Near the end of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, he describes the effect of seeing a scene from Fellini’s film Casanova, in which the protagonist dances with an automaton. Barthes is overwhelmed by the beautiful simulacrum of a young woman, discussing how the combination of “desperate” inertness and apparent affection touched him in the same way as the “punctum” in photography. Mulvey recalls this scene in her book Death 24x a Second, as she engages in a dialogue with Barthes, for whom cinema was normally free from the elegiac effects that he described in photography. The project of Mulvey’s book, as described in the subtitle, is to bring to the surface the repressed stillness of the moving image, and by doing so, return to cinema many of the attributes that Barthes rules out. Rather than a seamless illusion of movement and life, Mulvey explores how new technologies expose the presence of the still image in all film—whether this is the filmstrip of celluloid film or the freeze-frame on a DVD. Although this is a book about film, Mulvey’s discussion of cinema’s psychic and social resonances through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century have relevance for the fields of art history...