Near the end of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, he describes the effect of seeing a scene from Fellini’s film Casanova, in which the protagonist dances with an automaton. Barthes is overwhelmed by the beautiful simulacrum of a young woman, discussing how the combination of “desperate” inertness and apparent affection touched him in the same way as the “punctum” in photography. Mulvey recalls this scene in her book Death 24x a Second, as she engages in a dialogue with Barthes, for whom cinema was normally free from the elegiac effects that he described in photography. The project of Mulvey’s book, as described in the subtitle, is to bring to the surface the repressed stillness of the moving image, and by doing so, return to cinema many of the attributes that Barthes rules out. Rather than a seamless illusion of movement and life, Mulvey explores how new technologies expose the presence of the still image in all film—whether this is the filmstrip of celluloid film or the freeze-frame on a DVD.

Although this is a book about film, Mulvey’s discussion of cinema’s psychic and social resonances through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century have relevance for the fields of art history and visual culture. At the heart of Mulvey’s argument is a revisitation of her classic essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (Screen 16, no. 3 [Autumn 1975]: 6–18), as she explores the potential of the digital to open up other viewing positions that she constructs as having a more active relationship to the images viewed. Framing her discussion with the “death” of traditional film and the rise of new digital media, she takes the reader on a journey through the history of cinema, arguing that cinema is now a haunted medium, with its celluloid history shadowing its digital presence. By exploring this technological shift, Mulvey stages a wider discussion of the relationship of modernity to the construction of gendered subject positions, focusing on the female automaton and the mechanised film star as simulacra of an ideal femininity and as analogous to the structure of cinema itself. Mulvey also returns to the concepts of the uncanny and the index, which have become clichés over recent decades in film studies, photography, and art histories. She reinvigorates the potential of these terms as a result of her close, historically situated readings.

In the introduction, Mulvey explores the technological changes that have taken place over the course of her own career from the early 1970s to the early 2000s, stating, “When I first started writing about cinema, in the early 1970s, films had always been seen in darkened rooms, projected at 24 (or thereabouts) frames a second” (7). The shift from this darkened space, with control given over to the projector, to self-directed viewing on DVD or video, frames Mulvey’s thinking on the concept of stillness in relation to cinema. Delay, or stillness, she argues, has always been present in the filmstrip, laying dormant until new technologies have allowed it to come to the surface. Rather than the materiality and construction of the film being exposed only in avant-garde experimentation (Mulvey discusses Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera), now such devices as slow motion and freeze-frame, as well as editing and splicing, are available to the viewer of conventional, Hollywood cinema through a DVD menu. The revelation of cinema’s stillness brings up its relationship to the photographic index, along with its complicated relationship to time. This shift between the “then” of filming and the “now” of watching is complicated by the experience of the filmic action as happening in the present, a reanimation of something past that Barthes describes in relation to the photograph as a “temporal hallucination” or the sense of “that-has-been.”

In chapter 1, “Passing Time,” Mulvey explores the relationship between early cinema as “natural magic” and the illusions made possible with digital technology. Mulvey coins the phrase “technological uncanny” to describe the effect on the viewer of a new technology not fully understood, so that at the beginning of the digital age, with “the perfect imitation of the indexical image by digital technology” (31), the viewer is returned to a similar state of wonder as early viewers of cinema. Building on this discussion, in the second chapter Mulvey more broadly discusses the concept of the uncanny as presented by Freud’s 1919 essay and an earlier text by Wilhelm Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (1906), to which Freud’s more famous work is in part a reply. Her close reading of the two essays turns on Freud’s linking of the uncanny to the familiar. She explores his dismissal of Jentsch’s assertion that an uncanny effect can be found in the new as being part of Freud’s hostility to cinema, fashion, and modernity. Mulvey finds a link between the two arguments in the centrality of uncertainty, and explores how cinema evokes old superstitions and irrational beliefs in ghosts and the return of the dead. The combination of the familiar and unfamiliar found in the automaton Olympia in “The Sandman” by ETA Hoffmann is compared with the emblematic woman of modernity—the flapper—who Mulvey argues is equally mechanised: “her high heels and ‘posed’ stance evoked a mechanical movement that took femininity away from nature into culture” (50).

What Mulvey calls the human fascination with “the mechanical animation of the inanimate” (11) is at the core of Death 24x a Second, with the figures of the female automaton and mechanised film star recurring as a motif to explain this boundary shifting. Just as the filmstrip is passed before the lens to give the illusion of a moving image on the screen, the automaton evokes the presence of a human life, while only imitating it. In this chapter Mulvey proposes that the beautiful automaton represents a femininity that is “eviscerated,” that denies the maternal body; and she equates cinema with this modern, “robotic” conception of femininity, which was resisted and disavowed by Freud’s focus on the familiar in “The Uncanny.” In the early twentieth-first century, however, Mulvey argues that cinema has aged and “seems closer to Freud’s uncanny of the old and familiar, and thus, metaphorically, to the archaic body of the mother” (52).

Mulvey explores the different picturings of the uncanny in a number of case studies, looking at Hitchcock’s Psycho, Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy, and Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker trilogy. The importance of the death drive is elaborated in these chapters, considering the tension between stillness and movement as worked out in various narrative devices whose resolution is death, with “The End” meaning the end of both the film and the characters’ lives. Mulvey shows how these films privilege repetition and circularity, allowing the film’s construction to come to the surface, thereby interrupting the smooth movement and illusion of the cinematic narrative. This analysis of internal filmic disruption is followed by chapters that consider the potential for the spectator to intervene and delay the movement and coherence of the cinematic flow. These include the final two chapters, “The Possessive Spectator” and “The Pensive Spectator,” which map a couple of key spectator positions that respond to her own discussion of voyeurism in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” “The Possessive Spectator” poses a fetishistic relationship with the screen image, with the potential to freeze and repeat scenes from a film when viewed digitally, which allows for an engagement with film stars that disrupts the narrative as well as identification with the protagonist. Here the spectator as fan is allowed a possessive relationship with her or his idol beyond the collection of secondary material such as photographs and film stills, taking moments or gestures out of the narrative flow for contemplation that is not dictated by the director. This delaying of cinema is used by Mulvey to expose the stillness of the film star—the combination of stylized poses and movements that allow the viewer to consume the object of her or his fascination. The ability to pause reveals the centrality of stillness to the narrative structure: “in the process of stilling a favourite figure, transforming it into a pin-up and then reanimating it back into movement, the spectator may well find . . . that the rhythm is already inscribed into the style of the film itself” (167).

As part of her discussion of the fetishistic spectator, Mulvey considers the delays caused by textual analysis, which are emphasized by new technologies that allow the spectator control over narrative flow. Mulvey presents the fan and the critic as structurally similar viewing positions in the construction of what she identifies as the “pensive spectator.” In her final chapter Mulvey uses Raymond Bellour’s 1987 essay “The Pensive Spectator” (Wide Angle 9, no. 1 (1987): 6–7)—which considers the impact of pauses and stops in cinema sequences—as a model that pre-empts the possibilities of delay presented by the digital. Discussing Bellour, Mulvey explains how “a moment of stillness within the moving image and its narrative creates a ‘pensive spectator’ who can reflect ‘on the cinema’” (186). This reflection allows for a relationship with the cinematic image similar to the shifting tense of the photograph, “a space for consciousness of the still frame within the moving image” (186). In this concluding reflection on stillness and technology in relation to the history of cinema, Mulvey once again evokes its ghosts, conceptualizing cinema as a parallel world of its own. She compares the modernist conception of cinema as “a revolutionary, mechanical eye that transformed human vision” with the model of delayed cinema that allows cinema itself to be examined: “The new technologies work on the body of film as mechanisms of delay, delaying the forward movement of the medium itself, fragmenting the forward movement of narrative and taking the spectator into the past” (181). It is through this past that Mulvey sees the future of cinema, with its celluloid history not simply displaced by digital technology, but instead providing a way of looking anew at the pauses, delays, and repetitions that for so long have been relentlessly spooled forward by the projector.