From the mid-twentieth century onwards, televisual media has actively shaped relations between human bodies, health practices and market forces. By paying close critical attention to the nuances of these connections, Body, Capital and Screens makes an important intervention in the field of European and global health history, and presents a convincing argument for the value of engaging with visual resources in historiographic research.

The editors of Body, Capital and Screens, Christian Bonah and Anja Laukötter, currently lead the erc funded research programme Body Capital, which links a visual history of the body with economic history to address a variety of health-related issues. Writing in the introduction to the volume, Bonah and Laukötter argue that visual material is “essential to the enactment of beliefs about health and body practices in the communication societies of the 20th century” and thus “might be seen as the 20th century’s paramount archival source” (p. 14). “Visual” might here be more accurately parsed as “televisual”: the volume focusses specifically on non-fiction films, with particular emphasis on public health information broadcasts and documentaries.

Each chapter starts with an analysis of a single film, which is used as a hermeneutic for addressing a broader topic. For example, an account of the French release of the West German sex-education film Helga: The Intimate Life of a Young Woman (1967) allows Bonah to explore the role of state-controlled French television in shaping public debate on the legalisation of oral contraception, the decriminalisation of abortion, and the introduction of compulsory sex education in French schools. As Bonah notes, this is not a visual cultural history of public health films, but a history of public health told through visual resources (p. 101).

A list of the films used to open each chapter offers a schema of the historical, geographical, and thematic range of the volume: Henri Cartier Bresson’s Victoire de la vie (France, 1937); the bbc documentary Machinery for Living / Your Life in Their Hands (UK, 1958); Children in Need (UK, 2015); the aforementioned sex-education film Helga (France / brd, 1967); the alcohol-awareness campaign film Le bistrot (France, 1984); an 11-minute short about high divers, Crystal Champions (USA, 1929); cancer-awareness animation Inside Magoo (USA, 1964); the sex-education film Sagst du’s deinem Kinde? (‘Will you tell your child?’) (gdr, 1963); unesco’s informational short The Task Ahead (unesco, 1951); Farm to Pharmacy (India, 2011), a documentary about the use of medicinal plants in the state of Orissa; and The Eternal Fight (UN / who, 1948), an audio-visual expression of the founding mission of the World Health Organization. Geographically, the majority of the contributions focus on Europe or North America, although the most compelling chapters are the last two, in which Jean-Paul Gaudillière maps the possibility of “a visual, colonial, subaltern, or world history of health and bodies” (p. 291) and Kirsten Ostherr addresses the challenges to global health communications posed by the networked circulation of Zika virus media.

Body, Capital and Screens addresses the increasingly complex entanglements of biopolitics with bio-economics; it is original in that it demonstrates the formative role played by screen media in shaping the pathways that produce what Nikolas Rose has termed, in his 2006 book of the same title, “the politics of life itself.” Subjectification – the classification of individual subjects in relation to health, sickness, and bodily behaviours, and the reorganisation of relations between individuals and biomedical authorities (Rose, 2006, p. 5) – is one such pathway, and a recurrent theme across several contributions to the volume.

Luc Berlivet’s chapter “Measuring Subjectification” explores the criteria used to evaluate French health education campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s, arguing that subjectification became a key objective of public health during this period. Drawing on Foucault’s definition of subjectification as a form of power applied to everyday life that categorises the individual by attaching him to his own identity and behaviours, Berlivet shows how the relative success or failure of each campaign was focussed on one important question – did it make the viewer discuss the campaign with other people? Talking about health risks such as smoking and drinking thus became understood as an effective method of identifying particular behaviours as a problem, thereby allowing the speaking subject to verbally identify themselves as ‘an individual at risk’.

In Medical Visions (2013) Kirsten Ostherr showed how the “production of the patient” took place through different imaging technologies; selected chapters in this present volume extend Ostherr’s insights to consider more precise categories of health subject (for example, David Cantor’s chapter “Inside Magoo” explores the construction of the subject-at-risk in relation to cancer). Given that Body, Capital and Screens focusses on visual media, it is interesting to note the frequent centrality of language to this process; in several chapters, first-person speech is established as an effective technique of subjectification, creating new types of health subject.

First-person speech – in the form of the articulation of the views of ordinary citizens – became increasingly significant for public health campaigns in the second half of the twentieth century, replacing the overtly didactic or authoritarian approach of the immediate post-war period. Laukötter’s chapter explores public screenings of sex-education films in the 1960s gdr. The discussions that followed the screenings were considered a vital part of the instructive process, turning passive viewers into “fellow researchers”; within this framework, the role of the film producer was not so much to transmit knowledge, but to shape the emotions of the viewer so as to bring new health subjects into being. The growing emphasis on the ‘ordinary citizen’ in public health televisual productions is not just a reflection of changing public health policy, nor simply an effect of technological advances (for example, the introduction of lighter, single-man cameras in the 1960s, which made it possible to conduct interviews on the street), but was also a matter of aesthetic influence. Hence for example Bonah argues that in France cinéma vérité played a part in getting ordinary people to talk to the camera, thereby influencing the countercultural presentation of sex education on French television, whilst Laukötter argues that the health education films of Götz Oelschläger must be contextualised in terms of the influence of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre and the experimental films of the 1960s. Chapters such as these are fascinating reminders that health education materials are shaped by aesthetic concerns as much as by clinical considerations or policy demands.

The penultimate chapter, “From Colonial to Global” by Jean-Paul Gaudillière poses some intriguing questions about the potential intersections between visual culture and global health studies. Gaudillière looks to ethnographic documentaries (which started in the interwar years and became increasingly popular after the war) as a potential source of subaltern visual historiographies of health, arguing that such films are able to convey something that Western words and categories cannot. Gaudillière draws attention to the work of ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch, who would frequently relinquish the camera to the subjects of his films, or re-write scenarios with his subjects’ involvement. Throughout this chapter, Gaudillière offers convincing evidence that a more decisive engagement with visual culture would benefit scholarship on health practices beyond Europe.

While the majority of chapters focus on pre-digital visual culture; Kirsten Ostherr’s contribution, which concludes the volume, explores how digital communication networks (such as WhatsApp, Facebook and YouTube) have created challenges for a top-down model of health information management. In the Zika virus outbreak of 2016, visual representations of Zika circulated digitally along social media channels, shaped by algorithms and filter bubbles, generating destabilising counter-narratives to those of official organisations like the who. Ostherr’s chapter is one of the few to expressly engage with pressing topics like health datafication and dataveillance; this feels particularly timely, given that the covid pandemic has intensified existing concerns about encroaching surveillance and the sharing of health data (for example in relation to contact-tracing apps), and given new urgency to ensuring the accuracy of health information circulating in online spaces. Ostherr concludes that effective public health communication requires transparency around datafication and dataveillance, as well as the genuine opportunity for citizens to participate in active data-making when global health disasters threaten their communities; one wonders what the management team behind the UK’s failing nhs covid-19 Test-and-Trace app might make of this.

This a tightly curated volume, with only one chapter that feels slightly out of place – this is the chapter on the Austrian artist valie export, whose fine-art practice operates in a fundamentally different register to the broadly documentary televisual or filmic practices addressed in the rest of the book. Collectively, these essays show that throughout the post-war period, the promotion of culture was part of a complex biopolitical and bio-economic ecology, and convincingly demonstrate the key role played by modern visual media in the shift from a national biopolitical public health paradigm to one shaped by market forces.