Exorcising Unhomely Street: Filmic Intuition and the Representation of Post-concussive Syndrome

Susannah Gent

My interdisciplinary, practice-led research involves a diverse methodological approach, including experimental film production, continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience. In this exposition, I review the role of intuition in creative practice, and the influential factors when the work of art ‘happens’. The short, experimental film Unhomely Street represents the experience of post-concussive syndrome through a surrealist narrative with historical accounts of atrocity and anti-capitalist polemics. Having employed a new approach to filmmaking — a spontaneous method in which artistic decisions are informed by emotional tone rather than narrative concerns — I reflect upon this creative play. I draw on the work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, specifically his view that emotion underpins consciousness, Freud’s theory of the unconscious, and Irving Massey’s understanding of metaphor as the original, pre-linguistic language of thought.

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