The veiled screen: uncanny crystallizations in the moving image

This dissertation theorizes how thinking can be generated through the act of film spectatorship. It explores instances in which cinema reflects the thoughts of those who place themselves in its presence by generating uncanny self-reflexivity. By basking in audio-visual art that seems to mirror their own position as viewers, spectators are able to engage with film as a simulation of their own potential mental images as if cinema was thinking for them, with them, as if by them. This active engagement with film has the potentiality to transform reality by summoning hidden thoughts within the spectator to a conscious level. The project illustrates this spectatorial engagement through a variety of comparative visual and textual examples that range from Spanish cinema’s role in Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy to the relationship between postmodern American horror films and Don Quijote. The concept of an uncanny crystallization, an idea that imbricates Freudian psychoanalysis with Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema, is at times extrapolated from the central relationship between viewer and film at the core of the argument to observer and artwork in the case of Diego Velázquez’ Las meninas or reader and novel in the case of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quijote. Even though its primary focus is cinema, this dissertation initiates a broader theory about the role of art in shaping the mind not by limiting it to the confined worldview delineated by an artist but by opening up potentialities of thought that can liberate it precisely from the limits of the frame, the page or the screen.