In the pit, ink on paper, 2024
I’ve been studying film depictions of womens mental illness, trauma and dissociation and ended up in the pit.
The Snake Pit (1948) is a film directed by Anatole Litvak. Olivia de Havilland portraits a woman in a mental institution with no memory of why and how she has ended up there. It’s a nightmarish tale of how she ends up deeper and deeper in the pit, to the darkest parts of the institution with the ”hopeless” cases until in treatment she finds the key, the trauma that locked her inside her mind