Bride of Frankenstein
Bride of Frankenstein
by Shane Denson
Lever Press, 2025
ISBNs
Paper: 978-1-64315-084-0
eISBN: 978-1-64315-085-7
About the Book
The inaugural volume in the film|minutes book series, this book offers a close, minute-by-minute analysis of director James Whale’s iconic 1935 masterpiece Bride of Frankenstein. Alternating between a variety of analytical lenses, including descriptive, historical, and philosophical, this study breaks from conventional forms of film-analytical writing and offers an experiment in defamiliarization and looking anew. In the 1930s, the film opened a space for reflection on the rapid normalization of filmic sound, which it both relies on and estranges. In the 2020s, Bride of Frankenstein brings forth questions of new technological mediums such as artificial intelligence and the transformation of human agency. Shane Denson argues that such associations should not be written off as mere anachronism, but seen, rather, as a strategy of serialization; that is, it is by means of such anachronism that a film like Bride of Frankenstein remains open to new developments and novel situations, and thus comes alive for future viewers.
Volumes in the film|minutes series cut up films into segments of exactly one minute and transform each minute into an innovative tool for thinking with the film. Each volume works rigorously with the concept of “the minute” as a non-cinematic scale/quantity, a means to zoom in on (dis)orderly fragments that do not necessarily respect the confinements of cinematic form or meaning. As a critical practice, the focus on minutes causes disruptions and displacement that create novel connections and perspectives, and uncovers hidden traces, making it possible to watch each film anew.
Volumes in the film|minutes series cut up films into segments of exactly one minute and transform each minute into an innovative tool for thinking with the film. Each volume works rigorously with the concept of “the minute” as a non-cinematic scale/quantity, a means to zoom in on (dis)orderly fragments that do not necessarily respect the confinements of cinematic form or meaning. As a critical practice, the focus on minutes causes disruptions and displacement that create novel connections and perspectives, and uncovers hidden traces, making it possible to watch each film anew.
About the Author
Shane Denson is Professor of Film and Media Studies, and by courtesy, of German Studies and of Communication at Stanford University, where he also serves as Director of the Program in Modern Thought & Literature. His research interests span a variety of media and historical periods, including phenomenological and media-philosophical approaches to film, digital media, and serialized popular forms.
Reviews
“Rather than treating written criticism and videographic criticism as opposed modes, Denson shows how prose can absorb something of the temporal sensitivity and recursive attention of digital viewing practices while still sustaining conceptual and argumentative complexity. In that sense, the book does more than analyze Bride of Frankenstein; it offers a model for how film criticism might be practiced under contemporary media conditions.”
— Amanda Dubrule, Popular Culture Review“What I find most intriguing about the book is its layered reflexivity. While the film’s themes of seriality, media change, and human–animal–machine relations have been explored before, notably by Denson himself, their re-examination through the parametric logic of the film|minutes project, combined with the author’s intellectually rigorous yet affectively engaged perspective, yields a richer mode of thinking and feeling about the film and its cultural, aesthetic, and technological significance.”— Jirí Anger, Queen Mary University of London
Tags
film|minutes, Bride, Film, History & Criticism, Performing Arts
Open Access Information
Label: The Lever Initiative
License: CC BY-NC-ND
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