VOLUME 3 ISSUE 1

The International Journal of the

Image
__________________________________________________________________________

Parallel Images
The Real, the Ghost and the Cinema
ZANGER ANAT YONAT

ontheimage.com

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE IMAGE

http://ontheimage.com/
First published in 2013 in Champaign, Illinois, USA
by Common Ground Publishing
University of Illinois Research Park
2001 South First St, Suite 202
Champaign, IL 61820 USA
www.CommonGroundPublishing.com
ISSN: 2154-8560
2013 (individual papers), the author(s)
2013 (selection and editorial matter) Common Ground
All rights reserved. Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review as permitted under
the applicable copyright legislation, no part of this work may be reproduced by any process without written
permission from the publisher. For permissions and other inquiries, please contact
<cg-support@commongroundpublishing.com>.
The International Journal of the Image is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal.

Parallel Images: The Real, the Ghost and the

Cinema
Zanger Anat Yonat, Tel Aviv University, Israel

Abstract: A film asks its viewers to believe that the filmic world, a world of light and shadow,
is real. As Christian Metz observed in 1979, one of the main paradoxes in cinema is that
between absence and presence. This is perhaps the reason why contemporary cinema has to be
very careful about the way in which it employs possible worlds in order to build and rebuild
its imagined world. This paper explores the ways in which images are engaged in constructing
and deconstructing cinematic worlds. First, I will discuss a few types of labyrinths and rhizomes
in Eschers graphic works. Then, I will introduce two films and their various modes of engaging
ghost pictures: Michelangelo Antonionis Blow-Up (1966) and Cronenbergs Videodrome
(1982). Through these films, I will tackle the issue of parallel cinematic worlds. Could it be
that cinema-including postmodernist cinema-has not yet renounced its symbiosis with the
real?
Keywords: Moving Images, Labyrinth, Rhizome and Parallel Worlds, The Real in Cinema,
Postmodernism, Escher

For postmodernist fiction is full of paradoxical and labyrinthine spaces

Brian McHale (1992: 157)

et us imagine that we are about to enter an entirely new space. It might be M.C. Eschers
Another World II. It might be Jorge Luis Borges Tion, Uqbar, Orbis or Tertius or Italo
Calvinos Anastasia or Fantasliea. But the feature shared by all these versions of space
is the impossibility of their coexistence with each other in terms of familiar cognitive,
temporal or spatial codes. In all fiction, Borges tells us in The Garden of Forking
Paths (1964 [1956]: 26),
when a man is faced with alternatives, he chooses one at the expense of the others; in the
almost unfathomable Tsui Pen, he choosessimultaneouslyall of them. He thus creates
various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times.1
Let us imagine that we have entered one of these impossible spaces, that we are confronted
with a gardenthe garden of forking pathsand that within this garden we find, as in George
Cantors Chinese box of infinities, Eschers Waterfall. What else?
What is wrong with this picture? We may observe that in the spaces we have just referred
to, individual elements are not confounded with one another. Echoing the labyrinth theme,
Eschers Waterfall (1961), Borges Garden of Forking Paths (1964 [1956]) and Calvinos
Invisible Cities (1978 [1972]) all involve parallel worlds that produce cognitively impossible
1

Richard Burgin (1968) observes that Eschers work shares some of Borges themes.

The International Journal of the Image

Volume 3, 2013, www.ontheimage.com, ISSN 2154-8560
Common Ground, Zanger Anat Yonat, All Rights Reserved, Permissions:
cg-support@commongroundpublishing.com

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE IMAGE

pictures. Unlike the classic Greek labyrinthwhere Theseus escapes from the maze by following
Ariadnes thread from one point in the structure to anotherthe labyrinth of Escher, Borges,
or Calvino has no structure or center. It is a rhizome in which multiplicity connects one point
to another. If the classic labyrinth might be challenged by its own structure, the structure of
the rhizome is that of a non-hierarchical network of all kinds. As described in Deleuze and
Guattaris A Thousand Plateaus, The rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying
system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automation, defined
solely by a circulation of states (1987: 21).
Accelerated by the development of electronic and digital media, the labyrinth and the rhizome
are among the prevailing themes of contemporary culture and have come to dominate postmodernist aesthetics.2 Contemporary cinema has deployed various kinds of labyrinths. It is my
contention, however, that because of its parallel, non-hierarchical structure, the rhizome is
rarely to be found in so-called postmodernist cinema. This itself may sound like a paradox
but, as I hope to show, this principle is the ghost behind the scenes that keeps the films going
on.
Ernest Gombrich (1961) identifies Escher as a contemporary artist whose prints are meditations on image reading.3 I want to elaborate on this observation and trace its implementation
in postmodernist cinema. To do so, I will first characterize Eschers labyrinth and then trace
the ways in which Escherian labyrinths have been recorded in the cinematic medium. As the
objects of my scrutiny, I have chosen two of Eschers works: Reptiles (1943), Relativity (1953),
and two films: Antonionis Blow-Up (1967) and Cronenbergs Videodrome (1982). Following
Christian Metz (1979), I intend while analyzing these texts to trace the paradox of presence/absence as inscribed in the cinematic image. As I will show in this paper, Escher developed at least
two kinds of labyrinths, but only one has so far inscribed itself in postmodernist cinema.4

Eschers Meditations on Image Reading

M.C. Escher introduces Reptiles (1943) first under the category of the regular division of a
plane and secondly as the sub-category of story-pictures.5 Escher describes the story of the
Reptiles as the life-cycle of a little alligator as it climbs up the back of a book on zoology and
works his laborious way up the slippery slope of a set square to the highest point of his existence.
Then [] he goes downhill again, [] taking up once more his function as an element of surface
division (Escher, 1992 (1959: 10).6 Martin Gardner, citing Escher, adds:
The border line between two adjacent shapes is a complicated business. On either side of it,
simultaneously, a recognizability takes shape. But the human eye and mind cannot be busy
with two things at the same moment and so there must be a quick and continuous jumping
from one side to the other. But the difficulty is perhaps the very moving-spring of my perseverance (Gardner: 1990 [1975]: 91)

D. Fokkema (1986) observes that words such as mirror, labyrinth, map, journey (without destination),
[...] television, and photograph [...] are frequently used lexemes in postmodernist texts (ibid: 87). See also Jencks
(1984) on postmodernist space, cited in McHale (1992: 158), see the analogy that McHale draws between Cortazars
Continuity of Parks and Eschers Print Gallery (1987).
3
Doris Schattschneider cites Gombrich (1961) in her Visions of Symmetry-Notebooks, Periodic Drawings and Related
Work of M.C. Escher (1990: 280).
4
See also M. Gardner 1975 [1965]: 93 on different categories in Eschers work.
On cinematic labyrinths see also M. Friedman (1991), The Historical Thriller: The Double Labyrinth [Hebrew] in:
Zemanim-A Historical Quarterly; and T. Kougler, 1994, Labyrinth as a Representative Model of Detective Movies
in Moutar, Tel-Aviv University, Faculty of the Arts, no. 2 pp. 149158.
5
M.C. Escher-The Graphic Work, 1992 (1959).
6
Escher adds the following remark: The title book of Job has nothing to do with the Bible, but contains Belgian cigarette papers (ibid: 10).

ANAT YONAT: PARALLEL IMAGES

(Reptiles, M.C. Escher, 1943)

What differentiates Print Gallery, Waterfall, High & Low, or Relativity from Reptiles? What
is the quality that places the latter text in a different sub-category?7 Escher places Another
World II, High & Low, as well as Relativity in the category of Relativities:
[...] It is impossible for the inhabitants of different worlds to walk or sit or stand on the
same floor, because they have differing conceptions of what is horizontal and what is
vertical. Yet they may well share the use of the same staircase. On the top staircase [...]
two people are moving side by side and in the same direction, and yet one of them is going
downstairs and the other upstairs. Contact between them is out of the question because
they live in different worlds and therefore can have no knowledge of each others existence
(ibid: 14).

Interestingly, High and Low (1947) is introduced by Escher in a different sub-category, that of Relativities. Print
Gallery (1956) as well as Drawing Hands (1948) are in the category of Conflict flat-spatial while Belvedere (1958),
Ascending and Descending (1960), as well as Waterfall (1961) are presented in the last category: that of Impossible
Buildings (ibid: pp. 716).

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE IMAGE

(Relativity, M.C. Escher, 1953)

While all the Escher works mentioned here revolve around the labyrinth theme, the impossibility
of each is generated by a different kind of paradox. In this respect, Reptiles might be considered
representative of the first group, that of ontological violations. Different ontological levels are
presented to the beholder; some seem to belong to a first degree of reality and others to a
second degree of reality. However, by frustrating transference from one level to another and
back again, the viewers glance fixes on the production mechanism of the text itself. Thus, the
surface of the ontological violation presents tangled hierarchies (Hofstadter: 1980[1979]:
691). Through shifts between different ontological levels of reality or worlds, the global effect
is one of ontological violation, suggesting that no level is truer than any other.

ANAT YONAT: PARALLEL IMAGES

Chart 1: Shifting between Different Ontological Levels of Reality

The labyrinth created by Relativity or Waterfall rests on entirely different principles of possible
world construction, involving, simultaneously, multiple worlds on the same ontological level.
Borges The Garden of Forking Paths presents an impossible story created by the presence
of too many versions playing themselves out on the same ontological level.8 Eschers Relativity,
Print Gallery, or Ascending and Descending work the same way. As Gombrich would have it:
Watching ourselves trying to read the print in terms of a possible world, we gain some insight
into the beholders share in all readings of spatial arrangement (1960 [1959]: 208). After all,
in terms of our knowledge, it is similar to viewing the same picture twice, but simultaneously
from different vantage points.
Violating the familiar either/or relationship, this type of labyrinth suggests the additive relation:
the simultaneous presence of multiple worlds on the same ontological level. The global effect
forces the viewer to meet the ellipse of representation, that lacks the center of meaning
(Foucault, 1986).

Chart 2: Multiple Worlds on the same Ontological Level

McHale (1987) identifies The Garden of Forking Paths as a paradigm for both Ecos Pynchons and Calvinos postmodernist novels. (ibid: 106).

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE IMAGE

Films Impossible Picture

Let me now trace the uses of Eschers labyrinths in film, via a still picture, being taken in a park
by a photographer who is himself being photographed by Antonionis camera in Blow-Up
(1967).9 Blow-Up is a cinematic text that self-reflexively discusses its medium, its limits of
representation, and the way it records-or, rather, simulates-the reality alluded to. In an Escherian
way, the viewer of Blow-Up is haunted by the notion that each level of reality has yet another,
additional level and each fictional level has a still more fictional one.
Thomas (David Hemmings) is a photographer in swinging London of the 1960s. Idly, he
visits a park, meets a woman (Vanessa Redgrave), and photographs her with her male friend.
She demands the film from him but he refuses. Later, he develops the film, enlarges it and begins
to suspect that the man in the park was murdered, that someone was waiting for him in the
bushes.
The main riddle of the narrative revolves around the question: was there a murder in the
park or not? This speculation gives rise to other questions such as: why didnt Thomas inform
the police about the event in the park? Who is the girl? What does she want? Since the film
does not supply definite answers to these questions, the spectator has to look for different
questions to be asked. Was there a murder in the park? Was there a body in the park? The
spectators see the body in the enlargement made by Thomas. He sees the body lit by a neon
light on grassbut the next morning there is no sign of it. So was there a body or was it only
an optical illusion? And, consequently, what meaning can we attribute to the fact that towards
the end of Antonionis film, Thomas himself gradually dissolves.
The spectators of Blow-Up are never given the keys required for cognitive mapping (to
use Jamesons term, 1984). Much like the viewers of Eschers Reptiles (1943) or Dewdrop
(1948), who seem to have lost their way between representations of second-degree reality
and first-degree reality merely in order to ultimately discover that both levels lie within the
same artistic text, itself second-degree reality. Thus, in Blow-Up, the pictures are stolen, the
enlargement in which Thomas saw the body remains, but he himself does not recognize the
body in the stained mosaic of the enlargement even though he had seen it before. Patricia, his
friend, does not see the body in the picture, the body itself has vanished from the park without
leaving any evidence that it ever existed.10 And then Thomas himself vanishes from the screen.
The image-reading process undergone by the spectator revolves around attempts to solve the
following ontological tension:
1.
2.
3.

The disappearance of the picture of the body is interpreted by the spectator as: this is only
a picture, hence a second degree of reality within the world of the picture.
The disappearance of the body itself is interpreted by the receiver as part of the reality of
the movie (part of its plot).
The disappearance of Thomas signifies: this is only a movie!!

Rephrasing Hofstadter in: Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (1980 [1979]), we
may describe the process as follows: focusing on the blow-up, we get the message that sign and
body are two different things. Then our gaze moves towards the real body, the one that we
perceive to be real. At this point, it seems that this body is real, while the enlarged picture is
only a signifier. But both readings are wrong; since both are only points of electronic color superimposed on the same flat surface.
9
In contrast to a theoretician like iek (1991) who identifies Antonionis film as [...] the last great modernist film
(ibid: 143), I consider Antonionis film as recording an aesthetic shift of norms between modernism and postmodernism.
As such, it involves both epistemological and ontological questions, but the latter are foregrounded. See also Zanger,
1993.
10
See also Antonionis script p. 112.

ANAT YONAT: PARALLEL IMAGES

The idea that one level of the picture is less real than the other is false. In an Escherian
manner, once we are willing to enter the Print Gallery or, as it were, the movie theater, we
have already been tricked: we have perceived the film as reality.11 And rephrasing Hofstadter
again, (1980 [1979]: 701), the only way not to be sucked in is to see both bodies as colored
smudges on film, to identify both as spots of light and colors on celluloid. Then and only then,
do we appreciate the full meaning of Patricias declaration: It looks like one of Bills [abstract]
paintings signifying this is not a body. Thomas himself becomes no more than an electronic
vibration, a recorded signal as does Patricias declaration: This is not a body. In other words,
at the very moment that the film points to its production, its own simulacra, the message of
the film is destroyed.12

The Photographer in Blow Up, Michelangelo Antonioni (1967), Photographed by Arthur Evans, BFI/MGMWB

Videodrome, directed by David Cronenberg (1982), seems to be the virtual-reality version of

Blow-Up. Like Blow-Up, Videodrome produces a recursive self-referentiality that absorbs the
viewer into its strange loop. Similar to Eschers Reptiles or Dewdrop, the ontological borders
between the different levels of reality are blurred: the TV screen in Videodrome is contained
by its own frame, but Cronenbergs close-ups permit the image to burst out of its boundaries
and expand beyond the inner world of the film to the full proportions of the cinema screen.
Later on, when Max Renn puts a videotape into his machine, Cronenberg inserts a blip of video
distortion over the entire visual field. According to Bukatman (1993), this insert does not signify
hallucination but rather infects the viewer with a similar experience of decayed boundaries.
11
12

Or in a Godelian way, as Douglas Hofstadter would have it (1980 [1979]).

Echoing Magrittes Ceci nest pas une pipe in his The Two Mysteries. See also Zanger, 1993.

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE IMAGE

No cinematic register differentiates hallucination from reality or second-degree reality for

the viewer. The absence of such a register throws discourse itself into question.13 However, the
film does not present the multiple worlds existing on one ontological level. The reading process
of Videodrome might involve possible worlds, but the viewer does not discover that there is
not one world but a plurality of competing worlds or better; if there is one world, it includes
a multiplicity of conflicting perspectives (Merrell, 1991: 4). During the screening of a few
segments, like that of the video distortion, the viewer might believe that Videodrome is more
than reality (as Brian OBlivion, one of the films characters says), but the global effect is that
of alternating between different degrees of reality.

The Ghost Behind the Scene

V. Perkins (1972) has made the observation that while a painting creates a world, still-photographs and, subsequently, cinema create the world.14 The cinematic medium, by its very nature,
takes the issue of representation to its extreme. But if postmodernist labyrinth-makers like
Escher, Borges, or Calvino show that each particular perspective of the world is only a world
and not the world, the Gordian knot connecting the cinematic medium and its representation
of reality make this not too easy a task. Interestingly, the first kind of labyrinth, i.e. alternation
between different levels of reality, became one of the hallmarks of postmodern cinema. In
addition to Videodrome, other familiar examples are Brazil by Terry Gilliam (1982), True
Stories by David Byrne (1982), The Purple Rose of Cairo by Woody Allen (1985) and Pleasantville by Gary Ross (1998), to mention just a few. In these films, different levels of realities
threaten the familiar order, but the dnouement supplies a realistic motive that retrospectively
rearranges the various levels in the familiar order. The second type of labyrinth, however,
evoked by the simultaneous presence of multiple worlds belonging to the same ontological level
is rarely found in postmodernist cinema. Partial experiences come from the domain of video
art, independent cinema, and the genre of science fiction. Examples, apart from Videodrome,
might include La Jete by Chris Marker (France, 1969), Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky (USSR,
1972), Buena Vista by Thierry Kuntzell (France, 1980), and Speaking Parts by Atom Egoyan
(Canada, 1989) that succeed in creating a nonhierarchical network rather than a coherent
world. Despite their concrete material of sounds and images, parallel worlds are introduced
before the spectators eyes in such a way that the global effect created by the films sustains the
impossible coexistence of entities competing for the same ontological level.15
In his study on Postmodernism, Brian McHale (1987) suggests a paradigmatic model that is
characterized by a change of the dominant in a given worldview.16 According to McHale, the
epistemological dominant engages and foregrounds such questions as: What is there to be
known? Who knows it? How do they know it, and with what degree of certainty? (1987:7).
The ontological dominant engages and foregrounds such questions as: What is a world? What
kinds of worlds are there, how are they constituted, and how do they differ? (ibid: 9). However,
the affinity between these two dominants leads to an exchange between foreground and back-

13

See Bukatmans analysis.

Interestingly, McHale (1987) observes that: an ontology is a description of a universe, not of the universe; that is,
it may describe any universe, potentially a plurality of universes (McHale, 1987: 27; emphases are in the text).
15
Yet, in view of the new technologies emerging in both electronic and digital media, it is quite possible that more
multiple worlds will be produced in the futurethrough Virtual Reality technologies, interactive cinema, or entirely
new procedures.
16
The dominant should be understood in the context of Russian Formalism as the focusing component in the work
of art through which the hierarchical structure of devices is achieved (Jakobson 1971 [1935]); in McHale, 1987: 6.
14

ANAT YONAT: PARALLEL IMAGES

ground: thus epistemology is foregrounded in modernist texts, while ontology is backgrounded,

and the reverse is true for postmodernist ones (ibid: 11).17
Replacing the question of How do aesthetics and culture norms function in principle? by
How do aesthetic and cultural norms function along the time axis? will allow us to identify
Blow-Up (1966) and not only Videodrome (1982) as postmodern. Engaging both epistemological and ontological questions, Blow-Up shifts epistemological questions to the background
during the reading process and demands the foregrounding of a set of new questions, i.e., ontological ones.18 However, popular postmodernist cinema may adopt non-linear narratives or
large quantities of intertextuality, but not a multiplicity of ontological levels. Such a multiplicity
would create a rupture between the film and its represented world. Thus, Kenneth Branaghs
Dead Again (1991) or Quentin Tarantinos Pulp Fiction (1993) merge present and past and
male and female identities, but their rhetorical devices maintain the retrospective unity of both
space and time with regard to narrative events. As Christian Metz has already observed (1979),
one of the main oppositions in cinema is between absence and presence. The film asks its
viewers to believe that the world presented to them, a world of light and shadow, is real.
Thus, it has to be very careful about the way in which it employs possible worlds in order to
build and rebuild its imagined world.19 Maybe this is the reason why even postmodernist cinema
cannot allow itself to make wide use of a rhizome.

17

McHales model recognizes the transformation of sensibilities, whose treatment is based on the shift of the dominantthus leaving space for each of the little narratives of postmodernist texts to inscribe themselves in culture.
Little narratives have come to replace the idea of le grand rcit in the traditions of modernist Western culture.
18
This structure is made available through three different writings that work independently and are recorded on the
film: the camera gesture, the actors gesture and the sound gesture; each gesture consistently cast doubt on the other
gestures.
19
Peter Wollens 1982.

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE IMAGE

REFERENCES
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 1967, Blow-Up (Great Britain, Ponti & MGM) Based on Julio
Cortazars story: The Devils Drools.
Borges, Jorge-Luis, 1964, Labyrinths-Selected Stories & Other Writings Ed. by Donald A. Yates
& James E. Irby. A Preface by Andre Maurois. A New Directions Book, 1964.
Bukatman, Scott, 1993, Terminal Identity-The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction.
Duke University Press, Durham and London 1993.
Burgin, Richard, 1968, Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges New York: Holt, Rinehart &
Winston.
Calvino, Italo, 1978 (1972) Invisible Cities, translated by William Weaver Helen & Kurt Wolff
Books, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Cronenberg, David, 1982, Videodrome, Canadian Film Development Corporation & Famous
Players Ltd.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix, 1987, A Thousand Plateaus-Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Translated and foreword by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis & London: University of
Minnesota Press.
Derrida, Jacques, 1981(1966) Ellipsis in Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass pp.
294300. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Escher, M.C. 1992 (1959), M.C. Escher-The Graphic Work Introduced and Explained by the
Artist. Koln: Benedikt Taschen.
Fokemma, Douwe, 1987 The Semantic and Symbolic Organization of Postmodernist Texts
In: Approaching Postmodernism: Papers Presented at a Workshop on Postmodernism,
ed. Douwe Fokkema pp. 8199 Utrecht: University of Utrecht.
Foucault, Michel, 1986, Of Other Space, in Diacritics 16 (1).
Friedman, R. Mihal, 1991, The Historical Thriller: The Double Labyrinth [Hebrew] in: Zemanim-A Historical Quarterly published by the Aranne School of History, Tel Aviv
University & Zmora-Bitan. vol. 3940, Winter, 1991.
Gardner, Martin, 1976, The Art of M.C. Escher in: Mathematical Carnival London: Penguin
Books pp. 89102.
Hofstadter, Douglas, 1979, Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid New York: Vintage
Books, A Division of Random House, 1980.
Jakobson, Roman, 1971, The Dominant in: Reading in Russian Poetics: Formalist and
Structuralist Views, edited by Matejka Ladislav and Kristine Pomorska. Cambridge,
MA and London: MIT Press.
Jameson, Fredric, 1984, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism in: New
Left Review 146, 5392.
Jencks, Charles, 1984, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, Fourth revised edition,
London: Academy Edition.
_______, 1986 [1982] What is Post-Modernism? London: Art & Design.
McHale, Brian, 1987, Postmodernist Fiction, New York: Methuen.
_______, 1992, Constructing Postmodernism, London and New-York: Routledge.
Megill, Allan, 1985, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida London,
Berkeley and Los-Angeles: University of California Press.
Merell, Floyd, 1991, Unthinking Thinking-Jose Luis Borges, Mathematics, and the New
Physics. West Lafayette Indiana: Purdue University Press.
Schattschneider, Doris, 1990, Visions of Symmetry: Notebooks, Periodic Drawings, and Related
Work of M. C. Escher. New York: W.H. Freeman.
Stallabrass, Julian, 1996, Empowering Technology in: Gargantua-Manufactured Mass Culture
pp. 4083. London & New York: Verso, 1996.

10

ANAT YONAT: PARALLEL IMAGES

Zanger, Anat, 1993, Blow-Up-Between Modernism and Post-Modernism in: Meoznaim vol.
42 Sep-Oct. [Hebrew]
iek, Slavoj, 1991, Looking Awry-An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture.
Cambridge, MA & London, UK: October Books, MIT Press.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Zanger Anat Yonat: Anat Y. Zanger is an associate professor in the Department of Film and
Television and chair of the MA in Film Studies at Tel Aviv University. Her research interests
include: Israeli cinema, mythology, collective memory, intertextuality, and space and landscape.
She is the author of Film Remakes as Ritual and Disguises (Amsterdam University Press, 2006)
and Place, Memory and Myth in Contemporary Israeli Cinema (Valentine Mitchell, 2012).

11

The International Journal of the Image interrogates

the nature of the image and functions of imagemaking. This cross-disciplinary journal brings together
researchers, theoreticians, practitioners and teachers
from areas of interest including: architecture, art,
cognitive science, communications, computer science,
cultural studies, design, education, film studies, history,
linguistics, management, marketing, media studies,
museum studies, philosophy, photography, psychology,
religious studies, semiotics, and more.
As well as papers of a traditional scholarly type, this
journal invites presentations of practiceincluding
documentation of image work accompanied by
exegeses analyzing the purposes, processes and
effects of the image-making practice.
The International Journal of the Image is a peerreviewed scholarly journal.

ISSN 2154-8560