Feeling Pictures

Abstract

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.