Acknowledgements Introduction: ‘The sanguine, pulsating, enterprising modern life’: Cinema and Vitalism 1. Taking Life for a Spin 2. Turn-of-the-century Vitalism and Philosophy of Life 3. Early Film Theory 4. Cinematic Vitalism Chapter 1: Vitalism and Abstraction: Rhythm and Non-Organic Life from Hans Richter to Sergei Eisenstein 27 1. The Reinvention of Cinema in Abstract Film 2. A Universal Language 3. Bergson, Intuition, and Art 4. Setting Form into Motion: Scroll Paintings and Empathy 5. Transition to Film 6. Back into Matter: from Abstraction to Montage Chapter 2: New Worlds: Uexküll’s Umwelt Theory at the Movies 1. Forays 2. A Meditation on Mediated Dogs 3. The Agony of the Starfish: Uexküll’s Chronophotography 4. Of Ticks and Humans 5. Against Anthropocentrism: Umwelt and Cinema 6. A Necessary Field of Action: Benjamin, Umwelt, and Play 7. Painlevé’s Cinema of Bewilderment Chapter 3: The Interweaving of World and Self: Transformations of Stimmung in Expressionist and Kammerspiel Film 100 1. The Mediation of a Dog’s World 2. A Brief Aesthetic History of Stimmung 3. Turn-of-the-Century Vitalist Stimmung and the Cinema: Georg Simmel and Hugo von Hofmannsthal 4. Balázs, Kammerspielfilm, and Expressionism 5. The Kammerspiel Film: Naturalist Plots and Progressive Aesthetics Chapter 4: Open Bodies, Open Stories: Evolution, Narration and Spectatorship in Postwar Film Theory 1. The Axolotl and the Cinema: Bazin, Bergson, and Evolution 2. Cinema’s Milieu 3. Life and the Temporalities of Film and Painting 4. Post-Apocalyptic Life: Kracauer’s Theory of Film 5. Conclusion: Vital Cinema Bibliography