In their use of home movies, collages of photographs and live footage, moving image artists explore the wish to see dead loved ones living. This study scrutinizes emotions and sensations surrounding mortality and longing. Its focus is on love, tenderness, and eroticism, on the undoing of the self in desire and loss, and on the pursuit of relations with a missing other.

In dialogue with Judith Butler on grievability, and Giorgio Agamben on bare life, Emma Wilson traces connections between imaging of intimate losses and public acts of mourning in response to atrocity, the Shoah and Hurricane Katrina. The book lays out a series of sensitive new readings of works by Agnes Varda, Pedro Almodovar, Ingmar Bergman, Sophie Calle, and many others. Attending to images of tactility, to fine details of texture, light, and affect, it re-imagines the role of the sensuous in lens-based art.

Emma Wilson is Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts in the Department of French and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College.