10.54103/2036-461X/20558
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Mireille Berton, Le médium (au) cinéma. Le spiritisme à l’écran, Georg: Genève 2021, pp. 360
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2023-09-22
2023-07-10
2023-09-22
2023-09-22
171-173
Cinéma & Cie
Giancarlo Grossi
2023/09/22
10.54103/2036-461X/20558
171
University of Milan
2036-461X
40
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Mireille Berton, Le médium (au) cinéma. Le spiritisme à l’écran, Georg: Genève 2021, pp. 360
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/20558/18790
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                                                                                       Mireille Berton
                                                                                       Le médium (au) cinéma.
                                                                                       Le spiritisme à l’écran
                                                                                       Genève: Georg, 2021, pp. 360
                                                                                       DOI https://doi.org/10.54103/2036-461X/20558




                                                                                         A device that records and projects, making           getting to the heart of the matter, it is necessary
                                                                                       visible what escapes natural perception. Its           to emphasize the specific originality offered
                                                                                       images are suspended between presence                  by Berton’s approach to both film history and
                                                                                       and absence, past and present. Around it,              media archaeology, which can already be found
                                                                                       different subjects gather and connect, sitting         in her previous essay Le corps nerveux des
                                                                                       in the same dark space and enchanted by a              spectateurs (2015). It is in fact a personal and
                                                                                       common phantasmagorical entertainment. This            innovative declination of the epistemological
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                                                                                       description refers not only to the mechanism of        approach to the history of viewing and listening
                                                                                       cinema but is equally fitting if we think of another   devices developed in Lausanne’s school,
                                                                                       apparatus of communication with another space          which not only draws on the research of
                                                                                       (or rather a beyond): precisely the spirit medium,     François Albera and Maria Tortajada, but also
                                                                                       human body that becomes the center of machinic         on the work of scholars outside film theory
                                                                                       processes such as recording, visualization, and        such as Rae Beth Gordon, Jacqueline Carroy,
                                                                                       communication with the universe of ghosts.             Alessandra Violi. In this respect, psychological
                                                                                       (Spirit) mediums and (technical) media indeed          and parapsychological discursive formations,
                                                                                       seem to have invented each other, such are             real and imaginary technologies, art films and
                                                                                       the many similarities that characterize their          b-movies are summoned without any hierarchical
                                                                                       functioning, starting from their very linguistic       distinction as historically determined symptoms
                                                                                       homology. Is it therefore possible to reconstruct      of a relationship capable of connecting the
                                                                                       a cross-history of otherworldly spirits and            emergence of phenomena which only apparently
                                                                                       media images, starting from the identification         possess distinct histories (above all, audiovisual
                                                                                       of a cultural and social context favorable to the      devices and hallucinated subjects). The tool for
                                                                                       origin of both spiritism and cinema? How does          accessing this submerged history is always film
                                                                                       this mutual constitution impact how cinema has         analysis (analogous to the analysis of dreams
                                                                                       dealt with the problem of the ghosts, together         and Freudian slips for the psychoanalyst), which
                                                                                       with the bodies and technologies which capture         allows not only to individuate the intersecting
                                                                                       their presence?                                        history of mediums and media, spiritism and
                                                                                         These are questions that animate Mireille            cinema, but also to unmask the ideological
                                                                                       Berton’s volume Le médium (au) cinéma. Before          neuroses, especially patriarchal ones, reflected


                                                                                       Cinéma & Cie vol. 23 no. 40 2023 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                 171
in insidious strategies of construction and            The condition of spirit medium then becomes
domination of female identity.                         one of those spaces of marginalization in which
  Starting from this operation, Berton departs         women find, paradoxically, that voice and agency
from the method, albeit foundational, of Friedrich     denied by the prevailing social rules (an element
Kittler who first discussed the double meaning         that returns in Berton’s analysis of the1944
of the term medium, but with the assumption            movie The Uninvited, directed by Lewis Allen).
of a precedence of technological materialism           And it is thanks to this exchange (between bodies
over other determinations. Rather, Le médium           and technologies) that it also becomes possible
au cinéma moves closer to those ghost-focused          to reinvent the archaeology of cinema, as
media archaeologies (especially Jeffrey Sconce,        Berton does in the second chapter, in which she
Stefan Andriopoulos, and Tom Gunning, who also         considers not only Robertson’s phantasmagoria
signs an exquisite preface to the volume) which        or Marey’s application of graphic methods to the
have placed specific attention on the horizontal       body of the Italian psychic Eusapia Palladino,
co-determination between technologies, on              but also Mesmer’s baquet and ectoplasms and
the one hand, and discursive formations and            ideoplasms as pre-cinematic devices.
imaginaries, on the other hand (what Berton calls        Already in this first part of the book, the
the reciprocal interaction between hardware and        methodological centrality that Berton gives
software).                                             to the analysis of film as a privileged heuristic
  If the first chapter is devoted to the theoretical   tool for archaeological investigation emerges,
status quaestionis, with a particular focus on         and imposes itself in the following chapters
the spectrality studies developed since Jacques        as the main register of the investigation. In
Derrida and his influential Specters of Marx           the selection of the film corpus, a particular
(1993), already from the second chapter the            predilection for Hollywood genre cinema (whose
focal shift operated by Berton begins to become        reinterpretation is never lacking a playful irony)
evident. In fact, the focus of the investigation       does not escape. Precisely because of its popular
is not so much on the ghost as on the spirit           destination, these movies turn out to be the
medium, whose identity depends – always in a           most suitable to account for the way an entire
reciprocal and reversible relationship – on that       episteme is reflected in mass culture. Exemplary
of the technological media developed In the same       is Berton’s analysis of The Devil Commands
period (the “spiritual telegraph” is a current         (Edward Dmytryk, 1941), with Boris Karloff
metaphor in nineteenth and early twentieth-            playing the typical role of the mad scientist who
century parapsychological literature). Indeed,         tries to record the otherworldly presence of
media technologies entertain an ambiguous and          his deceased wife. Here the analysis brings out
articulated relationship with spirits: sometimes       not only the cultural influence of the radio, but
they hinder their manifestation, in rare cases they    also of a forgotten and failed device such as the
should record and prove their effects, but almost      necrophone envisioned by Edison in the 1920s,
always they serve as an epistemological model          which was supposed to pick up the presence
to which psychics conform and in which they find       of dispersed units of life in the ether. Equally
legitimacy. If the spirit medium then appears as a     significant is Berton’s reading of one of William
battery traversed by a huge and complex system         Castle’s gimmick movies, 13 Ghosts (1960),
of energies, it is especially the female body, by      whose sensationalist entertainment enables a
virtue of the hysterical, nervous, passive, and        deeper understanding of the machine à fantômes
delicate character culturally attributed to it by a    identity shared by spirit séances and movie
patriarchal society, which constitutes the most        theaters. In fact, the experience played on the
convenient tool for otherworldly communication.        correspondence between a spirit-viewing device



172                                                                               Le médium (au) cinéma
within the diegesis, a pair of glasses invented      figure of the spirit medium, replaced precisely by
by Doctor Plato Zorba, and an extra-diegetic         surveillance technologies, as becomes evident
device, the Illusion-O red and blue cellophane       in the sixth and final chapter in which Berton
viewing system that allowed spectators, by           analyzes contemporary film imagery (among
focusing on one color or the other, to reveal or     other titles, the Paranormal Activity and Insidious
make ghosts disappear on screen. As Berton           sagas) following the topos of the haunted house
notes, the two tools of visualization (intra- and    and its transformations. This prevarication
extra-diegetic) correspond to two tendencies         of technology over the body is echoed in the
                                                     spectrality of today’s virtual mediality, expressing
of modern spiritism: the former related to the
                                                     itself in the invisible action of algorithmic forces,
scientific recording of the invisible, the latter
                                                     in the restless eternity of digital identities trapped
to the creation of a new connection between
                                                     in social networks, or, as Berton ironically points
participants gathered around a spectacular
                                                     out, in online work sessions that by demanding
entertainment. May it also be possible to reread
                                                     constant “presence” cannot fail to remind of
the twofold historical vocation of cinema starting
                                                     postmodern spirit séances. The persistence
from them?                                           of these specters in the contemporary socio-
 Certainly, the intersecting history of cinematic    digital horizon only confirms the urgency of a
images and supernatural spirits outlined by          cine-psychoanalysis such as Mireille Berton’s,
Berton allows us to grasp some important             capable of resurfacing the historical repressed
ruptures in the history of cinema and media.         that inhabits the unconscious of media devices
Above all, the gradual disappearance of the          through a tight dialogue with the imagery they
                                                     produce.
                                                                                      Giancarlo Grossi
                                                                                  [University of Milan]




Cinéma & Cie vol. 23 no. 40 2023 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                 173
