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Performing Brains on Screen deals with film enactments and representations of the belief that human beings are essentially their brains, a belief that embodies one of the most influential modern ways of understanding the human. Films have performed brains in two chief ways: by turning physical brains into protagonists, as in the brain movies of the 1950s, which show terrestrial or extra-terrestrial disembodied brains carrying out their evil intentions; or by giving brains that remain unseen inside someone's head an explicitly major role, as in brain transplantation films or their successors since the 1980s, in which brain contents are transferred and manipulated by means of information technology. Through an analysis of filmic genres and particular movies,
Performing Brains on Screen documents this neglected filmic universe, and demonstrates how the cinema has functioned as a cultural space where a core notion of the contemporary world has been rehearsed and problematized.
List of contents
Acknowledgments, Note on References and Images, 1. Brainhood and the Cinema, The Deficit Model and the Agency of Film, Bs to Zs, Filmic Brains in the Neurobiological Age, 2. Brains in the Pulps, Resources, Scientifiction, Textual and Visual, Advertisement and Prophetic Insight, Before Gernsback, Weird Tales, Stories Astounding and Amazing, 3. Naked Brains and Living Heads, Brain Movies, Body Parts, The Donor Portion, Apes, Semigrafts, Living Heads, Some Filmic Allografts, Paradox of the Naked Brain, 4. Personal Survival, Immortality and the Brain, Adam and Tithonus, Staying the Same, Becoming Someone Else The Man Who Changed His Mind (1936) Change of Mind (1969) The Man With the Transplanted Brain (1971), 5. Frankenstein's Brains, Shelley's Novel and Frankenstein Films, The Final Touch: Frankenstein (1931), The Universal Series, The Hammer Series, Beyond Universal and Hammer, 6. Memories, Lost and Regained, A Preference for Retrograde Amnesia, Localizing Memory in the Filmic Brain, Personal Identity and the Authenticity of Memory, Erasing Memories, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Dark City (1998), 7. Imagine, They Are in the Human Mind, Bibliography, Films, Index
About the author
Fernando Vidal is Research Professor of ICREA (Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies) at the Medical Anthropology Research Center, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain.
