There is a particular cinematic situation – Marc Vernet would call it a “figure of absence” – that I have always found mysteriously compelling. We have a person alone in a dark house, beset by various inner anxieties. Gradually, strange noises and signs begin to manifest. Fleeting shadows and groaning pipes prepare for a sudden, more terrifying apparition: perhaps a fully embodied stranger who begins to attack or rape our central character, as atonal music builds and the camera work becomes more agitated …

But then, at the highpoint of this frenzy, comes a cut. We now see our hero or heroine the following morning, placidly munching on breakfast, reading a newspaper, or going for a stroll. Everything is perfectly fine and back to normal; it is as if nothing dramatic whatsoever has occurred. There are no physical traces, no flashback memories, no discussion on the phone with the police or the protagonist's best friend concerning the violence of the previous night. The “incident” is never again mentioned in the film – even if, in the course of the plot, such incidents indeed recur.

It was all a dream? A psychotic hallucination? Perhaps. But some filmmakers – referring here especially to filmmakers of the various national New Waves and art cinemas of the 1960s and 1970s, keen to distance themselves from the stuffy protocols of a once-classical Hollywood product – like to place these kinds of tidy attributions in doubt.