Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image

by Laura Mulvey

Death 24x a Second is a fascinating exploration of the role new media technologies play in our experience of film. Addressing some of the key questions of film theory, spectatorship, and narrative, Laura Mulvey here argues that such technologies, including home DVD players, have fundamentally altered our relationship to the movies. 

According to Mulvey, new media technologies give viewers the ability to control both image and story, so that movies meant to be seen collectively and followed in a linear fashion may be manipulated to contain unexpected and even unintended pleasures. The individual frame, the projected film’s best-kept secret, can now be revealed by anyone who hits pause. Easy access to repetition, slow motion, and the freeze-frame, Mulvey argues, may shift the spectator’s pleasure to a fetishistic rather than a voyeuristic investment in film. 

By exploring how technology can give new life to old cinema, Death 24x a Second offers an original reevaluation of film’s history and its historical usefulness.

Genres: Film, Theory, Nonfiction

216 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2006

About the author

Laura Mulvey is an English feminist film theorist. She was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She worked at the British Film Institute for many years before taking up her current position.

Mulvey is best known for her essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen. It later appeared in a collection of her essays entitled Visual and Other Pleasures, as well as in numerous other anthologies. Her article, which was influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, is one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework. Prior to Mulvey, film theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz used psychoanalytic ideas in their theoretical accounts of the cinema. Mulvey's contribution, however, inaugurated the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis and feminism.

(via wiki)

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

OMG. She is the master

[Celeste Teng]

need to try more Mulvey! the introduction laid the groundwork for the rest of the book beautifully, made it an easier read than expected. she brings the Big Names into clear and economical conversation (Barthes, Bazin, Bellour, etc). some of the middle chapters are repetitive/circular but love the one on Kiarostami.

[isabella · Rating 4 out of 5]

i liked this a lot more than visual pleasure… she parses things in a much more straightforward fashion and certainly clarified a bit of bazin for me. she also just seems to have more enjoyment and interest in the ‘playful’ aspects of film. also an engagement with cinema beyond hollywood is always good. i feel my little vampire metaphor is BEGGING to be made heheh

[Matthew Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not crazy about the Freudian foundations (which can often lead to some hasty generalizations about spectatorship), but Mulvey makes some decent points in the end about the dualities of stillness and movement in cinema. Almost a manifesto.