Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics (Recursions)

We've all had the experience of watching a film and feeling like we've been in a trance. This book takes that experience seriously, explaining cinema as a cultural technique of trance, one that unconsciously transforms our perceptions. Ute Holl moves from anthropological and experimental cinema through nineteenth-century psychological laboratories, which she shows developed techniques for testing, measuring, and classifying the mind that can be seen as a prehistory of cinema, one that allows us to see the links among cinema, anthropology, psychology, and cybernetics. Ute Holl explores cinema as a cultural technique of trance, unconsciously transforming everyday spatio-temporal perception. The archaeology of experimental and anthropological cinema leads into psycho-physiological laboratories of the 19th century. Through personal and systematic catenations, avant-garde filmmaking is closely linked to the emerging aesthetics of feedback in cybernetic models of the mind developed at the same time. Holl analyses three major fields of experimental and anthropological filmmaking: the Soviet avant-garde with Dziga Vertov and his background in Russian psycho-reflexology and theory of trance; Jean Rouch and his theory of cine-trance and the feed-back; and the New American Cinema with Maya Deren and Gregory Bateson conceptualising the organisation of time, space, movement and feedback trance in anthropological filmmaking. Cover 1 Table of Contents 6 Foreword 8 Preface to the English Translation of Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics 14 In the Beginning 20 Part I 22 1. Cinema 24 2. Cybernetics 34 3. Knots 40 4. To Whom it May Concern 48 Part II 56 1. Discretions 58 2. Depersonalizations 78 3. Deviations 118 4. Compressions 138 Part III 160 1. Mental Apparatuses 162 2. Psycho-Motor Activity 188 3. Psycho-Drama 198 4. Psycho-Technology 206 5. Psycho-Reflexology 220 Part IV 248 1. The Truth Won by Means of Film 250 Part V 280 1. After All: Return to Receiver 282 Notes 286 Bibliography 310 Index 322