List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Bodies and Boundaries 3
Ch. 1 Movement, Fragmentation, and the Uncanny 8
Unnatural Conjunctions: The Heterogeneous Text 10
"Its Strange Mixture of the Natural and the Artificial": The Presence of Kleist 15
"Bits of Bodies": The Fragmented Text 17
Man and the Cinema Machine: Magician, Psychoanalyst, Scientist: The Case of Dr. Caligari 21
Fritz Lang, the Apparatus, and the Fissured Text 31
Magician and Surgeon 42
"Knife Phobia" 44
"Doing It with Scissors": Dismemberment in Hitchcock 45
Ch. 2 Monstrous Births: The Hybrid Text 55
Miscegenation and the Sister Arts: Griffith's Broken Blossoms 57
Hitchcock's "Half-Caste" 67
Murnau 73
Cinematic Vampirism 73
Painting and Repression 79
Herzog's Unassimilable Bodies 88
Witchcraft, Vision, and Incest: Dreyer's Day of Wrath 94
The Phantom of the Cinema: Body and Voice 101
Ch. 3 Incorporation: Images and the Real 104
Trompe l'Oeil Effects 104
Cinema and the Real 114
Body Language: Kleist's and Rohmer's Marquise 119
Hitchcock as Pygmalion 130
Wings of Desire: Reality, Text, Embodiment 137
Kleist, Tableau Vivant, and the Pornographic 143
Fassbinder's Cinema of Mixed Modes: Tableau Vivant and the Real 147
Incorporation in Greenaway 156
Painful Images 166
Afterword: Ut pictura poesis 168
Notes 175
Index 215

Film, a latecomer to the realm of artistic media, alludes to, absorbs, and undermines the discourses of the other arts--literature and painting especially--in order to carve out a position for itself among them. Exposing the anxiety in film's relation to its rival arts, Brigitte Peucker analyzes central issues involved in generic boundary crossing as they pertain to film and situates them in a theoretical framework. The figure of the human body takes center stage in Peucker's innovative study, for it is through this figure that the conjunction of literary and painterly discourses persistently articulates itself. It is through the human body, too, that film's consciousness of itself as a hybrid text and as a "machine for simulation" makes itself deeply felt.
In films ranging from Weimar cinema through Griffith, Hitchcock, and Greenaway, Peucker probes issues in aesthetics problematized by Diderot and Kleist, among others. She argues that the introduction of movement into visual representation occasioned by film brings with it an underlying tension suggestive of castration and death. Peucker goes on to demonstrate how the encounter between narrative and image is both gendered and sexualized, rendering film a "monstrous" hybrid. In a final section, she explores in specific cinematic texts the permeable boundary between the real and representation, suggesting how effects such as tableau vivant and trompe l'oeil figure sexuality and death.
Originally published in 1995.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.