Movie poster
District Attorney David Rowe, a white man, has terminal cancer; Dr. Bornear transplants his brain into the body of Ralph Dickson, a black man run over by a car. It is therefore as a white lawyer in a black man’s body that Rowe will prosecute the white racist sheriff Gene Webb for the murder of a young black woman. The scenario is thoroughly structured by the racial divide. [...]
How does it relate to brainhood? When a journalist asks Dr. Bornear, “What is he now, doctor: a white man with a black body, or a black man with a white brain?” the surgeon does not reply, but the film’s answer seems unambiguous. Several times Rowe asserts the continuity of his personal identity under a different appearance. To his wife, he explains, “the brain is a wonderful thing. It’s really everything: David in me, Margaret in you.”
Publicity for the movie
Inspired by the homonymous book by Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega, this timespace presents the authors' genealogy of the cerebral subject and the influence of the neurological discourse in human sciences, mental health and culture.