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

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A device that records and projects, making visible what escapes natural perception. Its images are suspended between presence and absence, past and present. Around it, different subjects gather and connect, sitting in the same dark space and enchanted by a common phantasmagorical entertainment. This description refers not only to the mechanism of cinema but is equally fitting if we think of another apparatus of communication with another space (or rather a beyond): precisely the spirit medium, human body that becomes the center of machinic processes such as recording, visualization, and communication with the universe of ghosts. (Spirit) mediums and (technical) media indeed seem to have invented each other, such are the many similarities that characterize their functioning, starting from their very linguistic homology. Is it therefore possible to reconstruct a cross-history of otherworldly spirits and media images, starting from the identification of a cultural and social context favorable to the origin of both spiritism and cinema? How does this mutual constitution impact how cinema has dealt with the problem of the ghosts, together with the bodies and technologies which capture their presence?

These are questions that animate Mireille Berton's volume *Le médium (au) cinéma*. Before

getting to the heart of the matter, it is necessary to emphasize the specific originality offered by Berton's approach to both film history and media archaeology, which can already be found in her previous essay *Le corps nerveux des spectateurs* (2015). It is in fact a personal and innovative declination of the epistemological approach to the history of viewing and listening devices developed in Lausanne's school, which not only draws on the research of François Albera and Maria Tortajada, but also on the work of scholars outside film theory such as Rae Beth Gordon, Jacqueline Carroy, Alessandra Violi. In this respect, psychological and parapsychological discursive formations, real and imaginary technologies, art films and b-movies are summoned without any hierarchical distinction as historically determined symptoms of a relationship capable of connecting the emergence of phenomena which only apparently possess distinct histories (above all, audiovisual devices and hallucinated subjects). The tool for accessing this submerged history is always film analysis (analogous to the analysis of dreams and Freudian slips for the psychoanalyst), which allows not only to individuate the intersecting history of mediums and media, spiritism and cinema, but also to unmask the ideological neuroses, especially patriarchal ones, reflected
in insidious strategies of construction and
domination of female identity.

Starting from this operation, Berton departs
from the method, albeit foundational, of Friedrich
Kittler who first discussed the double meaning
of the term medium, but with the assumption
of a precedence of technological materialism
over other determinations. Rather, *Le médium
au cinéma* moves closer to those ghost-focused
media archaeologies (especially Jeffrey Sconce,
Stefan Andriopoulos, and Tom Gunning, who also
signs an exquisite preface to the volume) which
have placed specific attention on the horizontal
co-determination between technologies, on
the one hand, and discursive formations and
imaginaries, on the other hand (what Berton calls
the reciprocal interaction between hardware and
software).

If the first chapter is devoted to the theoretical
status quaestionis, with a particular focus on
the *spectrality studies* developed since Jacques
Derrida and his influential *Specters of Marx*
(1993), already from the second chapter the
focal shift operated by Berton begins to become
evident. In fact, the focus of the investigation
is not so much on the ghost as on the spirit
medium, whose identity depends – always in a
reciprocal and reversible relationship – on that
of the technological media developed In the same
period (the "spiritual telegraph" is a current
metaphor in nineteenth and early twentieth-
century parapsychological literature). Indeed,
media technologies entertain an ambiguous and
articulated relationship with spirits: sometimes
they hinder their manifestation, in rare cases they
should record and prove their effects, but almost
always they serve as an epistemological model
to which psychics conform and in which they find
legitimacy. If the spirit medium then appears as a
battery traversed by a huge and complex system
of energies, it is especially the female body, by
virtue of the hysterical, nervous, passive, and
delicate character culturally attributed to it by a
patriarchal society, which constitutes the most
convenient tool for otherworldly communication.

The condition of spirit medium then becomes
one of those spaces of marginalization in which
women find, paradoxically, that voice and agency
denied by the prevailing social rules (an element
that returns in Berton's analysis of the 1944
movie *The Uninvited*, directed by Lewis Allen).
And it is thanks to this exchange (between bodies
and technologies) that it also becomes possible
to reinvent the archaeology of cinema, as
Berton does in the second chapter, in which she
considers not only Robertson's phantasmagoria
or Marey's application of graphic methods to the
body of the Italian psychic Eusapia Palladino,
but also Mesmer's *baquet* and ectoplasms and
ideoplasms as pre-cinematic devices.

Already in this first part of the book, the
methodological centrality that Berton gives
to the analysis of film as a privileged heuristic
tool for archaeological investigation emerges,
and imposes itself in the following chapters
as the main register of the investigation. In
the selection of the film corpus, a particular
predilection for Hollywood genre cinema (whose
reinterpretation is never lacking a playful irony)
does not escape. Precisely because of its popular
destination, these movies turn out to be the
most suitable to account for the way an entire
episteme is reflected in mass culture. Exemplary
is Berton's analysis of *The Devil Commands*
(Edward Dmytryk, 1941), with Boris Karloff
playing the typical role of the mad scientist who
tries to record the otherworldly presence of
his deceased wife. Here the analysis brings out
not only the cultural influence of the radio, but
also of a forgotten and failed device such as the
necrophone envisioned by Edison in the 1920s,
which was supposed to pick up the presence
of dispersed units of life in the ether. Equally
significant is Berton's reading of one of William
Castle's gimmick movies, *13 Ghosts* (1960),
whose sensationalist entertainment enables a
deeper understanding of the *machine à fantômes*
identity shared by spirit *séances* and movie
theaters. In fact, the experience played on the
correspondence between a spirit-viewing device
within the diegesis, a pair of glasses invented by Doctor Plato Zorba, and an extra-diegetic device, the Illusion-O red and blue cellophane viewing system that allowed spectators, by focusing on one color or the other, to reveal or make ghosts disappear on screen. As Berton notes, the two tools of visualization (intra- and extra-diegetic) correspond to two tendencies of modern spiritism: the former related to the scientific recording of the invisible, the latter to the creation of a new connection between participants gathered around a spectacular entertainment. May it also be possible to reread the twofold historical vocation of cinema starting from them?

Certainly, the intersecting history of cinematic images and supernatural spirits outlined by Berton allows us to grasp some important ruptures in the history of cinema and media. Above all, the gradual disappearance of the

figure of the spirit medium, replaced precisely by surveillance technologies, as becomes evident in the sixth and final chapter in which Berton analyzes contemporary film imagery (among other titles, the *Paranormal Activity* and *Insidious sagas*) following the *topos* of the haunted house and its transformations. This prevarication of technology over the body is echoed in the spectrality of today's virtual mediality, expressing itself in the invisible action of algorithmic forces, in the restless eternity of digital identities trapped in social networks, or, as Berton ironically points out, in online work sessions that by demanding constant "presence" cannot fail to remind of postmodern spirit *séances*. The persistence of these specters in the contemporary socio-digital horizon only confirms the urgency of a cine-psychoanalysis such as Mireille Berton's, capable of resurfacing the historical repressed that inhabits the unconscious of media devices through a tight dialogue with the imagery they produce.

Giancarlo Grossi
[University of Milan]