Volumising

Abstract

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.