Layering

Abstract

This chapter focuses on how films get spectators to perform the feat of creating imagined images and layering them over those that are on screen. Gary Tarn’s Black Sun (2005) provides the opening example in which the blind French artist Hugues De Montalembert recounts in voice-over his strong memory of a striking scene that he witnessed prior to going blind and which contrasts markedly with the images that appear on screen for the length of time that he tells his tale. This example serves to explain how and why mental images can appear just as vividly in spectators’ minds as onscreen images do. The ground of imagining is formed before spectators are guided on how to take flight from it across sections that introduce further examples, from Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog (2015) through Patrick Keiller’s Robinson trilogy (1994-2010) to Agnès Varda’s Jane B. by Agnès V. (1988). In addition to an on-going dialogue with the work of Elaine Scarry, this chapter interweaves references to cognitive psychology and philosophy that inform other chapters too. Layering is just one of the processes at work in the formation of imagined images while watching films, and subsequent chapters outline others.