Expanded Subjectivity as Cinema’s Self-Reflection: Affective Images in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now

Abstract

Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) – a psychological thriller – in terms of its narrative is a drama of loss, grief and acceptance, but it is also a highly reflexive film because it takes perception and interpretation as its central themes. The article discusses the curious relationship between the film’s diegetic reality and the cinematic apparatus that represents this reality. At the heart of the matter lies the issue of expressing and extending subjectivity through an (audio) visual medium, the representation of thought processes as mental and technological reconstructions of personal experiences, perceptions and feelings. The initial and central trope in question is the cinematic form and formation of memory, or more precisely a temporally expanded sense of memory: visions of the past, the future, and the present. I argue that the protagonist’s ability to unwittingly see beyond the here and now is not only a reflection of trauma processing, but also analogous to the mental processes of the spectator, his or her successful or failed understanding of the film’s complex stream of images. I try to show that cinema – by exploiting the potential of the conventions of continuity editing – is capable of employing traits of subjectivity without creating a unified fictional narrator character or making perceptual focalization as an explanation for the ambiguous meanings of representation.