Doppelgänger Cinema

“Film is in its essence a world of doubles.”–Nicholas Royle

As media theorist Friedrich Kittler and others have noted, cinema from its very inception has been haunted by doubles through the “celluloid ghosts of the actors’ bodies.” Considered both in terms of its intermediality with literary evocations of the uncanny and with respect to the ghostly effects of the cinematic apparatus itself, this seminar will examine the figure of the doppelgänger and its variations (twins, clones, split personalities) in films such as Bilocation (2013), Black Swan (2010), The Dark Half (1993), Dead Ringers (1988), Doppelgänger (2003), The Double (2013), Enemy (2013), Fight Club (1999), and The Prestige (2006).