Atomic Light (Shadow Optics).ATOMIC LIGHT (SHADOW OPTICS) by Akira Mizuta Lippit. University of Minnesota (body, education) University of Minnesota - The home of Gopher. http://umn.edu/. Address: Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. Press/248 pp./$19.95 (sb). What is the common factor among x-ray machines, psychoanalysis, and atomic radiation? According to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. Akira Mizuta Lippit, a professor of cinema, comparative literature, and Japanese culture at the University of Southern California The U.S. News & World Report ranked USC 27th among all universities in the United States in its 2008 ranking of "America's Best Colleges", also designating it as one of the "most selective universities" for admitting 8,634 of the almost 34,000 who applied for freshman admission , these inventions have broken through the boundaries of interiority and exteriority ex·te·ri·or·i·ty n. Outwardness; externality. , visibility and invisibility, known and unknown. Humanity has continued striving to light up the unknown darkness since Prometheus gave us fire. With x-ray machines and psychoanalysis, we can see through the surfaces between interiority and exteriority, envisioning the invisible body and mind. However, peeking into Pandora's box Pandora’s box contained all evils; opened up, evils escape to afflict world. [Rom. Myth.: Brewer Dictionary, 799] See : Evil is perilous--what if we see too much? The invention of the atomic bomb atomic bomb or A-bomb, weapon deriving its explosive force from the release of atomic energy through the fission (splitting) of heavy nuclei (see nuclear energy). The first atomic bomb was produced at the Los Alamos, N.Mex. allowed humans to realize we have had the power to penetrate everything by unseen light and we could destroy the witnesses such as at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Lippit suggests that when the darkness is completely eliminated by light, like in Roger Corman's 1963 film X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes, what is left is nothing but a luminous void--a trip across obscurity and emptiness. However, cinema, which "has always been a vision machine," can extract the seer from boundaries and open a new universe at the same time. Interweaving the writings of Sigmund Freud, foundational work on x-rays, and postwar Japanese and French films, Lippit explores in depth the relation between atomic light and shadow optics, and leads us to a new field of visual studies. |
|
||||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion