Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Whoever wrote the other review of Jalal Toufic's masterpiece included here must not be familiar with either Freud's essay an "The Uncanny" or the elegant tradition of association Toufic writes within. Should everyone write like Camille Paglia? There is room in the world for richer, denser, more lyrical writing; especially on the topic of the undead which lends itself readily to this kind of investigation. Read this book. It is a rare opportunity to access the thoughts of "the amnesiac" Jalal Toufic.(Then go see Vampyr.)
Click Here to see more reviews about: Vampires: An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film
While this expanded and revised edition of Jalal Toufic'ssecond book, (Vampires), is at one level an uneasy essay on the undeadin film (the subtitle of the book), it is actually much more thanthat. Drawing on various altered states of consciousness he underwent,films and novels on the undead, psychiatric case studies and mysticalreports, the author tackles many of the certainly dubious but alsodubiously certain characteristics of the undeath state, for example:over-turns that undo the dead's turn to answer an interpellation;doubles; frequent unworldly freezings still, ones that reveal theoccasional worldly immobilization of the living as merelymotion-less-ness, i.e. a variety of movement; the implicit indefinitefall of/in the cadaver; the turning of the metaphorical into theliteral; and an unreality that sometimes behaves in a filmic manner(e.g., the lapses in hypnosis, schizophrenia, and undeath permitediting in reality), inducing the undead to wonder: "Am I in afilm?" While the author's first book, Distracted, was written forthe living, (Vampires) was written about and for those who are"mortals to death" (the title of a special issue the authoredited for the journal Discourse). It thus belongs—somewhat edgilyas the author qualifies the validity of guidebooks for the dead—onthe same shelf as the Bardo Thödol and the Egyptian Book of the Dead.--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Click here for more information about Vampires: An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film
0 comments:
Post a Comment