Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image Laura Mulvey Laura Mulvey addresses some of the crucial questions of film theory, spectatorship and narrative. New media technologies, such as video and DVD, have transformed the way we experience film. These technologies give viewers the means to control both image and story, so that films produced to be seen collectively and followed in a linear fashion may be found to contain unexpected, even unintended, pleasures. The tension between the still frame and the moving image coincides with the cinema's capacity to capture the appearance of life and preserve it after death. Mulvey proposes that with the arrival of new technologies and new ways of experiencing the cinematic image, film's hidden stillness comes to the fore. The individual frame, the projected films' best-kept secret, can now be revealed, by anyone, at the simple touch of a button. As Mulvey argues, easy access to repetition, slow motion and the freeze-frame may well shift the spectator's pleasure to a fetishistic rather than a voyeuristic investment in the cinematic object. By exploring how new technologies can give life to 'old' cinema, Death 24x a Second offers an original re-evaluation of film's history. Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and the author of Visual and Other Pleasures (1989), Citizen Kane (1992) and Fetishism and Curiosity (1996).