The Cadaver’s Pulse: Cinema and the Modern Prometheus

Abstract

With the invention of the cut at the end of the nineteenth century, the cinema became a Frankensteinian monster. The cut allowed the cinema to take shots of dead things, of events past and people demised, and cut them together into new undead images, replicating the illusion of life. This chapter focuses on two aspects of revivification as it pertains to the image of Frankenstein on film: the transnational use of Frankenstein in cinema and the re-cutting of Frankenstein in avant-garde films. The chapter considers the ways in which metaphoric (across national identities) and actual (within the film text itself) cutting lead to the creation of new ‘cinematic life’ through transnational genre hybridity and the making of new films out of old, dead ones.