Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving ImageDeath 24x a Second is a fascinating exploration of the role new media technologies play in our experience of film. Addressing some of the key questions of film theory, spectatorship, and narrative, Laura Mulvey here argues that such technologies, including home DVD players, have fundamentally altered our relationship to the movies. According to Mulvey, new media technologies give viewers the ability to control both image and story, so that movies meant to be seen collectively and followed in a linear fashion may be manipulated to contain unexpected and even unintended pleasures. The individual frame, the projected film’s best-kept secret, can now be revealed by anyone who hits pause. Easy access to repetition, slow motion, and the freeze-frame, Mulvey argues, may shift the spectator’s pleasure to a fetishistic rather than a voyeuristic investment in film. By exploring how technology can give new life to old cinema, Death 24x a Second offers an original reevaluation of film’s history and its historical usefulness. |
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Abbas Kiarostami aesthetic Alex and Katherine André Bazin animate associated automaton Barthes Barthes’s Bazin becomes body Camera Lucida celluloid close-up create culture dead death drive delayed cinema Douglas Sirk earthquake Farhad fascination fiction figure film film’s filmstrip freeze frame Freud Friend’s House gesture Gilles Deleuze goes halt Hitchcock Hollywood Hossein human iconic inanimate Ingrid Bergman inscribed instance Jacques Rivette Janet Leigh Jentsch’s Journey to Italy Katherine’s Kiarostami kind look Lora Lora’s magic Marion’s material mechanical metaphor metonymy mise en scène movement and stillness movie moving image Naples narrative Olive Trees past pensive spectator Peter Brooks plot Pompeii pose prefigured presence Psycho Raymond Bellour reality reflection relation representation Rossellini scene screen sense sequence shot Sigmund Freud significance Sirk space spectacle spectator’s spectatorship star star’s stasis story story’s structure Tahereh takes Taste of Cherry temporality textual analysis transformed uncanny uncertainty unconscious Visual Pleasure