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This dissertation focuses on the story of a film character that Italian cinema has brought to the fore, particularly by the neorealist film movement. The automaton of Italian cinema is a marginal, alienated character who apparently does not possess an individual consciousness and will but is subjected to those of others. Combining Aristotle’s notion of the automaton with anthropologist Clara Gallini’s discussion of the urbanized population in late nineteenth-century Italy, I focus on the automaton not as the machine that imitates the human but as the human in flesh who imitates a machine that imitates the human, through bodily and psychological automatisms. In this way, I define this figure as a “flesh automaton,” in which the Christian and phenomenological notion of the “flesh” meets with the automatic kind of event brought by cinema. As a philosophical figure that can be described from time to time as an aesthetic figure and/or a psycho-social type, but is not reducible to either of them, I also define the flesh automaton as a Deleuzian cinematic conceptual persona. In my study, I complicate the notion of humanism usually associated with Italian cinema, in the filmmakers Cesare Zavattini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Elio Petri, by showing the weight of automatisms both at the gestural and cinematographic levels. I argue that understanding the interplay between event and habit, and human and non-human provides deeper understanding of the subjects portrayed in these films. I combine archival research, theoretical reflection, and textual analysis to explore the automatic body in this cinema and to show how themes elaborated by Italian literature and culture, and expressed through acting and cinematographic productions, anticipated contemporary transnational mediatic developments and posthumanist theories of agency and performativity. My research develops in three directions: first, a genealogy of the automatic body in Italian theatrical magnetism and the influence of French psychiatry and theatre on it; second, the use of non-professional actors in the cinema, particularly neorealism in the early 1940s; third, the filmmakers’ peculiar relationship with the marginal automatic body. The Automaton of Italian Cinema shows how authors such as Zavattini and Pasolini either use cinema to “reanimate” the automatic body, thereby releasing it from its destiny of repetition, or to show its inherent negative charge and another possible outcome towards the grotesque, as reflected by Petri. Ultimately, I discuss how, by forming an enunciative assemblage with these filmmakers, the flesh automaton questions the monolithic male bourgeois subjectivity of the postwar Italian Marxist and humanist intellectual.

This dissertation analyses William Castle's The Tingler (1959), George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978), Lucio Fulci's L'aldila/The Beyond (1981), and Andrzej Zulawski's Possession (1981) to find the pulse in cinema. It acknowledges that the pulse is "felt" rather than "perceived," yet argues that the pulse has a wider-reaching effect in cinema than simply the physiological response of the spectator to the image. My aim is to establish the terms according to which the economy and aesthetics of the pulse can be brought to bear on our understanding of cinema and cinema spectatorship. I argue that the economy of spectatorship is better understood by Jean-Francois Lyotard's concept of the dispositif than the formulation of the cinematic apparatus of 1970s film theory, which sought to demonstrate the ideological interpellation of the viewing subject. The dispositif recognises the distribution of the pulse - the force of intensities in the body of the spectator and in the image - in terms of an energetic exchange and expenditure. The dispositif is vital for thinking about the spectator as a component in the energetic system of cinema. My conception of the pulse in cinema is characterised by the energetic relationship between the spectator and the image, and is Open. This pulse is imperceptible in the image and works to the originary sensory aesthetics of aisthesis in the viewer. Aisthesis, in this thesis, refers to the sensations that are "exposed" by the apparatus. However, what is also "exposed" is the freedom of the blood that circulates in an exposure that spills blood and, in so doing, changes aisthesis to aesthetics. I conceive the pulse as aisthetic because it is the minimal condition of sensation, whilst being the propulsion for the blood that circulates. This thesis will thus examine the pulse "exposed" through the spilling of blood in horror cinema, which exemplifies a cinema of expenditures. Such expenditures transform subjectivity into the operations of a sovereign spectatorship. It is in experiencing horror film that the pulse is most potent, for it is within such films that the affective forces of horror characterised by blood can be found.