ABSTRACT
This chapter explores two visual texts separated by one hundred years: DeMille's Joan the Woman and the contemporary television series Mr. Robot. These generically and medially distinct texts seem like strange bedfellows, but they share a particular investment in spectres and their corporealisation. Cinematic or televisual ghosts work on two levels – on the characters and on the viewers – and are simultaneously destabilising and compelling. The experience is at first affective in that it invokes shock and fear or disbelief, but it also has a cognitive dimension. A ghost is a provocation to rethink the limits of knowledge and truth. The chapter focuses on the power of cinematic technology to materialise ghosts – a fundamental ontological impossibility – as a mechanism for forcing those in the present to confront the past and its legacies on behalf of the future.
