The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema

This study sees the nineteenth century supernatural as a significant context for cinema's first years. The book takes up the familiar notion of cinema as a ghostly, spectral or haunted medium and asks what made such association possible. Examining the history of the projected image and supernatural displays, psychical research and telepathy, spirit photography and X-rays, the skeletons of the danse macabre and the ghostly spaces of the mind, it uncovers many lost and fascinating connections. The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema locates film's spectral affinities within a history stretching back to the beginning of screen practice and forward to the digital era. In addition to examining the use of supernatural themes by pioneering filmmakers like Georges Méliès and George Albert Smith, it also engages with the representations of cinema's ghostly past in Guy Maddin's recent online project Seances (2016). It is ideal for those interested in the history of cinema, the study of the supernatural and the pre-history of the horror film.

Provides a pre-history to the horror film. Examines the trope of cinema as a haunted or supernatural medium, both as it manifested in cinema's earliest years and its return in recent decades. Ties early cinema to the Victorian cultural phenomena of spiritualism, psychology and stage magic, as well as the emergence of X-ray photography.

Autorentext

Murray Leeder teaches Film Studies at the University of Calgary, Canada, and holds a PhD from Carleton University. He is the author of Horror Film: A Critical Introduction (forthcoming) and Halloween (2014) and editor of Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era (2015).

Inhalt
1.Introduction.- 2. The Haunting of Film Theory.- 3. Light and Lies: Screen Practice and (Super-) Natural Magic.- 4. The Strange Case of George Albert Smith: Mesmerism, Psychical Research and Cinema.- 5. Aesthetics of Co-Registration: Spirit Photography, X-Rays and Cinema.- 6. Méliès's Skeleton: Gender, Cinema's Danse Macabre and the Erotics of Bone.- 7. Living Pictures at Will: Projecting Haunted Minds.- 8. Conclusion: Lost Worlds, Ghost Worlds.