The film Idées Fixes / Dies Irae – Variations on the Same Subject (1977) is governed by the principle of inversion: between word and image, depth and surface, and male and female. No element, visual, acoustic or written, appears in a state of self-affirmation without having already been distorted by another, also without contaminating another. The film incorporates conflicting claims, without favouring one or the other, maintaining for itself a position of inbetweenness. Each integrated element affects its host, tampering with its identity, haunting it with possibilities and voices. The figural layout of the film title, as it appears on the screen, breaks down the horizontal axis of two formulaic syntagms, ‘idées fixes’ (‘obsessions’) and ‘dies irae’ (‘day of wrath’), reconstructing them vertically as ‘IDEESDIES’ and ‘FIXESIRAE’ – which would be vertical, were the two original syntagms to be written in two consecutive lines, welded into a continuous horizontal sequence, each resulting amalgamation evoking the components of a locus communis, a lost minimal ‘isotopy’. However, the fact that they are rebound horizontally does not necessarily mean that they should be read in this way. On the contrary, it signals that we are free to read not only vertically, as a kind of parallelismus membrorum, but also as ‘ideas of wrath’ or ‘fixed days’. The change of order, discontinuing unidirectional time, standardises the chiastic coupling as a modus operandi of the overall direction of the film. The reversal of the spatial axes is established as a construction principle of the text, which will culminate, as we shall see, in the paradox of a vertical horizon.

The relationship between the theme and its variations, as indicated in the subtitle of the film, is the second constructive principle of the film. The shots form a network of variations, interchanging their components, complementing each other and cross-referencing throughout the film. The question is what the theme is: it is absent, a structural centre which lies elsewhere. It permeates the film, leaking into the details of its materials, but only the distorted ‘Dies Irae’ of the title gives its name away; it is Carl Dreyer’s film of the same title (Vredens Dag [‘Day of Wrath’], 1943).