Severing the Soul

She could do complicated math problems effortlessly at the age of nine. And yet Rosemary, the oldest daughter of the highly gifted Kennedy family, was considered mildly mentally retarded. When she started having tantrums in puberty, her father, Joseph Kennedy, demanded a lobotomy. He wanted to save the family's reputation by taming his maladjusted daughter. Rosemary Kennedy died in 2005. That year Barbara Klutinis decided to make a film about the primitive way people in the United States dealt with mental illnesses from the 1930s through the 1960s. She moulds historical material as if it were clay: she smoothly mixes photographs of Rosemary swimming gracefully and shots of her with her older brother John with footage that suggests a lobotomy. The description of the way the surgeons spoke to the locally anaesthetised Rosemary to find out to what degree they damaged her personality is blood-curdling. As the girl sang and counted numbers, the surgeons scraped away parts of her brain with a small spatula. Only when she became incoherent, did the surgeons stop.