Feminist film scholars have long argued that neither narrative nor visual structuring, individually or together, yields a homogenous experience for viewers. Yet, more often than not, it is the look of, and structures for looking at, the image that grounds viewers’ fascination with bodies. This brownbag presentation discusses the power of the look in the construction of one such body–the ”˜mad’ body. Part of a larger project on cinematic madness, genre and spectatorship, this discussion takes up the look of madness configured as mental illness in mid- to late-twentieth century US and British films, including Nunnally Johnson’s "The Three Faces Eve" (US, 1957). In this film, Johnson adapts the markers of both the written case history and the subsequent instructional medical documentary to the temporal and spatial conventions of classical Hollywood cinema. While such genre adaptation risks re-inscribing dominant social norms and discourses, the visual look of the film–and the viewer’s desire for Eve’s body–work to rupture disciplinary power relations. I suggest the same affective logic undergirds the look of other films centered on mental illness across genres. Film clips will be included in this presentation.