AUTOPSIES: THE AFTERLIFE OF DEAD OBJECTS

This is where we post film stills from cinematic and televisual works that invest dead objects. We are not just looking for representations of things that once were associated with modernity, but rather for the ways that the cinema problematizes those objects and reinvests them with new meanings. In reflecting on how the moving image has used things, we hope to ask questions about cinematic memory, consumer culture, and everyday life.


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In this postwar Austrian-U.S. coproduction, directed by Emile Reinert, a key scene occurs in the Kaiserpanorama of Vienna. The mise en abyme of proto-cinematic technology in the film noir draws our attention to the fact that we are watching a film in the same way the characters are--and to the way optical devices as well as film make possible fantasmatic excursions in space and through the monuments of cities.

This film is available through the Film Archiv Austria in a restored print on DVD.