top of page

Full Out
2025 | 14' |16mm > digital | 5.1 and stereo

In 19th century Paris at the Salpêtrière Hospital, patients were hypnotized on stage to reproduce the symptoms of hysteria for public audiences. Over a century later, high school cheerleaders are fainting en masse.

Full Out is the inaugural work in a suite of films investigating the intricate threads between historical accounts of mass hysteria, the body's capacity for knowing, and the ways collective resonance can both fracture and heal.


"Fractions of spectral images from Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière (1875-1879) – a medical journal intended as a visual reference for psychiatric diagnosis – seep into the film’s opening mimicking a collective involuntary motor behavior, a synchronised blinking. A piano is scrupulously tuned, its strings tensing and loosening, and the spotlight of a theatre illuminates an unusual clinical spectacle of vulnerability and rebellion. ‘At times there seems to be two persons in me, I am at once actor and spectator’ claims the voice of the performer. Through exquisite visual abstraction and a deeply electrifying soundscape Sarah Ballard plunges us into an energetic journey of contagious convulsion that reframes contemporary narratives of mass psychogenic illness." – Ane Lopez, BFMAF programmer's note


Screenings:

2025 First Look, Museum of the Moving Image, Astoria, NY
2025 Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, New Cinema Award Winner, Berwick-Upon-Weed, UK

bottom of page