ABSTRACT

Film theorists have long discussed the revolutionary potential of the cinema. In the early Soviet Union, as Susan Buck-Morss suggests in her essay, the cinema was seen as the most important political-ideological tool of Lenin’s revolution. In France, surrealists, especially the early Artaud, also saw the cinema as revolutionary, but on a philosophical rather than a political plain. The contribution of Jonas Frykman on the social construction of the Swedish body in the 1930’s underscores Buck-Morss’s point about the universal appeal of mass images. In her contribution to The Senses Still, Susan Buck-Morss suggests that when confronted by the cinema, the nervous system is modified in a seemingly paradoxical way: “On the one hand there is an extreme heightening of the senses, a hypersensitivity of nervous stimulation. On the other, there is a dulling of sensation, a numbing of the nervous system that is tantamount to corporeal anaesthetization.”