Ordem Moral
How to steal a newspaper from your wife between World Wars: force abortions in excess of 5 maids and assorted visitors, then accuse her of hysteria when she absconds with the driver.
After staging plays that regarded marriage as a prison, a sickness, death, and taking much shit from her husband, our heroine runs away with a guy to a love nest, away from big city.
The driver was in fact fired from his job for being “effeminate”, and is subsequently infected with the Spanish Flu. His anarchist friend from the union helps him, as long as he can skim some dough from the top.
They only last a couple days before being busted by the cops, and the days of compulsive institutionalisation in a dumping ground for mental illness begin.
The finest medical doctors of the age attest to the pathology, using the finest phrenology of the time: moral turpitude brought about by menopause, excess magazine reading and theatrics, in a nutshell, feeling too many emotions.
Her son a weakling, shaken with the revelations but unable to raise to the occasion. He’s caught reading some of those smutty postcards between magazine sheets, but sweeps it under the rug.
Only long after these events is she released to peace and quietude outside a prison, for the crime of having emotions. The newspaper was sold right away, so she loses in the end.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.