Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema

by Stefan Andriopoulos, Peter Jansen (Translator)

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. Juxtaposing these medicolegal and cinematic scenarios with modernist fiction, Andriopoulos also develops an innovative reading of Kafka’s novels, which center on the merging of human and corporate bodies.
            Blending 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.
 

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 2 out of 5]

This feels like one of those books written by a professor who would teach an elective course in which his book was the main text, thus allowing him to make some easy sales and also allowing him to talk about his favorite scholar and intellectual: himself. In fact, he cites himself so often, and in the third person, that he puts your average wrestling heel to shame. Herr Andriopoulos would call this "Autopoiesis," which is one of his favorite words. Another one of his favorite words is "nosography," which a sane person parsing for cognates might think has something to do with studying noses. Andriopoulos uses these two words with a relish and frequency that reminds me of the way Yule Brenner took to, "Et cetera, Et cetera, Et cetera," in the "King and I," after Deborah Kerr's character teaches him the expression. The author doesn't so much say these words as constantly invoke them like a magical incantation or a refrain in some secret mantra.

"Possessed" deals with the fascinating subject of films and fiction that depict possession and hypnotism, with an especial focus on the brilliant movies that came out of Babelsberg, Berlin, before talkies came on the scene, back when film grammar was both hidebound and expanded by being almost totally about images (to paraphrase what Stanley Kubrick said when someone mentioned that "Barry Lyndon" reminded them of a silent film, silent movies got a lot right that the talkies didn't).

This is an intrinsically fascinating subject, and it takes some work and a kind of anti-genius to make it as bloodless as Yabadabadopolis does, so he deserves some kind of perverse credit for managing to make someone like Judith Butler (or even Bruno Latour) seem like a not-obscurantist grifter, and if the book is in fact some kind of troll, then I rescind all prior criticism and bow before this guy's genius. If this is a troll, he's right up there with Alan Sokal.

Two out of Five Nosographical Autopoiesises, at any rate, since there is at least a decent bibliography worth raiding in the back of the book.

[Erick Felinto · Rating 5 out of 5]

German expressionism is about the hypnotic power of images. In this book, Andriopoulos deciphers the metaphor of hypnosis as a statement about the (sometimes dangerous) powers of cinema as an art of vision. According to this cultural perspective, cinema is a technology so powerful that transforms spectators into passive automata and has profound psychological consequences. Fascinating book.