Doubling, Distance and Identification in the Cinema

The intention of this project is to argue theoretically for, and exemplify through critical and historical analysis, the interrelatedness of discourses on scale, distance, identification and doubling in the cinema. The link between the first two terms (scale and distance) and the latter two (identification and doubling) is implicit in the title, and its unfolding constitutes the project: for instance, the closer one comes, the deeper identification is likely to be, and the greater the likelihood that what is apparently 'there' will impose itself as also 'here', existing both inside and outside the viewing psyche, which becomes double, and whose doubling may either become explicit or remain implicit in the text. Along with its collapsing of interiority/exteriority distinctions, doubling reveals the reversibility and ambiguity of scale, as what is 'there' could just as well have been situated 'here'. The book contains analyses of a wide variety of films, including Citizen Kane, The Double Life of Veronique, The Great Gatsby, Gilda, Vertigo and Wings of Desire.

Paul Coates is Professor in the Film Studies Department of the University of Western Ontario, Canada. His books include The Story of the Lost Reflection (1985), The Gorgon's Gaze (1991), Lucid Dreams: the Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski (ed.) (1999), Cinema, Religion and the Romantic Legacy (2003), The Red and the White: The Cinema of People's Poland (2005) and Cinema and Colour: The Saturated Image (2010). In 1997 he became only the second Film Studies academic to give a series of Gauss seminars at Princeton University. His Screening the Face was published in 2012 by Palgrave Macmillan.