Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2007, volume 25, pages 890 ^ 910

DOI:10.1068/d436t

Afterimages

Marcus A Doel, David B Clarke

Department of Geography, Swansea University, Swansea SA2 8PP, Wales;
e-mail: M.A.Doel@swansea.ac.uk, D.B.Clarke@swansea.ac.uk
Received 24 March 2006; in revised form 27 July 2006

Abstract. In this paper we argue that montage is at the heart of contemporary human geography.
We demonstrate the centrality of montage in a wide variety of domains, including the analysis of
modernity, the critique of political economy, and the practice of spatial science, before drawing out
the implications of this centrality in the wake of so-called `nonrepresentational' theory. While
nonrepresentational styles of thought ordinarily veer off into considerations of performance, practice,
and enactment, the ontological and epistemological play of montage plunges theoretical practice into
what Agamben, Baudrillard, and Benjamin call `imagelessness', `obscenity', and the `optical uncon-
scious'. Each of these is addressed in turn, and each is illustrated with stills taken from the films of
Jim Jarmusch. The overall aim of the paper is to sensitize human geographers to the duplicitous
operation of the discipline's cinematic optical unconscious, and in so doing to open up a space for
a more considered engagement with geography's much-vaunted visuality.

``[W]e see the world with completely different eyes.''

Moholy-Nagy (1927, page 26)
Introduction
``[S]hock is the very form of the communication of movement in images.''
Deleuze (1989, page 157)
If one were to list the keywords that structure contemporary human geography, one
would hardly expect `montage' to figure prominently. It will not surprise readers of
this journal to learn that `montage' does not feature in the `comprehensive' index to the
latest edition of The Dictionary of Human Geography (Johnston et al, 2000). Drawn
from the worlds of paper-play, advertising, and avant-garde filmmaking (and most
famously associated with Sergei Eisenstein, Vladimir Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov),
the juxtaposition of symbolically charged images for critical affect seems far removed
from the interests of the discipline [beyond passing, self-conscious experimental flirta-
tion of the kind practised by Allen and Pryke (1994), Pred (1985; 1996), Pryke (2002),
and Soja (1989; 1996; 2000)]. Montage is the process of selecting, editing, and piecing
together separate sections of imagery for a calculated affect, and the technique of
producing a new composite whole from fragments of imagery (from the French,
monter, to mount). Even self-consciously critical human geographers tend to prefer
stock images of shock to a shocking clash of images: a preference invariably hailed
as a conscientious privileging of politics over aesthetics and of substance over style.
They instinctively call upon a horror of content rather than a horror of form: a horror
of seeing particular scenes (for example, exploitation, injustice, suffering) rather than a
horror of seeing under particular conditions (for example, phantasmagoria, spectacle,
simulacrum).
One does not have to look too far, however, to find montage at work in human
geography. Given the lack of recognition afforded to montage in geography, it is
worth labouring a number of examples. For instance, Pickles (2004, page 89) draws
attention to ``the montage origins of all mappings and the plurality of mapping
Afterimages 891

systems represented in any single map.'' Composed of heterogeneous discourses and

practices, maps hold together through what he refers to as the intertextual ``law of
assembly'' (page 159). Owing to this essential incompleteness, Pickles encourages us to
exploit the insatiability of the mapping impulse and the inherent instability of maps
to make them act otherwise. Maps are exemplary ``spaces of slippage'' (page xii). This
is why cartographic reason and the mapping impulse express deconstructive disjointure
(Doel, 2003; 2006; Olsson, 1994). ``[T]he mirror has been broken into a thousand pieces,
each shard still reflecting, but without overall coherence, without the possibility of the
universal view, without the possibility of control'' (Pickles, 2004, page 161). Similarly,
the sociospatial process for historical-geographical materialists is said to evolve
through relatively autonomous but overdetermined moments. Accordingly, Harvey
(1996, page 80) explains that, while ``Each moment is constituted as an internal
relation of the others'' (emphasis in original), ``A gap always exists between the different
moments so that slippage, ambiguity and unintended consequences inevitably occur''. For
this reason, structural causality eschews determinism and teleology to become aleatory
and undecidable. Every moment exists as a differential relation that is divided against
itself. Every moment expresses antagonism, contradiction, and tension. In other words,
the sociospatial process unfolds through montage (compare Harootunian, 2004, on
dialectical parallax). Hence Benjamin's insistence that ``History decays into images,
not stories'' (page 462), and that the ``image is dialectics at a standstill'' (page 476).
Meanwhile, human geographers of a quantitative bent have juxtaposed all manner of
datasets to disclose their significant differences, co-relations, and causal co nnections:
from the banality of correlation to the beauty of satellite radar interferometry. In other
words, quantitative human geography is also a form of montage. It works through the
calculated juxtaposition of variables. Consequently, the relationship between X and Y
is of a piece with that between use value and exchange value, and between signified and
signifier. Hence Olsson's (1975; 1991) radical gesture of returning spatial science to the
poststructuralist fold. So, when geography decays into images, it decays into variables,
values, and signs.
Rather than multiply the examples of montage employed by human geographers,
this paper will address Rose's (2003, page 213) claim that ``We just don't know how,
exactly, geography is a visual discipline'', by demonstrating the centrality of montage.
Specifically, we argue that the montage form of contemporary human geography
discloses the workings of an optical unconscious that plunges us into the afterimages
of nonrepresentational obscenity. To begin to appreciate this, consider two key domains
that countless human geographers have addressed: modernity and capitalism. Buck-
Morss (1989, page 74) argues that montage was already visible in the arcades of the
early 19th century thanks to the ``fortuitous juxtaposition of shop signs and window
displays'', and it ``was raised by technology during the course of the century to the
level of a conscious principle of construction''. It is little wonder, then, that in the wake
of the First World War, Berlin Dadaists regarded montage as the visual form most
capable of expressing the traumatic impact of the industrialization of warfare, the
dehumanization of work, and the urbanization of everyday life (Doherty, 1997).
Montage embodied the kinaesthetic jolts, estrangements, and disfigurements of an
increasingly unhinged modernity. Modernity is not only a social formation convulsed
by shocks, however. It is also a social formation ruled over by the enchanted glow
of phantasmagoria and spectacles. ``It is the sun that never sets over the empire of
modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its
own glory'' (Debord, 1987, ½13). This is exemplified by the bewitching commodity
form, which bestowed the remnants of premodern aura on the `artificial kingdom'
892 M A Doel, D B Clarke

of manufactured goods, transforming an alienated world of disenchanted things into

a seductive space of enchanted kitsch (Merrin, 2005; Olalquiaga, 1999).
Agamben (2000) reminds us that Marx was in London when the first Universal
Exposition of 1851 was held in the iron-and-glass Crystal Palace in London's Hyde
Park. ``It is probable that Marx had in mind the impression felt in the Crystal Palace
when he wrote the chapter of Capital on commodity fetishism. ... The disclosure of
the commodity's `secret' was the key that revealed capital's enchanted realm to our
thoughtöa secret that capital always tried to hide by exposing it in full view'' (Agamben,
2000, page 75). To get to the heart of the matter, we need to lay bare the commodity's
`secret'. Commodities are not produced because they are useful. They are produced to
be sold. Their use values are secondary to their exchange values. Indeed, Baudrillard
(1975; 1981) argues that the moral imperative to `make use' and `have needs' functions
as an alibi for the systemic imperative to exchange and consume. For capitalists,
commodities are brought into existence to make money and to accrue value. ``Capital
is not interested in the particularities of the determinate transformation of material,
only in the reproduction of value'' (Arthur, 2001, page 40). So, where there may once
have been an apocryphal bartering of useful things (C ^ C), often mediated by the
lubricant of money (C ^ M ^ C), there is now only an imperative to make money
(M ^ M0 ). The medium (exchange value) has literally taken over the message (use
value), such that the expansion of value and the accumulation of capital are typically
mediated by the production of commodities (M ^ C ^ M0 ). The empty form of exchange,
exemplified by money, ``takes over from what it is supposed to mediate, reducing the
extremes to its supports in its activity, namely the making of money'' (Arthur, 2001,
page 35, emphasis in original). In other words, the content of M ^ C ^ M0 is neither the
production, circulation, and consumption of socially useful things nor the production,
realization, and accumulation of surplus value. Its content is an empty form: the
calculated transposition of heterogeneous terms. ``There is a void at the heart of
capitalism'', observes Arthur (2001, page 32). ``[C]ommodity exchange ... abstracts
from, or absents, the entire substance of use value.'' At the moment of exchange,
commodities have absolutely nothing in common other than their exchangeability. The
fact that exchange takes place testifies to the fact that the void, the empty form, is
not still but dynamic. This is why exchange never yields equilibrium. (And let us not
forget that further perturbation comes from the insatiable desire that satisfaction
guarantees and from the ineliminable excesses of surplus value.) In short, the commo-
dity's `secret' is neither transparency (`ˆ') nor phantasmagoria (`6ˆ') but montage
(dialectical `/ ' and deconstructive `X '). Like the map, the moment, and the image,
the commodity is dialectics at a standstill. This is why it suffices for Marx to open
Capital with ``an immense accumulation of commodities'', although the analysis imme-
diately settles upon a single commodity, the `unit' of this immense accumulation, which
halves together incompossible and antagonistic qualities that will inevitably come to rip
the capitalist world asunder: use value and exchange value, concrete labour and
abstract labour, value and surplus value, etc. Here, as elsewhere, everything hinges
on that which is halved together. Without montage there would be no exchange of
commodities, no accumulation of capital, and no critique of political economy.
Four questions immediately pose themselves. Why single out montage from the
disparate reserves of visual culture? How does montage inform contemporary human
geography? What is the relationship between montage and so-called nonrepresenta-
tional theory? And why does montage disclose an optical unconscious that plunges us
into obscenity? Each of these questions is addressed in turn and illustrated where
appropriate with stills from the films of Jim Jarmusch.
Afterimages 893

Vision thing
``The image's secret, like the secret of the commodity, has to do with the effaced
machinery of its production.''
Moore (2000, page 71)
A vast amount of scholarship on visual culture has disclosed innumerable ways of
looking, seeing, perceiving, representing, and abstracting, each of which is the effect
of a specific social and technical context (Evans and Hall, 1999; Fyfe and Law, 1988;
Jay, 1993; Kember, 1998; Latour and Weibel, 2002; Mirzoeff, 2002; Sturken and
Cartwright, 2001; Taylor, 1994). Given this heterogeneous body of work, it goes without
saying that one should not expect, say, cartographers, painters, photographers, scien-
tists, voyeurs, and writers to envision in the same way. Despite the physiology of the
eye and the optics of the lens, vision cannot be taken as given. Like other forms of
embodied and disembodied practice, vision is always a situated accomplishment real-
ized in singular contexts. Unsurprisingly, then, many human geographers have been
sensitive to the spatiality of vision, especially with regard to the tendency to privilege
the visual in ontology, epistemology, and methodology (Daniels, 1993; Rose, 2000;
Ryan, 1997; Thrift, 2004a).
In her consideration of the visual character of geography, Rose (2003, page 213) points
out that ``The visualities deployed by the production of geographical knowledges ... have
their foci, their zooms, their highlights, their blinkers and their blindnesses.'' What is
striking about these turns of phrase is that neither Rose nor her interlocutors comment
upon them (Rose et al, 2003). Rose's phraseology is a graphic illustration of a specif-
ically `cinematic unconscious' that pervades contemporary visual culture (Doel and
Clarke, 2002a). It also pervades human geography. For example, Entrikin (1991,
page 263) makes explicit reference to cinematography when he argues that ``different
elements move in and out of focus as we move between relatively centred and relatively
decentred points of view''. Similarly, both old-fashioned and newfangled approaches to
mental mapping, spatial cognition, and virtual environments focus on how a sequence
of viewsöand not just an arrangement of landmarksöcombine to provide a sense of
place (Golledge, 1992; Scho«lkopf and Mallot, 1995). Here, as elsewhere, vision is not
simply composed. It is articulated and entrained. ``Structured in mobility'', writes
Dubow (2004, page 270), ``the visual struggles to `take place' '' (compare Cresswell
and Dixon, 2002). Finally, Pile (2005) offers a psychogeographical analysis of the
`moods', `atmospheres', `structures of feeling', and `emotional work' of cities, drawing
out their dreamy, magical, and ghostly qualities with reference to a phantasmagoric
modernity that draws heavily on Benjamin and Freud.
In order to get beyond `gesturing around the visual', as Matless (2003) puts it, this
paper contributes to the analysis of contemporary visual culture through a conceptu-
alization of cinematic montage as the foundation of our `optical unconscious'. We refer
to an optical unconscious because that which renders visible never manifests itself
as such. ``While we remain attentive, fascinated, glued to what presents itself, we are
unable to see presence as such, since presence does not present itself, no more than
does the visibility of the visible'' (Derrida, 1981, pages 313 ^ 314, emphasis in original).
Crucially, ``The apparent immediacy of what seems to be given to present perception ... is
already shed as an effect, it falls: under the sway of a machinated structure that never
gives itself away in/to the present, which has nothing to do with it'' (Derrida, 1981,
page 308). This machinated structure is cinematic not only because of the dynamism
of the visible, but also because it links together heterogeneous movement-images
(Deleuze, 1986). Finally, we are able to claim that human geography has a cinematic
optical unconscious because the essence of cinema is montage, andöas we have
already seenömontage is indispensable to human geographers. From mapmaking
894 M A Doel, D B Clarke

to significance testing, and from the critique of political economy to satellite radar
interferometry, the myriad practices of human geographers confirm Lechte's (2003,
page 166) claim that montage expresses ``thought as well as action'' (compare Deleuze,
1986; 1989; Michaud, 2004).
The affinity between montage and geography remains secret despite the fact that film
has become a well-established area of geographical research (Aitken and Zonn, 1994;
Clarke, 1997; Cresswell and Dixon, 2002; Lefebvre, 2006; Lukinbeal and Zonn, 2004).
Indeed, human geographers have done much to advance film scholarship, especially
with regard to an understanding of the geography of filmöits production, distribution,
exhibition, and spectatorshipöand to an appreciation of the geography in filmöas
modes of documentation, fictionalization, representation, and simulation (Doel, 1999;
Hubbard, 2002; Lukinbeal, 2004). They have also demonstrated how the cinematic
experience has given rise to a host of reality effects, such as the engendering of
cinematic identities, the construction of urban screenscapes, and the remaking of the
`real' in the image of the `reel' (Craine and Aitken, 2004; Dixon and Grimes, 2004;
compare Barber, 2002; Fitzmaurice and Shiel, 2003). Human geographers have also
used films to illustrate a plethora of geographical concepts and concerns, from aliena-
tion to poststructuralism (Dixon and Jones, 1996; Gandy, 2003). Nevertheless, far less
attention has been paid to film form and the way in which it has come to act as
our optical unconscious. This neglect is significant not only because form structures
content, but also because forms possess their own historical and geographical specific-
ity. So, while much has been written about the geography of film and the geography in
film, the geography of film qua film remains largely unexplored (Clarke and Doel,
2005; Doel and Clarke, 2002b).
To cut to the chase, the essence of film qua film is articulated through its editingö
through the cross-referencing of the momentarily `framed', the contextual `out-of-frame',
and the expectant `yet-to-be-framed'. This cross-referencing can be either irregular
(a© la montage as conventionally understood, with its explosive clash of dialectically
charged images and surreal juxtaposition of ordinarily incompossible images: `montage
collision') or smooth ( a© la continuity editing, which links complementary images, such
as entrances/exits, actions/reactions, and causes/effects, into a seemingly seamless
whole: `montage rhythm'). However, the constitution of film as a fully fledged form
of visual culture was a contingent rather than a necessary event: a result of aleatory
encounter, not of teleological determination (Bowser, 1990; Burch, 1990; Elsaesser and
Barker, 1990; Lant, 1995). This is important because the geographical analysis of film
has worked on the erroneous assumption that film has certain inherent qualities, such as:
1. an ultrarealistic mode of representation (which thereby facilitates the conflation of
`real' and `reel' space); 2. a subject-centered diegesis (which implicates film in the constitu-
tion and negotiation of intersubjective identities, especially in terms of the dialectic of seen
and unseen, and of self and other); 3. a narrative form [in which meaning and sense prevail,
such that a film is presumed to be something that is essentially intelligible rather than
sensible, comprehended rather than felt (compare Deleuze, 1986; 1989; Shaviro, 1993;
Va«liaho, 2005)]; 4. an articulated depth (through which the two-dimensional screen opens
onto a three-dimensional scene); and 5. a suturing of the movement-image through editing
(through which the three-dimensional scene opens onto a dynamic, four-dimensional
space-and-time machine). Yet, none of these qualities is inherent to the medium. Moreover,
these five qualities have come to be associated with our world, which most human
geographers envision as an ultrarealistic, four-dimensional, dynamic space ^ time that
has meaning for us (compare Baudrillard, 1996; Smith with Doel, 2001). This is one of
the reasons why the spatial analysis of film qua film has significance far beyond media
studies and cultural geography.
Afterimages 895

Although it would be an exaggeration to claim that film has become the definitive
expression of contemporary visual practice, film has undoubtedly been treated as an
important, even exemplary, form of modern visual culture, particularly because of
its ability to abstract, manipulate, and reengineer the spatial and temporal registration
of events. For instance, Schivelbusch's (1988) study of the industrialization of light
in the 19th century culminates with film. Similarly, Kern's (1983, page 130) study of
the culture of time and space, over the period 1880 ^ 1918, argues that, ``of all the
technology that affected the pace of life, the early cinema most heightened public
consciousness of differential speeds.'' It not only reproduced the ``mechanization,
jerkiness, and rush of modern times'', but also expanded ``the sense of the present''
(Kern, 1983, page 70) by allowing one ``to splice open a moment and insert a number
of simultaneous activities'' (page 71). Christie (1994, page 33) even suggests that film
was the most accomplished expression of `vernacular relativity' for a mass audience.
Through the acceleration, deceleration, and reversal of action, film made the relativity
and plasticity of space ^ time tangible. Lury (2004) makes a similar observation in
relation to advertising logos such as the Nike Swoosh and Adidas stripes, which come
to life through the motion of innumerable fashion-conscious bodies.
Alluding to Proust and Bergson, Lury argues that an `illusion of the durable' (the
solidity of the brand, for instance) is conjured up through an orchestrated `spatialization
of time' in a multiplicity of interlocking media. ``The stripes on the legs of tracksuits,
the markings on socks, shorts, and caps are like the stripes and dots that marked
human limbs in the movement-study photography of nineteenth-century physiologist
Etienne-Jules Marey'' (Lury, 2004, page 387). However, the reality effect of these
movement-images is not simply the result of `tracing mechanisms' that are able to
capture the passing of otherwise lost time. Rather, it is expressed through an ``editing
of seeing'' (page 385). Reality is neither durable (an Ideal form, a still) nor ephemeral
(a passing form, a moving image). It is ``an effect produced by what provides the
motion'' (Derrida, 1981, page 309), ``a machination in which the present is no longer
anything but a whirligig'' (page 311). The real is laid on through ``the setting in motion
of a complex operation of differentiation by which the `given' is in fact produced as
material for transformation, and the `result' produced as the effect of a labour process''
(Lyotard, 1998, page 127). That the real appears to be given without being given
depends upon ``the reinforcement of the concealments by which the scene is put on
and the seduction operates'' (page 135).
What is interesting is not that the real is given, but that it is given in a particular
form. Actor-network theory is one attempt to describe the formation of that which
is given (Latour, 2005). According to Latour, the fact that social scientists seem
compelled to `jump' and `zoom' back and forth between incommensurable dimensions
(such as local ^ global, micro ^ macro, individual ^ society, interaction ^ framework,
event ^ structure, case ^ context, and time ^ space) is a sure sign that they have failed
to appreciate that all of these `dimensions', all of these `frames of reference', are created
and sustained through forms of `connection', `mediation', and `translation', whose
essential contiguity renders them commensurable. Rather than `jump' across abysses
( ^ ^ ^ ^ ) and `zoom' across dimensions (local ^ national ^ global ^ universal), Latour
`follows' the contiguous passage of innumerable mediators as they assemble, format,
and translate what will have been given. Everything is unfolded `side by side':
even `micro' and `macro', `big' and `little', `top' and `bottom', `space' and `time', and
`panopticon' and `oligopticon'. ``We all know this pretty well'', says Latour (2005,
page 186), ``since we have witnessed many cases where relative size has been instan-
taneously reversedöby strikes, revolutions, coups, crises, innovations, discoveries.''
What matters is not that something is given. What matters is how it is given.
896 M A Doel, D B Clarke

Consequently, ``it is this very framing activity, this very activity of contextualizing, that
should be brought into the foreground'', insists Latour (2005, page 186), ``and that ... cannot
be done as long as the zoom effect is taken for granted''.
Although montage does not feature explicitly in Latour's account, montage never-
theless clearly informs his `optical unconscious'önot only because actor-network
theory presents ``a trail of associations between heterogeneous elements'' (Latour,
2005, page 5, emphasis in original), but also because it ``pictures a world made of
concatenations of mediators where each point can be said to fully act'' (page 59,
emphasis in original). Accordingly, in his consideration of the difference between
relativism and relativity, Latour (1988, page 17) argues that ``There is no longer any
one frame that might be used as a rigid and stable reference, into which confidence is
vested; confidence is now put into the transversal link that allows all frames, no matter
how unstable and pliable, to be aligned .'' Similarly, Hayles (1993, page 77) astutely
observes that sense, meaning, and reference are accomplished and expressed through
`flickering signifiers' ( a© la Derrida's spectral play of diffërance, dissemination, and
supplementarity) rather than through `floating signifiers' ( a© la Lëvi-Strauss's inexhaust-
ible reserve of non-sense, the surfeit of langue over parole, and the excess of structure
over event and of form over content). Signifiers, like dimensions, are not cut off from
one another ( ^ ^ ). They cut across one another (XX ). The crisis of representation does
not amount to finding oneself cut off from the reality of the referent and trapped in
the prison house of language, but to finding oneself halved together in the place of
dissemination (Derrida, 1981). For, just as the flickering of movement-images can make
things appear durable, it can also make them appear ephemeral. In his discussion of
Op Art, for example, Rycroft (2005, page 362) notes the reversibility of form and
energy as ``the play of light on the surface of rock ... seemed to disintegrate the surface.''
Benjamin (1999, page 14) famously characterized the bourgeois world as ``the universe
of a phantasmagoria'' that could be critiqued only through an explosive form of `literary
montage' modelled on the cinema: ``to carry over the principle of montage into history.
That is, to assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely
cut components'' (page 460). Of all visual technologies, filmmaking is most concerned

Figure 1. Night on Earth (directed by Jim Jarmusch, 1992). ß Jim Jarmusch, reproduced with
permission of Locus Solus Inc.
Afterimages 897

with the sequencing of precisely cut components torn from their original contexts. This
sequencing fabricates a reality effect through which ``the cinematographic image itself
`makes' movement'' (Deleuze, 1989, page 156). Once assembled, a film does not re-present
a world that preexisted it. It presents a simulacrum. Obviously, these simulacral reality
effects are not confined to cinema (Baudrillard, 1994; Deleuze, 1990; 1994). To turn a street
corner, to blink, or to glance in a rear-view mirror is to experience the world through
montage (figure 1). All of which returns us to geography.

Afterimages ö resistance
``What does it mean to resist?''
Agamben (2002, page 318)
If cinematography and montage had any purchase on human geography, then that
should arguably have receded with the advent of nonrepresentational styles of thought
(Thrift, 2000). These styles of thought treat everything usually regarded as representa-
tional (words, concepts, ideas, perceptions, images) as events in their own right: `means
without ends' rather than media of re-presentation; `pure means' rather than vanishing
mediators. Hereinafter, constructivism and performativity take center stage. They
``transform the relations of representation against representing, against the universal-
izing conditions of exchange; representation held to use (a definition of Brechtian
distanciation), that is, to division, disunity, disturbance of the (social) contract (of
film)'' (Heath, 1981, page 242, emphasis in original). To simplify to the extreme, non-
representational styles of thought collapse the long-standing separation of the world
(reputedly over there, somewhere in the Real) from its re-presentation (supposedly over
here, somewhere in the imaginary and the symbolic). This collapse is one of Thrift's radical
gestures, one that many have found hard to swallowönot least because it seeks to free
thought from slavishly repeating what will have taken place out there in the world and
in so doing strives to bring thought to life. As with psychoanalysis, thought is taken to be
``a concrete event in the body, ... a material occasion'' (Ferrell, 1996, page 31, emphasis
in original). One is struck by thought. Thought is not a matter of reflection. It is the result
of an encounter. Hereinafter, one is forced to think through events of estrangement,
disjuncture, and disjointure. ``Anything can happen'', writes Auster (1992, page 160, empha-
sis in original). ``And one way or another, it always does'' (figure 2). In other words,
montage is the quintessential nonrepresentational image of thought.

Figure 2. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (directed by Jim Jarmusch, 1999). ß Jim Jarmusch,
reproduced with permission of Plywood Productions Inc.
898 M A Doel, D B Clarke

By refusing to succumb to the onto-theological faith in re-presentational second

comings (ie the dutiful copying in words, concepts, and pictures of revered originals,
such as being, identity, intention, reality, sense, truth, and value), nonrepresentational
styles of thought draw attention to the eventfulness of ``a moment-ary world ... which
must be acted into'' and ``not a contemplative world'' that should be held at a rever-
ential or critical distance (Thrift, 2000, page 217). Every moment is `side-shadowed'
(ie accompanied) by the virtual rather than `foreshadowed' (ie preempted) by the
possible (Deleuze, 1994). Moments do not emerge from the future and come to rest
in the past (possibility ! actuality ! memory). They precipitate out of the differential
relations of creative encounters. Past, present, and future happen once and for all, as
one of the tribes inhabiting Borges's fictive world of Tlo«n appreciates: ``the present
is undefined and indefinite, the future has no reality except as present hope, and the
past has no reality except as present recollection'' (Borges, 1999, page 74). It is little
wonder, then, that nonrepresentational styles of thought should have moved so rapidly
with their `simulacra' and `pure means' onto the processual terrain of actions, situa-
tions, events, praxis, performance, and phro¬nesis ö``a commitment to opening up the
moment'' (Thrift, 2003, page 2023) through ``effectivity rather than representation''
(2000, page 216, emphasis in original). After the decades-long struggle between struc-
ture and agency within human geography, it would appear that everything is finally
resolving itself in and through practice.
Nonrepresentational styles of thought invest in the conviction that the world is not
a ready-made that can be counted on and reflected upon. It is an event, a happen-
stance, a taking place. What takes place, however, is not arbitrary, as eventfulness is
increasingly anticipated by a plethora of more or less imperceptible `performative
infrastructures' (from clocks and timetables to computer software and artificial intelli-
gence) that function as a situational and `technological unconscious' (Thrift, 2003;
2004a; 2005; 2006). Indeed, `performative infrastructures' are always already at work in
the technological unconscious (Clough, 2000). Nevertheless, as eventfulness remains open
(not least to the differential and undecidable play of iterability and supplementarity), it
can be neither fully anticipated nor entirely accounted for. Events remain open, actions
exceed their effects, and practices are not simply matters of fact (compare Latour, 2005,
on matters of concern).
The turning away from representation is a turning towards materialism. After words
there is not silence. After words there are events. What have not been adequately
addressed, however, are the afterimages of this turn: save for the shifting of visual practice
towards a fully ``kinaesthetic experience of being in the world'' (Rycroft, 2005, page 368).
To put it bluntly, how should the nonrepresentational öeventfulnessöbe seen? With the
collapse of the critical distance that formally enabled the scene to be laid on, does
the nonrepresentational become unpresentable and obscene (ie enigmatic, sublime, and
transparent) or does it open onto an altogether different scene (such as Agamben's
concept of `imagelessness' or Benjamin's notion of the `optical unconscious')?
Now, in turning towards nonrepresentational styles of thought and action, Thrift
(2003; 2004a; 2004b) has drawn attention to their political import: the politics of affect,
the politics of disclosure, the politics of intercession, the politics of passing, the politics
of readiness, the politics of witnessing, etc. He wants to shake things up. He wants to
open up possibilities. He wants to resist the automatic (ie habitual, instinctual, and
programmatic) reproduction of space. For Agamben (2002, page 318), resistance
``means de-creating what exists, de-creating the real, being stronger than the fact
in front of you.'' Resistance is not limited, selective, and reserved. To the contrary,
resistance faces down existence and reality as such. On each and every occasion,
one must be able to face down what is a matter of fact. One must be able to revoke
Afterimages 899

one's suspension of disbelief, so that a portion of the world as it is given to us can

be given back (Baudrillard, 1996). Resistance begins with subtraction rather than
sublation, and with seduction rather than production. It is not surprising, then, that
Agamben should pose the problem of resistance in the context of cinema, and that he
should do so with reference to Debord's films and the `pure means' of montage.
Through the juxtaposition of differentially charged images, the force of disjuncture
opens up a supplementary dimension amid everything that appears to be fully and
irrevocably given (compare Foucault, 1986; Lefebvre, 1991; Tschumi, 1994). This is why
montage is the essential gesture of nonrepresentational styles of thought and action. It
makes the Open palpable and formlessness tangible (Bois and Krauss, 1997; Deleuze,
1989). ``What are phenomena rescued from?'', asks Benjamin (1999, page 473): ``their
`enshrinement as heritage'.öThey are saved through the fissure within them.'' This
fissure ``explodes the homogeneity of the epoch, interspersing it with ruins öthat is,
with the present'' (page 474). This fissureöso beloved by dialecticians, semioticians,
and poststructuralistsöis montage. Every moment is a meanwhile and a meantime, and
the passage of time is lived as duration rather than succession (Bergson, 1999; Deleuze,
1991). Through montage, eventfulness unhinges space ^ time and derails the seemingly
smooth operation of the machination by which reality is laid on. In short, resistance
proliferates `ands' and `buts' amid everything that happens.
Now, while it is true that montage can be put to work in a variety of ways, it is
important to realize that montage qua montage is essentially nonrepresentational. Not
only is there a fissure of formless non-sense before there is sense, but this fissure is
ineliminable. Consequently, any discursive apparatus that attempts to withdraw sense
from non-sense can do so only by opening up the fissure of non-sense in other
domains. Of all forms of montage, it is perhaps photomontage that has been the
most successful in putting montage to work in the service of sense. For example,
many geographers will be familiar with John Heartfield's subversion of National
Socialist propaganda, Peter Kennard's critique of the ideology of nuclear deterrence,
and London Dockland's Community Poster Project (Bird, 1993; Daniels, 1993). It
would be tempting to draw a parallel here between photomontage and continuity
editing as both ostensibly seek to muffle the explosive potential of montage through
the imposition of sense, were it not for the fact that, from George Grosz and John
Heartfield to Owen Logan and Klaus Staeck, photomontage has also been informed
by Dadaism and Surrealism. Every combination of images exceeds the calculus of the
real and the rational. Photomontage reveals not only that actuality is constructed, that
sense is produced, and that consent is manufactured, but also that they are fissured
by formlessness, non-sense, and eventfulness.
No matter how much it may be burdened with sense, every combination of images
bears witness to the Open. So, despite being put in the service of so many ends,
montage is essentially a means without ends. While sense and reference are temporarily
withdrawn from the Open, what return eternally with the cut of montage are chance,
divergence, and the improbable (Badiou, 2000). So, MacCabe (1974) is right to criticize
Eisenstein's na|« ve opposition between unequivocal representations shot from particular
points of view (the Real as fully seen) and the equivocal juxtaposition of representa-
tions to produce an excess that is nonrepresentable, as there is neither an objective
point of view nor a fixed reality, but he is wrong to limit the conflicted articulation
of the Real (the Open) to a dialectical contradiction, as the fissure can be infini-
tely ramified. Image is more than dialectics at a standstill. It is dissemination at a
standstill.
The centrality of montage to nonrepresentational styles of thought öie those
approaches that favour the excess of practice and eventfulness to the matter of fact;
900 M A Doel, D B Clarke

a surplus that is by definition not only virtual but also probing, critical, and resistant; a
dangerous supplement that causes presence to desist (Derrida, 1989) öis well demon-
strated by Agamben's (2000, page 58) notion of `gesture'. ``[G]esture is the exhibition of
a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such.'' For Agamben (2002),
the essential cinematic gesture is montage, since it makes visible the process by which
film is laid on. The gesture of montage has two aspects: stoppage and repetition. Like
the twofold nonoriginary process of differing and deferring that is expressed through the
supplemental play of diffërance, montage expresses the twofold process of stoppage and
repetition. The essential gesture of film is not the repetition of stills, each of which is
ordinarily singled out through a minimal difference so that it blends into the others to give
a semblance of true motion. ``[I]f the whole is not giveable, it is because it is the Open, and
because its nature is to change constantly, or to give rise to something new'' (Deleuze,
1986, page 9). As Descombes (1980, page 154) explains: ``The more perfect the repetition
(as in the case of twins or mass-produced objects), the less a rationalist philosopher is
able to tell where the difference lies . ... Repetition should therefore cease to be defined
as the return of the same through the reiteration of the identical; on the contrary, it is the
production (in both senses of the word: to bring into existence, to show) of difference''
(emphasis in original).
Cinematic repetition foregrounds the production of difference rather than the
reiteration of the given and the return of the same. Cinema allows the event to be
abstracted from its habitual flow, so it becomes a material to be engineered: stopped,
expanded, diminished, reversed, accelerated, decelerated, cut, spliced, transformed, etc.
Hereinafter, ``All identities are only simulated, produced as an optical `effect' by the
more profound game of difference and repetition'' (Deleuze, 1994, page xix) (figure 3).

Figure 3. Night on Earth (directed by Jim Jarmusch, 1992). ß Jim Jarmusch, reproduced with
permission of Locus Solus Inc.

Through cutting, crosscutting, and recutting, montage is a form of difference-

producing repetition that enables film to express the characteristics of a qualitative
multiplicity (Deleuze, 1991). With each cut, the whole changes. Like practice, eventful-
ness, and resistance, montage does not consist in anything. It has a certain dësistance
that does not so much negate a stance, as uproot and disseminate the whole series of
stances. In other words, like practice, eventfulness, and resistance, the cinematic cut
Afterimages 901

cannot be counted upon to still life and mortify time. Montage cannot keep still. Its
cuts are inherently excessive and unstable. Indeed, we wager that no one has ever seen
a still image.
``[R]epetition is not the return of the identical; it is not the same as such that
returns. The force and the grace of repetition, the novelty it brings us, is the return
as the possibility of what was. Repetition restores the possibility of what was,
renders it possible anew. ... Here lies the proximity of repetition and memory.
Memory cannot give us back what was, ... memory restores possibility to the
past. ... [M]emory makes the unfulfilled into the fulfilled, and the fulfilled into
the unfulfilled . ... [I]t is that which can transform the real into the possible and the
possible into the real'' (Agamben, 2002, pages 315 ^ 316).
If repetition opens things up (to dësistance, diffërance, and dissemination) then
stoppage hollows them out (see figure 3). ``To bring the [image] to a stop is to pull it
out of the flux of meaning, to exhibit it as such . ... [T]he image worked by repetition
and stoppage is a means, a medium, that does not disappear in what it makes visible. It
is what I would call a `pure means', one that shows itself as such. The image gives itself
to be seen instead of disappearing in what it makes visible'' (Agamben, 2002, pages
317 ^ 318). Unlike other histrionic gestures so familiar to early film audiences, the
close-upöespecially of the human faceöserved as the exemplary cinematic gesture
and the definitive presentation of a `pure means'. Indeed, the close-up dramatizes the
two aspects of montage: repetition is the constructive aspect; stoppage is the suspense-
ful aspect. ``[S]toppage ... is the power to interrupt, the `revolutionary interruption' of
which Benjamin spoke'' (Agamben, 2002, page 315).
Repetition differentiates: it differs and defers by way of the Open (Deleuze, 1994;
compare Derrida, 1978). This is why film and the cinematic unconscious are essentially
nonrepresentational, and why they are irreducibly bound up with resistance and
dësistance. Like Beckett and Kafka, montage expresses an unhinged world of `ands'
and `buts', an eventful world that sweeps up being into becoming. Benjamin first
recognized this supplementary dimension, where events of formless non-sense exceed
matters of fact, in the prints of 19th-century stills photography: although it would be
better to speak of a `dissimulated dimension' than of a `lost dimension' (compare
Lyotard, 1990; Virilio, 1991).
``No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his
subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the
tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now, with which reality has so to
speak seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy
of that long-forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently that we, looking
back, may rediscover it. For it is another nature that speaks to the camera than
to the eye: other in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness
gives way to a space informed by the unconscious . ... It is through photography
that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we
discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis'' (Benjamin, 1985,
page 243).
Having demonstrated the key connections between critical human geography,
montage, and the optical unconscious, we now need to set out the kind of geog-
raphy into which this nonrepresentational image of thought plunges. Having turned
away from the illusory desire to re-present, we ask where does the conjunction of
process, practice, eventfulness, resistance, and dësistance lead us? This question can
no longer be avoided.
902 M A Doel, D B Clarke

Pornogeography
``Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre,
no more illusion, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible,
exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication . ...
It is no longer the obscenity of the hidden, the repressed, the obscure, but that of
the visible, the all-too-visible, the more-visible-than-visible.''
Baudrillard (1988, pages 21 ^ 22)
The comeuppance of the previous sections is this: montage produces and exceeds
matters of fact. In each and every domain, that which is given is given through an
assemblage of views, an assemblage whose cuts ensure that what is given remains open.
For many, the world as montage is especially associated with the advent of digital
technologies, flickering signifiers, and virtual realities in the latter part of the 20th
century. However, we do not have to wait for digital technology to discover montage at
work in the world. The enchanted display of mass-produced commodities, the seductive
self-referentiality of full-length department-store mirrors, and the enormous popular-
ity of the stereoscope were all inherently obscene forms of montage (Crary, 1990;
Olalquiaga, 1999).
Obscenity is perfectly illustrated by the Paris Morgue, which became a place of
public spectacle and voyeuristic delight in the late 19th century, with its succession
of unidentified bodies and murder victims displayed on marble slabs behind a large,
glass window for public viewing. What began as a matter-of-fact civic duty to identify
the anonymous dead turned into one of the most popular forms of entertainment in
Paris, with some well-publicized corpses attracting up to 150 000 visitors (Schwartz,
1995). As with hyperrealist art, the public went en masse ``to see an astounding
thing: an image where there is nothing to see'' (Baudrillard, 1988, page 31, emphasis
in original). This form of obscenity, with its seductive deployment of matters of fact,
dominated late 19th-century culture and provided the context within which the
modern optical unconscious was formed (Benjamin, 1985; Krauss, 1994).
There are, however, two forms of obscenity. On the one hand, there is the obscenity
of viewing from a distance (for example, Bird's-eye view, God-trick, and Panopticon).
On the other hand, there is the obscenity of immersing the viewer into the scene (for
example, Panorama, stereoscope, and digital hyperspace). The incompleteness and
insatiability of looking (Schaulust) mean that both forms of obscenity are compelled
to see less and less: one by pulling too far away, the other by pressing too far in.
Consequently, it is simply not true that everything is produced, constructed, and
assembled, that everything is given to be seen. By focusing on the `mode of production'
(of truth, power, reality, desire, knowledge, meaning, value, etc), human geography has
blinded itself to the other half of the game: the `mode of disappearance'. For there is
always a double game of production and seduction, construction and deconstruction,
assembly and disassembly, and obscenity and imagelessness (Baudrillard, 1990; Virilio,
1991; 1994). Visual culture has always been duplicitous (Latour and Weibel, 2002;
Lyotard, 1990; Schwartz, 1996; Stafford, 1994).
Can we conceive of a more positive form of obscenity? For Agamben (2002,
page 319), there are two ways to make visible the fact that there is nothing to see.
On the one hand, ``pornography and advertising [act] as though there were always
something more to be seen, always more images behind the images.'' This produces
a vertiginous effect akin to the facing off of mirrors (Kearney, 1988). On the other
hand, it is possible ``to exhibit the image as image and thus to allow the appearance
of `imagelessness' '' (Agamben, 2002, page 319).
Afterimages 903

Figure 4. Down by Law (directed by Jim Jarmusch, 1986). ß Jim Jarmusch, reproduced with
permission of Black Snake Inc.

In the film Down By Law (directed by Jarmusch, 1986), Jack, Zack, and Roberto find
themselves sharing a window-less prison cell. After a while, Roberto uses a piece of
charcoal to `make' a window on one of the walls (figure 4).
For Jack, the window is obscene. It cannot but refer to that which it ostensibly
lacks: a view. The obscene image presents a palpable absence. Like the sublime, which
also presents the unpresentable, the obscene renders absence as a force of seduction.
For Jack a window without a view is far worse than a room without a view. For
Roberto, by contrast, the window is simply imageless. It lacks nothing. ``It means
only what it is. Nothing more, nothing less'' (Auster, 1982, page 148). The difference
between obscenity and imagelessness is beautifully encapsulated in Roberto's pointed
question to the disgruntled Jack: ``Do you say in English `I look at the window' or
do you say in English `I look out the window?' '' Jack replies: ``In this case Bob, I'm
afraid you've got to say `I look at the window'.'' Later in the film, the difference
between obscenity and imagelessness is reworked when Jack, Zack, and Roberto
escape from their cell and seek temporary refuge in a cabin that has the same set-up
as the prison cell (figure 5). This time, however, it is the real window that is obscene.
It makes the absence of freedom tangible.

Figure 5. Down by Law (directed by Jim Jarmusch, 1986). ßJim Jarmusch, reproduced with
permission of Black Snake Inc.
904 M A Doel, D B Clarke

Figure 6. Down by Law (directed by Jim Jarmusch, 1986). ß Jim Jarmusch, reproduced with
permission of Black Snake Inc.

The three escapees eventually encounter a road, and Jarmusch shows each of its
two seemingly identical directions in turn whilst the protagonists repeatedly look this
way and that way in utter disbelief (figure 6).
The uncanny duplicity of the two directions is achieved by editing the film in such a
way that it appears as though we are cutting between two opposing points of view,
when in actual factöand unbeknownst to the audienceöthe background remains the
same. Instead of cutting between different images (as in conventional forms of mont-
age), in this case a single image is cut so that it becomes estranged from itself. Since
each is one way and another, this way and that way, it frustratres ``the serialising of
segments cut out of so-called `reality' '' (Lyotard, 1998, page 148). What this reveals
is the fact that the cut produces a difference-producing repetition irrespective of
the number of segments involved. ``[T]he phenomena of montage are not limited to
a general articulation of the shots; they manifest themselves within the isolated image,
in the very continuity of the shot'', says Michaud (2004, page 286). ``In its deployment,
the image collides with the boundaries of the frame, which it explodes in order to
propagate itself through a dynamic impetus.'' Montage opens onto a qualitative multi-
plicity before it leads into a quantitative multiplicity. The absolute identity of the two
directions suspends reference and in so doing reality itself becomes imageless. It slips
into the guise of a `floated signified ' (Deleuze, 1990, page 49), which complements that
better known nonrepresentational figure: the so-called `floating signifier'.

Figure 7. Down by Law (directed by Jim Jarmusch, 1986). ß Jim Jarmusch, reproduced with
permission of Black Snake Inc.
Afterimages 905

``It is necessary to understand that the two series are marked, one by excess, the
other by lack, and that the two determinations are interchanged without ever
reaching equilibrium. What is in excess in the signifying series is literally an
empty square and an always displaced place without an occupant. What is lacking
in the signified series is a supernumeracy and non-situated given ö an unknown,
an occupant without a place, or something always displaced'' (Deleuze, 1990,
page 50).
Through the stoppage and repetition of two heterogeneous series, the scene in figure 6
is spontaneously derealized and actuality is transformed into an event. Similarly, the whole
film ends with Jack and Zack parting company in the face of imagelessness (figure 7).

Conclusion
``[T]he very dream of ... a total space had been definitively abolished by cinema.''
Kwinter (2001, page 120)
Each and every frame (image) refers to that which is out of frame, but the frame is
necessarily twofold. On the one hand, the frame refers to what is around the frame,
a spatially and temporally contiguous `unseen' that may, in its turn, subsequently enter
the frame and so become actualized as a seen/scene (for example, panning and track-
ing shots). On the other hand, the frame also refers to the absolute proximity of
noncontiguous spaces and times, a manifold and inexhaustible `unseen' that can never
be actualized as a framed seen/scene, but which nevertheless is pullulated and ramified
to infinity. There is ``an infinity of different angles, an infinity of different distances,
mise-en-sce©nes, perspectives, possible combinations with other objects, and positions
in the [untotalizable] chain of montage'' (Kwinter, 2001, page 120). The frame is the
marketplace for images, while the cut is the currency that enables them to be put into
circulation. The event takes place according to the four dimensions of stoppage,
repetition, frame, and cut.
The essential thing about film, then, is neither the framed image nor the moving
image (content), but that which comes between the frames: the cut (form). With the
cinema, reality is seen to stutter. A medium that stutters is shocking not only because it
breaks up its reality effects, but also because it dramatizes the fact that reality is not
represented; it is mediated. Reality does not appear before us as a ready-made; it is
produced in the most literal sense of the word. The real is rendered visible, caused to
appear, and made to appear ( pro-ducere). In other words, ``There is no `objective'
situation of cinema'' (Badiou, 2003, page 109).
In the first two decades of film exhibition, the main scourge of animated photog-
raphy, according to the trade journals, was neither the failure to render true motion
nor waning public interest in living pictures. It was flicker öthe trace of the cut
par excellence (Gunning, 2004). The war against flicker was finally won in the late
1900s when filmmakers adopted the rate of twenty-four frames per second. It was only
with the advent of continuity editing and narrative cinema, however, that the twofold
disjointure of the out-of-frame was finally tamed: an obviously disjointed `seen'
was transformed into a seemingly continuous `scene' by constantly `recentering' the
observer's point of view (Heath, 1981). Thereafter, the explosive potential of the out-of-
frameöthe ``omnipotence of montage'' (Deleuze, 1989, page 225)öwas barely felt
beyond the narrow confines of avant-garde filmmaking and experimental cinema
(Gunning, 1990). For more than a century, film has effectively functioned as a `smooth
space' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988). That smoothing has become the substrate of our
optical unconscious, producing ``a continuity in the passage from one place to another,
from one moment to another'' (Deleuze, 1989, page 225). Consider the gulf separating
906 M A Doel, D B Clarke

the urban experience described by Benjamin (1999) and that described by Debord
(1987). For Benjamin, the city is shocking. For Debord, it is an-aesthetic. Consequently,
few human geographers are aware of the multiplicity of cuts through which the Real is
made to appear (although see Doel, 2001; Olsson, 1991). ``The world comprises not
pregiven, ideal Forms [stills] but metastable shapes [movement-images] floating in a
river of ever-generating differences'' (Kwinter, 2001, page 24).
When we engage with visual ontology (modes of appearance and disappearance),
visual methodology (the techniques of the observer), and visual epistemology (the
making of sense in the world), human geographers need to appreciate that the Real
(so-called) is neither a still nor a moving image. What is more, ``that festival of affects
known as film'' (Barthes, 1987, page 345) has nothing whatsoever to do with represen-
tation. The Realöas a mode of appearance and disappearance and as a mode of
production and seductionöis the effect (or, if you prefer, the affect) of this optical
unconscious. The Real is an expression of a cinematic unconscious. It is articulated
(compare Agamben, 2002; Deleuze, 1993, 1994; Derrida, 1981; 1986; 1989; Lyotard,
1990).
``If things endure, or if there is duration in things, the question of space will need to
be reassessed on new foundations. For space will no longer simply be a form of
exteriority, a sort of screen that denatures duration, an impurity that comes to
disturb the pure, a relative that is opposed to the absolute: Space itself will need
to be based in things, in relations between things and between durations, to belong
itself to the absolute, to have its own `purity' '' (Deleuze, 1991, page 49).
Such is the Bergsonian universe: ``at each moment, everything tends to be spread
out into an instantaneous, indefinitely divisible continuum, which will not prolong itself
into the next instant, but will pass away, only to be reborn in the following instant, in
a flicker or shiver that constantly begins again. It would be sufficient to push this
movement of expansion (dëtente) to its limit in order to obtain space'' (Deleuze, 1991,
page 87, emphasis in original). When Benjamin (1999) characterized the modern world
as `phantasmagoric', when Debord (1987) defined consumer capitalism as a `society of
the spectacle', when Tschumi (1994) affirmed an architecture of `disjunction', when
Barber (2002) wrote of `projected cities', and when Latour (2005) spoke of a social
`zoom', these were no mere metaphors. In summary, then, we hope to have demon-
strated that human geographers can no longer take their optical unconscious for
granted. The world that we encounter and apprehend is a montage effectöimageless
and obscene.
Acknowledgements. We are very grateful to Jim Jarmusch, Black Snake Inc., Locus Solus Inc., and
Plywood Productions Inc. for permission to reproduce frame-pulls in this paper, and for the
assistance of Bart Walker, Carter Logan, and Stacey Smith at Creative Artists Agency and
Exoskeleton Inc. for facilitating both this permission and for providing a selection of approved
stills from the films. We are also grateful to the referees who kindly commented on an earlier
version of the paper.
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