Conclusion
The book concludes with a close examination of De Palma’s Femme Fatale as the exemplary experiment with a pure cinematic philosophy of the image and its praxis within visual, aural and narrative structures. The fragment is now intensified into a pure abstract geometric form in which the formal fragment takes on the qualities of a fractal organization in spatial and temporal relation. The fragment is analyzed in Femme Fatale in relation to shot scale (the close-up), the intensified split-screen sequence, the collage image (the concluding frame of the film), and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s reflexive imitation of Ravel’s Boléro theme. The book concludes with a hypothesis that the irreducible fragment of a pure cinematic form is suggestive of what Tarkovsky once called “the absolute image.”