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Overview
Dreams, x-rays, atomic radiation, and “invisible men” are phenomena that are visual in nature but unseen. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) reveals these hidden interiors of cultural life, the “avisual” as it has emerged in the writings of Jorge Luis Borges and Jacques Derrida, Tanizaki Jun’ichirô and Sigmund Freud, and H. G. Wells and Ralph Ellison, and in the early cinema and the postwar Japanese films of Kobayashi Masaki, Teshigahara Hiroshi, Kore-eda Hirokazu, and Kurosawa Kiyoshi, all under the shadow cast by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Akira Mizuta Lippit focuses on historical moments in which such modes of avisuality came into being—the arrival of cinema, which brought imagination to life; psychoanalysis, which exposed the psyche; the discovery of x-rays, which disclosed the inside of the body; and the “catastrophic light” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which instituted an era of atomic discourses.
With a taut, poetic style, Lippit produces speculative readings of secret and shadow archives and visual structures or phenomenologies of the inside, charting the materiality of what both can and cannot be seen in the radioactive light of the twentieth century.
Akira Mizuta Lippit is professor of cinema, comparative literature, and Japanese culture at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minnesota, 2000).
Akira Mizuta Lippit focuses on historical moments in which such modes of avisuality came into being—the arrival of cinema, which brought imagination to life; psychoanalysis, which exposed the psyche; the discovery of x-rays, which disclosed the inside of the body; and the “catastrophic light” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which instituted an era of atomic discourses.
With a taut, poetic style, Lippit produces speculative readings of secret and shadow archives and visual structures or phenomenologies of the inside, charting the materiality of what both can and cannot be seen in the radioactive light of the twentieth century.
Akira Mizuta Lippit is professor of cinema, comparative literature, and Japanese culture at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minnesota, 2000).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780816646111 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Minnesota Press |
| Publication date: | 12/25/2005 |
| Edition description: | First edition |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.88(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d) |
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | ix | |
| 0 | Universes | 1 |
| "Hoichi the Earless" | ||
| Blindness and invisibility | ||
| Exscription | ||
| Atomic destruction and phantom visuality | ||
| Catastrophic light, Japanese visual culture | ||
| Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel" (1941) | ||
| The universal Library and secret archive | ||
| Traces of the uninscribed and uninscribable | ||
| "The true story of your death" | ||
| Atomism | ||
| The shadow archive | ||
| Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever (1995) | ||
| Heterogeneity and psychoanalysis | ||
| A universe of the unarchivable | ||
| 1 | The Shadow Archive (A Secret Light) | 13 |
| "The secret is the very ash of the archive" | ||
| Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (1934-39) | ||
| "Into the light" | ||
| "The shadow of the god" | ||
| Secrecy and pseudonymy | ||
| Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, In Praise of Shadows (1933-34) | ||
| Illumination and the archive | ||
| "The glow of grime" | ||
| Radiation descends from above and assails the body like a fever | ||
| Cinders and atomic writing | ||
| Pellicular surfaces | ||
| X-rays and cinema, profound superficiality | ||
| Secret visuality | ||
| Avisuality | ||
| Cinefaction | ||
| 2 | Modes of Avisuality: Psychoanalysis-X-ray-Cinema | 35 |
| "The dream of Irma's injection" | ||
| The secret of dreams and the secret dream | ||
| Formlessness and interiority | ||
| "The very invisibility of the invisible within the visible" | ||
| Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen | ||
| Berthe's hand, X-rays | ||
| Inside out | ||
| Skiagraphy | ||
| Penetrating light and the Visible Human Project | ||
| Destructive visuality | ||
| Anniversaries, apocalypse | ||
| X sign | ||
| The dream of cinema | ||
| An exemplary design | ||
| 3 | Cinema Surface Design | 61 |
| "The psychology of movement" | ||
| Early cinema, making visible the invisible | ||
| Auguste and Louis Lumiere, the surface of the screen | ||
| Imaginary depth | ||
| "Unseen energy swallowing space" | ||
| Screens and displaced collisions | ||
| "Phantom rides" | ||
| Invisible thresholds between life and death | ||
| "The metaphysical surface" (Gilles Deleuze) | ||
| James Williamson, The Big Swallow (circa 1901) | ||
| Total visibility | ||
| The outer surface of consciousness | ||
| The phantasm | ||
| 4 | An Atomic Trace | 81 |
| "Eyes melted out of sheer ecstasy" | ||
| Colorlessness | ||
| The wrathful light of atoms | ||
| Invisible men | ||
| Optical density and diffusion | ||
| Allegories of atomic radiation | ||
| Invisibility and transparency | ||
| H. G. Wells (1897) and James Whale (1933), The Invisible Man | ||
| "A black cavity" | ||
| Racelessness | ||
| Unimaginable destruction, catastrophic light | ||
| Photographic sculptures | ||
| Face and surface, facelessness | ||
| Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952) | ||
| IM, "hypervisibility" | ||
| "Outside history" | ||
| Atomic and anatomic | ||
| Phonic atomism | ||
| The spaceless image | ||
| 5 | Exscription/Antigraphy | 105 |
| Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "a blending of some sort" | ||
| Painting and the universal image | ||
| Tanizaki's Japanese skin, which radiates darkness | ||
| "A bright shadow" | ||
| A dark writing | ||
| Atomic, atopic | ||
| Ibuse Masuji, Black Rain (1965) | ||
| Liquid atomic ash | ||
| Interiorized world | ||
| Emulsion, "an immiscible mixture" | ||
| Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour (1959), cinders and rain | ||
| An atomic trope, writing on skin | ||
| Mizoguchi Kenji, Ugetsu (1953), the searing surface | ||
| Impressions | ||
| "Eyes destined to weep" | ||
| Kobayashi Masaki, Kwaidan (1964), the invisible body | ||
| Disturbance of the senses | ||
| Demontage | ||
| Catastrophic synthesis | ||
| Antigraphy | ||
| Teshigahara Hiroshi, Woman in the Dunes (1964) | ||
| Identity papers | ||
| A liquid desert | ||
| 8:15 a.m. | ||
| Water from sand | ||
| A smooth archive | ||
| 6 | Phantom Cures: Obscurity and Emptiness | 133 |
| Psychic visuality and displaced interority | ||
| Kore-eda Hirokazu, Maborosi (1995) | ||
| "A beautiful light" | ||
| Memory and dream, the acousmatic voice | ||
| Passages and lines | ||
| A shadow optics | ||
| Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Cure (1997) | ||
| "X" | ||
| "I myself am empty" | ||
| Memories returned from the outside | ||
| Roger Corman, X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) | ||
| Atomic vision | ||
| Photographing emptiness | ||
| Mesmerism | ||
| Interiority constituted by the lack of interiority | ||
| Circumcision, secret cuts | ||
| The cure/to cure | ||
| Dark worlds | ||
| "Sightless vision," a vision machine at the end of cinema | ||
| Universe | ||
| Notes | 159 | |
| Index | 195 |
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