Cinema, Technologies of Visibility, and the Reanimation of Desire

Exploring the dead/alive figure in such films asThe Ring,American Beauty,andThe Elephant Man, Vincent 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.

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.

Introduction: Cinema, Technologies of Visibility, and the Reanimation of Desire * Envisioning the (W)hole World Behind Things in Sam Mendes’s American Beauty * Burning Transmission: Stilling Psychic Space in Gore Verbinski’s The Ring * Turning into Another Thing: David Lynch’s The Elephant Man * Inscribing the Dream of Otherness at the End of the World * Conclusion: Up with Dead People?