The hypothesis of the hidden painting

Abstract

Reality, experience, are of the order of the discontinuous, the fragmented. From these pieces of perception, the sequence of images-in-movement is used to organize a narrative, a script that disguises the horror of the gaze, the real behind the continuity. Imaginary or fantasy, which status should we give to these sequences? Playing with speed and with movement, the filmic production of David Lynch restores disarticulated fantasmatic series, referring to the original meaning of fantasm as an iconic image. On the other hand, Raul Ruiz seems to make rebuffs from the phantasmal images of Klossowsky, revealing the missing element in the set of empty and suspended icons we find in the “hypothesis of the stolen painting”. Lure or necessity, the construction of an image-movement as the basis of a narrative allows to integrate the experience, including that of trauma, deploying also instances of social recognition, an individual novel, collective myths, of a culture and a history. It is from this idea on the status of the iconic image in cinema, and its link to the fantasy and the civilizing tale, that we will analyze the absent character in Haneke’s Hidden (2005).