Review
"Death 24x a Second whispers rather than shouts, gently leading readers through a series of reflections on stasis, life, and death. In reference to stillness and the photograph, Mulvey elegantly aligns the divergent discussions of Andre Bazin and Roland Barthes, offering a productive assessment of each writer's attempt to grapple with the paradox of a time that was, in the past, a 'now.' . . . Mulvey. . . continues to provoke new ways of seeing--or reseeing--the cinema we think we know."--Film Comment
(Holly Willis Film Comment 20060501)"Rethinks the fundamentals of film history through modern audiovisual technology."--Independent on Sunday
"Death 24X a Second takes up both the challenge to critical thinking represented by new technological developments, and the impulse towards reflection on film's past that they have occasioned . . . a thoughtful book."--Tony Wood, New Left Review
"Elegiac . . . a wonderful close analysis. Despite the melancholy in cinema's enounters with a fleeting past, the prospects opened up by filmic slowness are, for Mulvey, productive of optimism."—Times Higher Education Supplement
(Dana Polan Times Higher Education Supplement 20070105)"Refreshingly argued. . . . Mulvey's argument assers a new viewer-film relationship . . . This allows a newly-multi-dimensional understanding of 'the internal world of cinema.' Taken as a whole, the book effectively, if idealistically, essays this newly empowered gaze as a revolution in our knowledge of the increasingly important image world she says is equivalent to 19th-century photography transforming 'the human eye's perception of the world.'"--onscreen
About the Author
Laura Mulvey is professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, and the author of a number of books, including Visual and Other Pleasures and Fetishism and Curiosity.
