Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- Prospectus
- Part 1 Confusion as Fusion: Metalepsis, Completeness and Coherence
- Part 2 Disorientating Figures and Figures of Disorientation
- Conclusion: Method-Free Orientation
- Appendix: Colossal Youth Scene Breakdown
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index
Chapter 6 - Distinguishing the Indistinguishable: Figures of Imperceptibility and Impossibility in Lost Highway and Caché
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- Prospectus
- Part 1 Confusion as Fusion: Metalepsis, Completeness and Coherence
- Part 2 Disorientating Figures and Figures of Disorientation
- Conclusion: Method-Free Orientation
- Appendix: Colossal Youth Scene Breakdown
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index
Summary
This chapter aims to make the theoretical discussion contained in the previous chapter a little more concrete by investigating a few specific instances of figuration. To this end, it consists of an enquiry into some particular filmic figures that have been constructed so as to disorientate the viewer, with a view to ‘figuring’ that which cannot be directly represented (which I will refer to generally as ‘impossibility’ or ‘the impossible’). More particularly, the chapter focuses on instances wherein disorientation is deliberately courted by images that can easily be confused either with one another, or taken for something they are not (which is another form of confusing one thing for another). This chapter, then, concentrates on the nature and function of images that verge on the indistinguishable or imperceptible; I want to suggest that there is another rich collection of figurative operations to add to Nicole Brenez's notions of disintegration, overload and short circuit (which we encountered at the end of the previous chapter) that we might call ‘figurality by indiscernibility’. I will demonstrate the crucial role of diegesis in the creation of these effects, emphasising once again the importance in narrative film of the intersection between the plastic and rhetorical senses of figuration, which is to say between the characteristics of certain images as images (what they look like) and how they contribute to a film's rhetoric in the largest sense (narration, mood, affect, theme and so forth). Crucial to the examples that will be discussed here are narratives of trauma and its aftermath – or, to put it more specifically, of attempts to avoid coming to terms with the infliction of trauma – which is to say that the films covered in this chapter not only produce disorientation but represent it; they concern disorientated characters as well as produce disorientated viewers. But I hope to be able to make some claims that are more nuanced than simply explaining away instances of audience confusion as motivated by the way they echo the disorientation of the characters onscreen; confusion, I will argue, may have important consequences for any aspect of a film's meaning.
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- Information
- The Cinema of DisorientationInviting Confusions, pp. 105 - 116Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020