Abstract/Summary

This video essay responds to moments in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) in which the protagonist invokes memories of a river. It does so by way of the ‘prosthetic flashback,’ a videographic technique whereby the critic includes extratextual footage which performs a character’s memory image. The work has two key goals: to critically respond to the distinctive anthropocentrism of Cassavetes’s cinema by expanding on fleeting and uncharacteristic (but significant) instances of pathetic fallacy; and to model the affordances of the prosthetic flashback.