Abstract

This paper explores notions of realism, evidence, undecidability and faith in the context of our relationship with images following the digital revolution and the transition from a culture of analog photographic and filmic records to the new space-time of virtual reality. The first part of the paper contrasts the phenomenological account of photographic images and the post-structuralist elaboration of an aesthetics of spectrality in the works of Roland Barthes, Deleuze and Derrida. Through the comparative analysis of films exploring processes of memory and time perception in relation to photographic and mental images, such as Chris Marker’s La Jetée, Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the argument highlights the emergence of complex storytelling strategies which challenge our assumptions about the objectivity and mechanical functioning of the recording camera. In the second part of the paper, I discuss the consequences of the meta-narrative use of theatrical mise-en-scène and its avatars to bring into view the shared spectrality of the recording camera and of the human psyche in the age of virtual reality. Alan Resnais’s You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet, Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love and 2046 provide the case studies for a reassessment of the evolution of film theory from a culture of epistemic knowledge and technological progress, to a culture of belief and metaphysical exploration of the human condition as both limited by death and open to non-linear processes of haunting.