Possessed
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€49.99
A01=Stefan Andriopoulos
agency
art
Author_Stefan Andriopoulos
autonomy
babelsberg
berlin
bernheim
broch
cabinet of dr caligari
Category=ATF
cinema
control
crime
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
free will
german expressionism
hallucination
haunting
hypnotism
identity
kafka
literature
mabuse the gambler
mesmerism
modernism
murder
nonfiction
possession
silent film
sleepwalking
somnambulism
suggestion
vision
Product details
- ISBN 9780226020549
- Weight: 425g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 01 Aug 2008
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Silent cinema and contemporaneous literature explored themes of mesmerism, possession, and the ominous agency of corporate bodies that subsumed individual identities. At the same time, critics accused film itself of exerting a hypnotic influence over spellbound audiences. Stefan Andriopoulos shows that all this anxiety over being governed by an outside force was no marginal oddity, but rather a pervasive concern in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Tracing this preoccupation through the period's films - as well as its legal, medical, and literary texts - Andriopoulos pays particular attention to the terrifying notion of murder committed against one's will. He returns us to a time when medical researchers described the hypnotized subject as a medium who could be compelled to carry out violent crimes, and when films like "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and "Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler" famously portrayed the hypnotist's seemingly unlimited power on the movie screen.
Combining theoretical sophistication with scrupulous archival research and insightful film analysis, "Possessed" adds a new dimension to our understanding of today's anxieties about the onslaught of visual media and the expanding reach of vast corporations that seem to absorb our own identities.
Stefan Andriopoulos is associate professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Columbia University.
