“Living Pictures at Will”: Projecting Haunted Minds

  • Murray Leeder
Chapter
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Abstract

This chapter explores a triangular relationship between internal mental spaces, the supernatural and the trope of projection. It examines several nineteenth-century texts that display this connection: Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1859 novella “The Haunted and the Haunters,” spiritualist/journalist W.T. Stead’s 1896 writings about “The Kinetiscope of the Mind” and David Starr Jordan’s 1896 sympsychography hoax. From these examples, it goes into a discussion of the use of supernatural-coded aesthetics to represent internal states in early cinema, eventually moving ahead to the reflexive hypnotism scene in Stir of Echoes (1999).

Keywords

Movie Theatre Mental Space Film Theory Hypnagogic Hallucination Early Cinema 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© The Author(s) 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  • Murray Leeder
    • 1
  1. 1.CalgaryCanada

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