Miriam Hansen's Preface and Epilogue: Mourning and Media

Relating Sigmund Freud's essay “Mourning and Melancholia” and Walter Benjamin's work on the Trauerspiel as well as his discussion of cinema in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” Gunning discusses the idea of testing as part of cinema's relation to mourning in modernity. Rather than view cinema as a simulacrum of reality, he proposes it as a way to work through our separation from things and their aura. Benjamin's discussion of the screen test and Freud's discussion of the reality testing offer other relations that spectators might have to the cinematic image than absorption or enthrallment.