The Art of Possible Over the Art of Actuality: Review of 12 Monkeys by Susanne Kord (Auteur Press)

Abstract

Susanne Kord’s book, 12 Monkeys (2019) analyzes the director Terry Gilliam’s film, 12 Monkeys (1995) that illustrates a deadly virus released in 1996 as its triggering force, which was in return inspired by the director, Chris Marker’s film, La Jetée (1962). Kord’s book may be of special interest to academics, scholars, and researchers in such disciplines as media studies, film studies, literature, sociology, history, and philosophy with its rich theoretical and analytical content. Although the book offers a critical analysis of the film with specific references to other films such as Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Birds (1963), and Die Hard (1988); philosophical, scientific, and theoretical sources of such figures as Einstein, Schopenhauer, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault; intertextual references like “Omar Khayyam and The Rubaiyat, the Book of Revelations, Virgil’s Aeneid, Hesiod, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein;” and to mythological and folk literature sources such as Prometheus and Cassandra complex, it can also be accessible to a wider audience with its easy-tounderstand language and pellucidity (Kord 2019, 13).