“A thrilling maelstrom of critical theory, film and media analysis, and visual cultural studies. In an electrifying descent into the insides of quasi-film genres from melodrama to horror and science fiction, Hausmann brings back a timeless work of film theory at once past, present, and future in its address. An energetic work that resists the paralyses of any given moment, Hausmann’s work remains vigorously out of time and place, outstanding in every dimension it enters.”–Akira Mizuta Lippit, author of Atomic Light, Electric Animal
“Cinema, Technologies of Visibility, and the Reanimation of Desire will be an enduring contribution to film studies. Films, Hausmann argues, rehearse the history of their ‘modes of production’ via direct allusion to optical technologies. Hausmann reaps uncommon rewards through close and informed reading of visual form.”—Tom Conley, author of An Errant Eye, Cartographic Cinema
Exploring the dead/alive figure in such films as The Ring, American Beauty, and The Elephant Man, Vincent J. Hausmann charts the spectacular reduction of psychic life and assesses calls for shoring up psychic/social spaces that transfer bodily drives to language. Drawing on expansive histories of cinema–including its relation to scientific/medical visual culture’s tracking of the human/animal body, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and sexuality studies, the book demonstrates that conceptions of psychic (re)animation remain interwoven with notions of cinematic motion, and emerge, embedded, in narratives of relations among analog and digital arts/technologies.
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Vincent J. Hausmann is an Associate Professor of English at Furman University, where he teaches cinema studies and literary theory. He has published on Bernardo Bertolucci, Joseph Conrad, and Paul Bowles, and coedits Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature.