Doubling, Distance and Instruments of Perception

Abstract

This chapter is concerned less with doubling that is explicit, an element of image-content, than with the way instruments of scene- focalization and (dis-)colouration promote a dual consciousness: the knowledge that one both ‘is’ and ‘is not’ capable of such vision, much as Francis in Egoyan’s Exotica (1994) both ‘does’ and ‘does not’ touch. The double is implicit as the locus of a double vision. The modernist clouding of vision matches the hand’s sensing of the object’s taboo status. Various instruments, fruits of modernity, may contribute to the modernist epistemological uncertainties they also resolve, creating crises that justify their own intervention. One is the zoom lens, considered here as used in Satyajit Ray’s Charulata (1964) and Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1973). Although the zoom transports one to another place, one’s sliding arrival there creates a modernist sense that one still could be (as one still is in fact) elsewhere, only one sense having left the point of departure. With regard to Wim Wenders’ Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire) (1987), the ‘double vision’ correlated in the previous chapter with its use of superimposition and ‘phantom hapticity’ results here from its oscillation between black-and-white and colour.