Tom Gunning

To Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision

his students into the night-side of Nature. Murnau intercuts Bulwer’s lecture with shots a film historian (and likely a contemporary viewer) would recognize as taken from (or closely patterned on) the scientific films of the era, including a close-up of a Venus flytrap closing around its prey and a spider crawling along its web toward a trapped insect. Murnau uses complex and highly symbolic intercutting in this scene and throughout the film, less to arouse Griffithian suspense than to create a series of magically interlocking events carried by sinister correspondences and analogies. 1 Thus, although the cut to the spider web confirms Bulwer’s demonstration to his students of the pervasive cruelty of nature, its vampire-like system of feeding on other species, this spider web does not cling to some untidy corner of Bulwer’s lecture room. Rather, through editing’s ability to juxtapose different spaces, this web hangs in the asylum cell of the vampire’s minion, Knock, whom we have just seen devour insects, proclaiming, “Blood is life!” Just as Bulwer compares the carnivorous plant to the vampire, Murnau’s editing compares the madman and the scientist, each the center of a dark system of deadly metaphors and hysterical imitations. Murnau cuts back from the asylum cell to Bulwer and his students bent over a water tank, as the scientist isolates another vampire of the natural world. A “polyp with tentacles” appears not merely enlarged by a close-up but obviously filmed through microcinematography, a frequent technique of scientific films since the invention of cinema. 2 As the microscopic monster’s tentacles grasp another cellular creature

Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography

Acknowledgments vii Introduction / Karen Beckman and Jean Ma 1 One. Beyond Referentiality 1. Whats the Point of an Index? or, Faking Photographs / Tom Gunning 23 2. The Forgotten Image between Two Shots: Photos, Photograms, and the Essayistic / Timothy Corrigan 41 3. Structural Film: Noise / Juan A. Suarez 62 Two. Nation, Memory, History 4. An Essay on Calendar / Atom Egoyan 93 5. Photographys Absent Times / Jean Ma 98 6. The Idea of Still / Rececca Baron, interviewed by Janet Sarbanes 119 7. Crash Aesthetics: Amores Perros and the Dream of Cinematic Mobility / Karen Beckman 134 8. Surplus Memories: From the Slide Show to the Digital Bulletin Board to Jim Mendiolas Speeder Kills / Rita Gonzalez 158 Three. Working Between Media 9. Photographys Expanded Field / George Baker 175 10. Weekend Campus / Nancy Davenport 189 11. Aleph Beat: Wallace Berman between Photography and Film / Louis Kaplan 196 12. Mental Images: The Dramatization of Psychological Disturbance / Zoe Beloff 226 13. Concerning the Photographic / Raymond Bellour 253 References 277 Contributors 293 Index 297

Uncanny Reflections, Modern Illusions: Sighting the Modern Optical Uncanny

Is there a specifically modern uncanny? Freud’s famous essay relates the uncanny to the timeless processes of the unconscious, and even refers back to archaic modes of thought — animism, magical powers of consciousness, the return of the dead, the existence of doubles.2 But while I would never claim that the uncanny is exclusively a modern phenomenon, I would certainly claim there is a modern uncanny. Much of what we think of as uncanny entails the emergence of a modern world: the struggle that an enlightened scientific worldview undertook with what it understood as superstition and illusion. The uncanny can arise when certain beliefs, taken for granted in traditional cultures, become unsettling and strange (yet, as Freud indicates, also hauntingly familiar) to modern experience. Likewise radical new technologies on first appearance can seem somehow magical and uncanny, recalling the wish fulfillments that magical thought projected into fairy tales and rituals of magic.