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The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c. 1900, by Lynda Nead; pp. vi + 291. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007, $40.00, £25.00.
It is apt that Lynda Nead begins her fascinating and informative volume with an exploration of the term "medium." As she clarifies, the word links the emergence of new mass communications such as film at the turn of the nineteenth century to the terrain of spiritualism. In both cases, medium marks a process of transition between the inert and the animated. In the course of the book's three thematic parts, "Ghosts and Machines," "Cameras and Cars," and "Earthly and Astral Bodies," Nead explores frictions and inversions between the moving and the still, the living and the dead. The metaphor of haunting thus comes to haunt the text itself, and it allows Nead to make productive connections between histories, objects, and cultural forms that otherwise appear disjointed or opposed.
The case studies explored are diverse, encompassing histories of aesthetics and the psychology of vision; associated visual technologies, including the magic lantern, the camera, the cinematograph, and other moving image devices; traditions of representation and exhibition associated with Victorian arts; and performance traditions in entertainments from magic theatre to music hall to fairground. As Nead explains, the "polemical aim" of this methodology is "to move beyond the established frameworks of interdisciplinarity" and develop a model of intermedial study "that produces an integrated approach to visual media and that secures these forms within historical networks that include technology, magic, entertainment and desire" (2). The opening two chapters are...