The Dark Mirror: Psychiatry and Film Noir probes the meanings behind the depiction of psychiatry and psychological illness in film noir, and how these depictions contribute to an overall understanding about the noir cycle itself. In this study, Marlisa Santos examines the role that the popularization of psychoanalysis in the 1940s and 1950s, beginning with the use of psychoanalytic techniques to treat World War II soldiers, had on writers and filmmakers of noir. This popularization had a lasting effect on American culture, especially as ideas such as introspection and a morally neutral universe became status quo, and thereby became reflected in the noir series. The films analyzed in this study reveal a distillation of such ideas, a bringing to the surface concerns and fears regarding the contradictory, yet thrilling nature of psychoanalysis: the ability of a "science of the mind" to eliminate the mysteries of the human psyche and the simultaneous nature of this science to expose the fundamental unknowability of the human psyche. Indeed, Santos argues that noir itself might not have existed without the introduction of psychoanalysis into American culture.

The Dark Mirror: Psychiatry and Film Noir probes the meanings behind the depiction of psychiatry and psychological illness in film noir, and how these depictions contribute to an overall understanding about the noir cycle itself. In this study, Marlisa Santos examines the role that the popularization of psychoanalysis in the 1940s and 1950s, beginning with the use of psychoanalytic techniques to treat World War II soldiers, had on writers and filmmakers of noir. This popularization had a lasting effect on American culture, especially as ideas such as introspection and a morally neutral universe became status quo, and thereby became reflected in the noir series. The films analyzed in this study reveal a distillation of such ideas, a bringing to the surface concerns and fears regarding the contradictory, yet thrilling nature of psychoanalysis: the ability of a 'science of the mind' to eliminate the mysteries of the human psyche and the simultaneous nature of this science to expose the fundamental unknowability of the human psyche. Indeed, Santos argues that noir itself might not have existed without the introduction of psychoanalysis into American culture.

Although it is a somewhat underrepresented form of literature in popular sensibility, poetry finds relevance in the modern world through its appearance in cinema. Film adaptations of poems and depictions of poets on the screen date back to the silent era and continue to the present day. However, there have been few serious studies of how cinema has represented the world of poetic expression. In Verse, Voice, and Vision: Poetry and the Cinema, Marlisa Santos has compiled essays that explore the relationship between one of the world's oldest art forms-poetry-and one of the world's newest art forms-film. The book is divided into three sections: poets on film, poetry as film, and film as poetry. Topics include analyses of poet biopics (such as Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle), filmic representations of poets or poetic studies (including Pyaasa), films inspired by particular poems (such as Splendor in the Grass), and the avant-garde phenomenon of the "poem-film" (such as The Tree of Life). Poetic influences considered in this volume range from William Shakespeare to e.e. cummings, and the films discussed hail from several different countries, including the U.S., the U.K., India, China, Italy, and Argentina. Featuring a great diversity in the age, genres, and countries of origin of the films, these essays provide an in-depth look at how poetry has been interpreted on film over the years. By addressing a heretofore unexamined aspect of film studies, Verse, Voice, and Vision will appeal to fans and scholars of both literature and cinema.