Bøker av Dr Dominic (University of Bristol Lash

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 1997 psychological horror, Cure, follows a detective (played by Koji Yakusho) as he investigates a string of gruesome murders in Tokyo, where each victim has an 'X' carved into their neck.Dominic Lash provides an in-depth analysis of Cure's themes, generic conventions, cinematography, editing, mise-en-scène, sound, and legacy. In examining the film's aesthetics he highlights the unique way in which it balances meticulous precision with a persistent and purposeful ambiguity. Lash goes on to situate Cure within its various contexts; firstly, as Kurosawa's 'breakthrough' film following a decade of mostly straight-to-video work and then its position in relation to the J-Horror boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Through a close reading of Cure's key scenes, particularly its final scene, Lash analyses the motivations behind Kurosawa's resistance to a definitive resolution. He argues that, just like its hypnotist antagonist, Mamiya, Cure unsettles some of our basic psychological assumptions. In doing so, he attempts to understand what it is about the film that lingers so disturbingly, long after the credits have rolled.

Robert Pippin (1948- ) is a major figure in contemporary philosophy, having published influential work on thinkers including Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. He is also an original thinker about - and critic of - film who has written books and numerous articles on canonical subjects such as the Western, Film Noir, and Hitchcock's Vertigo. In Robert Pippin and Film, Dominic Lash demonstrates the ways that film has been crucial to Pippin's thought on important philosophical topics such as political psychology, ethics, and self-knowledge. He also explores the implications of Pippin's methodological commitments to clear language and to maintaining close contact with the details of the films in question. In so doing, Lash brings Pippin's work on film to a wider audience and contributes to current debates both within film studies and beyond. This includes those concerning the relationships between film and philosophy, criticism and aesthetics, and individual subjectivity and political consciousness. Lash focuses on Pippin's major works on film - Hollywood Westerns and American Myth (2010), Fatalism in American Film Noir (2012), The Philosophical Hitchcock (2017), and Filmed Thought (2020) as well as his many shorter writings on film.