Lisa Cartwright

Marita Sturken

"Thoroughly updated to incorporate cutting-edge theoretical research, the second edition examines the following new topics: the surge of new media technologies; the impact of globalization on the flow of information and media form and content; and how nationalism and security concerns have changed our looking practices in the aftermath of 9/11. Challenging yet accessible, Practices of Looking is ideal for courses across a range of disciplines, including media and film studies, communications, art history, and photography."--BOOK JACKET.

An Introduction to Visual Culture

Practices of Looking

Moving images are used as diagnostic tools and locational devices every day in hospitals, clinics and laboratories. But how and when did such issues come to be established and accepted sources of knowledge about the body in medical culture? How are the specialized techniques and codes of these imaging techniques determined, and whose bodies are studied, diagnosed and treated with the help of optical recording devices? "Screening the Body" traces the unusual history of scientific film during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, presenting material that is at once disturbing and engrossing. Lisa Cartwright looks at films like "The Elephant Electrocution". She brings to light eccentric figures in the history of the science film such as William P. Spratling who used Biograph equipment and crews to film epileptic seizures, and Thomas Edison's lab assistants who performed x-ray experiments on their own bodies. Drawing on feminist film theory, cultural studies, the history of film, and the writings of Foucault, Lisa Cartwright illustrates how this scientific cinema was a part of a broader tendency in society toward the technological surveillance, management, and physical transformation of the individual body and the social body. She frequently points out the similarities of scientific film to works of avant-garde cinema, revealing historical ties among the science film, popular media culture and elite modernist art and film practices. Ultimately, Cartwright unveils an area of film culture that has rarely been discussed, but which will leave readers scouring video libraries in search of the films she describes.

Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture

Screening the Body

Susan Douglas

Professor of Communication and Science Studies Lisa Cartwright

Insightful and engaging, this new Canadian edition of Practices of Looking offers a broad overview of contemporary visual culture from an integrated North American perspective. With a strong awareness of the centrality of visual stimulation in our everyday lives, the authors explore the manyways we use icons, photographs, film, television, video games, advertisements, scientific images, and other visual media to create meaning and construct identity. Fully recognizing the many social, cultural, and political differences that make the Canadian visual experience distinct, thiscomprehensive volume highlights Canadian visual culture against the backdrop of an increasingly globalized visual world.

Lisa Cartwright contributes to feminist film theory by developing a new psychoanalytic theory of spectatorship and human subjectivity.

Lisa Cartwright

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