Reshaping

This chapter focuses on the activity of reshaping the image perceived on screen. The first section returns to Patrick Keiller’s London, first spoken about in the opening chapter, and to an example that was not discussed there in which the wandering imaginary figure of Robinson, a latter-day flâneur who is engaged in drifting and free association, pauses to remember a row of factories in a landscape that is now characterised by their absence. The shot of the landscape without the factories is held for long enough for spectators to imagine them as theorised in the first chapter, through layering and filling in. However, the imagining of the factories in such a manner involves a transformation of the perceived landscape and is tied to a political project too; it is this reshaping of the perceptual world that the rest of this chapter develops, concentrating on a few of the forms that this process takes principally with reference to films by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet.