![]() ![]() ![]() In a contemporary spin on the baroque allegory of life-as-dream and of life-as-stage, and in a play on the mise en abyme of illusion, overexposure thus simultaneously reveals illusion and blinds us to it, perhaps pointing to the core of the moviegoer’s desire. If such films deliberately make gazing unbearable, sustained overexposure in contemporary film can also function on a more metafilmic level, drawing our attention to the blind spot within our gaze. At its most extreme, it consists in exposing both the characters and the viewers to light as an actual source of, and metaphorical expression for, searing pain. In contrast to this structural reality of exposure, overexposure is immediately perceived as an anomaly in filmic enunciation, and is thus immediately “significant.” When realistically motivated, it simultaneously functions as a metaphor for intense forms of exposure and revelation: used “objectively”, it connotes the other in terms of the magical, the transcendent, the other-worldly used “subjectively”, it connotes altered states of consciousness (dreams, coma, madness). 1Exposure in its double meaning lies at the heart of the cinematographic experience: without lighting, there could be no “moving images”: if nothing were exposed to our gaze as moviegoers, and if we were not exposed to images, there would be no viewing at all. ![]()
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