Torture and other forms of extreme violence threaten the ascertainable intermediate spaces of media in which the subject negotiates the respective differences between sensation and community, autonomy and language, binding and trauma, and obsession and distance. Reinhold Görling shows that because the history of (the phantasms of) torture is a history of the political structure of these intermediate spaces, the story of the cinematic depiction of torture is also a story of media. He pursues these relationships in four perspectives - sensation, face, reconciliation, image - from Rossellini's Roma città aperta up to Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty.