint has been licked off by the child. The red, lead-based paint remains largely intact. The car itself probably has no real place in the poisoning of the child. However we can strip away this outer layer of information to get at the real truth of the case – just as the child did to reveal the worn grey body of his toy.

    --Rebecca Harrison

My PhD research can bring up some unexpected discoveries, and this week I was confronted with a pile of illustrated children's books about building sites from the 1970s, accompanied by 45 rpm records. Born the year of the first commercial production of compact discs, records have always been a bit of a mystery to me. Normally, a stack of bulky, dusty, scratched vinyl would arouse no interest in me, but, curious to see what French kids learnt about construction work, I couldn't let this particular collection remain silent.

By chance I came across one of those record players frequently advertised in magazines that can be connected to a computer via a Universal Serial Bus (USB) cable. These devices transfer the analogue audio output of the record into digital audio signals, which can be compressed and saved in various file formats.

Within minutes, the long abandoned discs were singing again and I had saved all the material ready to access at my finger tips without the need of transporting a turntable wherever I work. This technology can create backup copies of records that risk being worn out from overuse, and indeed convert 78 rpm discs into a practical format without the need of a 78 player. Records can now be played in the car CD player, or in the swimming pool through MP3 music players.

Some of the most extraordinary interactions between defunct mechanisms and digital technology have taken place in the music industry. Using optical scanning, scientists have been able to play back the earliest recording from 1860, an image of sound waves recorded onto smoke covered paper. See the story here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7318180.stm

And recently a shimmering new recording of Rachmaninoff playing the piano has been released. Celebrated records of the composer's performances do exist but this recording is completely new, made with the latest recording equipment. Zenph® Studios transforms original recordings into live performance, in ways that are too complicated for me to understand, so I refer you to their site:  
http://zenphstudios.com/reperformance.html

Further explanation can be found here:
http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue44/Rachmaninoff.htm

Despite the opportunities digital technology offers in reviving sounds from the past, some music lovers would rather hang on to their record collections. The rise in popularity of vinyl can be seen by the increasing space dedicated to it in large record shops, and, in February 2009, an influential German record label specialising in Jazz released its first albums on vinyl for 15 years.

For now it seems records are safe. I wonder if one day someone will find a way of transferring MP3 files back to vinyl?

Jacob Paskins