Supplementing

Abstract

This chapter looks specifically at the activity of supplementing what is on screen. Supplementing, as understood here, is a matter of entering into an encounter with onscreen images that inscribe the imprint of what is to be imagined within them. The chapter opens with consideration of a range of short films from To Each His Own Cinema (Gilles Jacob, 2007), before centring in the first main section on Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin (2008) in which the camera is turned on the expressions of a cinema audience: viewers hear what the women are watching and see the effect it has on their faces through their emotions but they never see it on screen. The second section of this chapter explores a quite different impression of imagination on the onscreen image through discussion of Jan Švankmajer’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1980) and The Pendulum, the Pit, and Hope (1983). The voice-over narrative and/or soundscape paints vivid pictures that flesh out in the mind what is not shown, the impact of which is seen on the screen, and the imagination works between the two, supplementing the onscreen image.