Film Figures

Film Figures offers the reader fresh insights into cinematic worlds through the figural analysis of narrative film.

Figural analysis is concerned with what we don't see in what we see; the unconscious aspects of what we see on the screen. Warwick Mules provides a set of concepts and a taxonomy of figures suited to such an analysis. Each chapter undertakes an extensive analytical reading of a key film guided by a concept to follow the negentropic movement of figures through the world of the film. Drawing on the work of Deleuze, Lacan and Benjamin, and highlighting key moments in the appearance of the figure in cinema history, Film Figures offers new concepts to engage in film analysis. In readings of films by Murnau, Hitchcock, Lang, Lynch and Haneke, the book explores technological, cultural and philosophical concerns through the plight of figures as symptomatic of the estrangement of modern life.