Sarah Cooper (2013) The Soul of Film Theory, London: Palgrave. 224 pp

Abstract

�� Sarah Cooper’s book is a meticulously researched history of the term ‘soul’ as used in film theory since its inception. The book traces the term’s curious history, and its insistent recurrence despite occasional complete vanishings. Apart from the introduction and concluding remarks, Cooper’s book consists of three large chapters that describe in chronological order the history of the notion of the ‘soul’ in film theory: ‘Classical Souls’ (23-67), ‘Signifying Souls’ (68-107) and ‘Body and Soul’ (108-151). It becomes very clear that Cooper is dealing here with a massive amount of literature, in part forgotten now, but which she patiently uncovers. As such, it is an important and impressive piece of work, which ought to feature in any serious theoretical Film Studies programme, notwithstanding some of my reservations about it, which I shall present below. In the Introduction (1-22) Cooper offers some definitions of the term ‘soul’, mentioning that it has its roots in the Old English and Old High German words ‘sawol’, ‘seel’ and ‘seol’, which were used to translate the Greek term ψυχή/‘psyche’ and the Latin term ‘anima’ (5). She mentions how ‘psyche’ is also linked to ψύχeιν/‘psychein’, which means to blow and to breathe, a connotation that is still present in some languages, including Slavonic ones (although Cooper does not mention this). She goes on to present different takes on ‘the soul’, mostly ‘idealist, spiritualist or psychological’ in order to highlight ‘film theory’s interest in thinking that has led to a privileging of mind’ in the first instance ‐ in stark contrast to much contemporary film theory, which privileges the body (7). Cooper briefly mentions Platonic (8-10) and Cartesian (10-11) notions of the soul, as well as more recent philosophical theorisations pertinent to her examination, in particular those of Emmanuel Levinas and Henri Bergson. Strikingly, however, Cooper does not interrogate the notion of the soul and its different meanings as perceived in Judeo-Christian traditions. There is namely a key difference in the understanding of the soul in the Roman Catholic and Jewish paradigms versus the protestant ones: the former offer a mysterious and mystical view of the unknowable core of who we are, while the latter supply a more mundane and strictly religious view of the innate goodness of a person, which can be either preserved for eternity or, through a sinful existence, condemned forever with no possibility of redemption. I would argue that such an interrogation might lead her to a re-thinking of the