Reshaping

This chapter focuses on the activity of reshaping the image perceived on screen. The first section returns to Patrick Keiller’s London, first spoken about in the opening chapter, and to an example that was not discussed there in which the wandering imaginary figure of Robinson, a latter-day flâneur who is engaged in drifting and free association, pauses to remember a row of factories in a landscape that is now characterised by their absence. The shot of the landscape without the factories is held for long enough for spectators to imagine them as theorised in the first chapter, through layering and filling in. However, the imagining of the factories in such a manner involves a transformation of the perceived landscape and is tied to a political project too; it is this reshaping of the perceptual world that the rest of this chapter develops, concentrating on a few of the forms that this process takes principally with reference to films by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet.

Supplementing

This chapter looks specifically at the activity of supplementing what is on screen. Supplementing, as understood here, is a matter of entering into an encounter with onscreen images that inscribe the imprint of what is to be imagined within them. The chapter opens with consideration of a range of short films from To Each His Own Cinema (Gilles Jacob, 2007), before centring in the first main section on Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin (2008) in which the camera is turned on the expressions of a cinema audience: viewers hear what the women are watching and see the effect it has on their faces through their emotions but they never see it on screen. The second section of this chapter explores a quite different impression of imagination on the onscreen image through discussion of Jan Švankmajer’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1980) and The Pendulum, the Pit, and Hope (1983). The voice-over narrative and/or soundscape paints vivid pictures that flesh out in the mind what is not shown, the impact of which is seen on the screen, and the imagination works between the two, supplementing the onscreen image.

Conclusion: Broadening Out

The conclusion journeys back across the different processes explored in the preceding chapters in order to stress continuities in the procedures that prompt mental image composition in spite of the very different films from different geo-political contexts and eras that have informed this study. It also asks how the fruits of this research might relate to an even broader range of filmic examples. The argument throughout the book emphasises that no one process is attached solely to the examples discussed in any given chapter and indicates how a number of processes sometimes coalesce when viewing an individual work. To take this argument further, the conclusion suggests that these processes, especially the opening account of layering, are portable and relevant to moments of mainstream narrative cinema as well as further examples from art house cinema and documentary. When characters tell stories in the diegetic space without their words giving way to images that illustrate what they are narrating, when a voice-over is evocative and diverges from what is seen on screen, or when a soundtrack speaks louder than words, there is an opening for the image-making capacity of the imagination that has been the book’s focus throughout.

Erasing

The focus of this chapter is on mental images that spectators are prompted to build and then to erase, either by conjuring a disappearance within them or by dismantling them fully as part of the activity of imagining. This iconoclastic mental activity is the corollary of the onscreen relation to the image in the work of the two contrasting directors discussed in this final chapter. The reshaping of the previous chapter necessitated adding something to the onscreen image. The work of erasure explored in this current chapter involves both subtracting something from the mental image that has been formed on the basis of verbal instruction and destroying it in its entirety: the former process is one traced as a recurrent element of Guy Debord’s first film Howls for Sade (1952). The latter process is one traced through a series of late films by Marguerite Duras, from The Lorry (1977) and The Ship Night (1979) to two shorts, Negative Hands (1979) and Caesarea (1979). Negative Hands also prompts instances of what Elaine Scarry terms ‘re-picturing’, which involves the forming and re-forming of mental images even as this too, in Duras’s case, serves an ultimate process of annihilation.

Layering

This chapter focuses on how films get spectators to perform the feat of creating imagined images and layering them over those that are on screen. Gary Tarn’s Black Sun (2005) provides the opening example in which the blind French artist Hugues De Montalembert recounts in voice-over his strong memory of a striking scene that he witnessed prior to going blind and which contrasts markedly with the images that appear on screen for the length of time that he tells his tale. This example serves to explain how and why mental images can appear just as vividly in spectators’ minds as onscreen images do. The ground of imagining is formed before spectators are guided on how to take flight from it across sections that introduce further examples, from Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2015) through Patrick Keiller’s Robinson trilogy (1994-2010) to Agnès Varda’s Jane B. by Agnès V. (1988). In addition to an on-going dialogue with the work of Elaine Scarry, this chapter interweaves references to cognitive psychology and philosophy that inform other chapters too. Layering is just one of the processes at work in the formation of imagined images while watching films, and subsequent chapters outline others.

Postscript

The brief postscript cites Derek Jarman’s writings in his book Chroma in order to stress that no two people’s mental images will be the same and encourages readers to broaden the scope of the discussion still further by extending guided imagining into as yet uncharted territory.

Volumising

Layering is operative as part of the processes of mental image formation discussed in this chapter too, but rather than drawing upon the relationship with the onscreen images, now there is nothing to see but blankness. When any trace of visual or representational images is removed entirely from the screen, it is the richness of the soundscape or voice-over that pervades, as the blank screen becomes the sole visual accompaniment for the formation of mental images and the configuration of mental space. This chapter introduces the relation between sound volume and spatial volume that underpins its argument by first considering an example from film curator Matt Hulse’s ‘Audible Picture Show’ (2003 onwards). It then attends to two blank screen films from different ends of the twentieth century, Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend (1930) and Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993). The chapter tests the mimetic account of mental image formation in the absence of the perceived images that served as the support of the imagined images of the previous chapter. It explores how mental space is configured and changed in Weekend, and how a poetic approach to verbal expression in Blue adds figurative imagery to the mimetic account of mental picturing.

Seeing Pictures

This opening chapter serves to introduce the principal focus of the book, which explores the felt experience of mental image-making while watching film. The introductory discussion positions the book first of all in relation to cognitivist work on imagination within film studies and points to the gap in scholarship on spectatorship regarding the experience of the image-making capacity of the imagination, situating it within a broader debate on mental imagery. The chapter engages with film theory and philosophy that anticipates the kind of image-making that will be focused on throughout the book and introduces what it means to imagine in images. It also justifies the book’s concentration on sound rather than silent cinema, since the verbal dimension and soundtracks are crucial to the kind of direction that produces the most vivid mental images, and the verbal dimension in particular permits introduction of the work of Elaine Scarry on guided imagining. It is the vivacity of such mental images that this first chapter outlines. In conceptual terms, this chapter and the following chapter serve to set up the key notion of ‘dual vision’ – of seeing what is on screen and ‘seeing’ what is in the mind – that informs the entire study.

Feeling Pictures

This chapter opens with an example from Marguerite Duras’s film The Atlantic Man (1981), in order to introduce some of the ways in which the felt experience of image-making spoken about in relation to dual vision and mental pictures in the first chapter can be further fleshed out. It is the substantiality of the vivid mental image that is explored in this chapter, which furthers what it means to imagine in images while watching film. Duras’s work is a point of reference throughout the book but serves here to lead into discussion of perception and imagination as theorised by twentieth-century phenomenologists. The felt experience of image-making begins to take shape in palpable form, and the relationship between perception and imagination that informs subsequent chapters is articulated first of all through a dialogue with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work in particular, and then with that of other philosophers and film theorists.