In this chapter I will be dealing with the paradigmatic uses of 'sense perception', 'sight' and, accordingly, with figures of discourse, most of which are metaphoric. And being comprised of comparison, metaphors might be said to give a figural 'third dimension' to discourse, so that its object all but literally stands out; yet for the same reason physical sight can be a metaphor for cognitive visions, since judgements of likeness are of course symmetrical. That is why Oedipus' self-blinding at the close of the drama is a painfully inadequate and metaphorical attempt to see no more of the truth, which of course will still pierce to his moral sightedness.

Moreover, sight is in a unique relation to the cinema on the one hand, the world on the other, and in between one's inner visual discourse which may be said to make strings of images into realized representations of actual things. Yet even as we are complicit in this perceptual reaction (we cannot choose to arrest the flow of images, under normal circumstances anyway), so we may be made, as Hitchcock knew so well, to discover our own guilt in watching a murder. Identification has its dual sense of 'picking out' a character as the same person we saw a few shots ago and of being placed physically in the position of the murderer. It is the synthesis of this dialectic which leaves us at the end of a Hitchcock film knowing that under certain circumstances any of us may become murderers, and having shared the anxieties of the murderer about being caught. Given a mediocre director, this strategy would involve, in most people at least, simple rejection, but Hitchcock was the great master of 'putting [the audience] through it', as he is alleged to have said about his intentions in Psycho. And sharing a murderer's dilemmas about where to hide the corpse, etc., we soon come to dread the footsteps or the knock on the door which will admit the hunters of the murderer, forcing the audience to leave the cinema with various doubts as to one's own capacity for mayhem. It is this, rather than the Catholic paraphenalia delineated by Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol in their 1957 study, recently translated as Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films, that gives Hitchcock's films their moral dilemmas most keenly felt, of course, by Catholics like Hitchcock himself. How does one confess to imaginary complicity in a fictitious murder?

In a similar way, the critically polarizing films of Sam Peckinpah will forever be anathema to the sentimental left, since he compels us to exult in killing (within the film's diegesis, of course) and mayhem for periods extended even more by his use of slow motion. This I believe is a device that few directors know how to use meaningfully, with exceptions like Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and its progenitor, Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954). It would be the subject of another book to delineate how and why Peckinpah can use slow motion to complex fictive effect, while for his imitators it merely provides the opportunity of showing off bloodletting and the special effects required to achieve them, which alienates the viewer in a sense of which Brecht would not have approved. For a description of how Peckinpah deploys Eisenstein's fine sense of 'montage' at the climax of The Wild Bunch (1969), a close reading is given in Andrew Tudor's Theories of Film.[1] To indicate also how different film is from verbal language I advert the reader to the almost entirely meaningless and certainly unjustified use of slow motion in George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), which employs the storyline from both Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch. Only once is it used to some purpose, when the epigonous heroes kill a man for the first time, and the rolling of his body in slow motion indicates the subjective time duration of the death for all three protagonists, and a moral turning point. Suffice it to say that on close analysis Peckinpah's slow motion shots are so placed as to produce a kind of 'musical' rhythm, and less formally that Peckinpah's existentialism, with particular reference to Nietzsche, since it can be said that the nonabsurdist death of a character in a way sums up his life and endows a final seal of meaning.

That Peckinpah sensationalizes virtues is not true, but nor is he pretending that all the deaths in his films point a moral, which would be insufferable. Peckinpah, a reader of Robert Ardrey, is simply 'telling us like it is' for us, and the violence of the reaction against his films' violence simply makes his case for him: he is hitting a repressed nerve in people that they would never otherwise have been confronted with. A small polemical point: on the use of violence in films, I believe it is only dangerous when it is badly directed, since the audience is primed for a violent resolution and comes out angry and disappointed, and ready to complete its 'trip' in the actual world. In the hands of a Peckinpah, it is cathartic as well as salutory: the audiences I have seen after seeing The Wild Bunch are in contrast very subdued, as perhaps they have just learned something about themselves.

Similiarly, The Deer Hunter (1978) was reviled because it did not condemn war. Clearly, the objectors want a different film, not one that concentrates on the impact on a community of senseless violence, its characters being munitions factory workers (a nice irony there) who just want to live their lives and never questioned the right of America to be in Vietnam. Such objections fall into the ancient trap of condemning a work because one does not empathize with the diegetic figures - who, in another irony, are the working class who one day are going to shake off their chains. Apparently at their primitive stage of consciousness, the working classes, like Dostoyevsky's derelict,[2] are to be valorized in the abstract but to be avoided personally even in a film showing them as cannon fodder.

A more appropriate approach to film needs to look at metaphor. In 'The Metaphorical Process',[3] Paul Ricoeur, argues that previous theories of metaphor have failed by not 'including imagining and feeling, that is, without assigning a semantic function to what seems to be mere psychological features and without, therefore, concerning itself with some accompanying factors extrinsic to the informative kernel of metaphor'.[4] Metaphor, according to Ricoeur, 'has to be described as a deviant predication rather than a deviant denomination'. And, 'while it is true that the effect of sense is focused on the word, the production of sense is borne by the whole utterance. It is in this way that the theory of metaphor hinges on a semantics of the sentence'. What is decisive is not anything enigmatic about the metaphor; rather, the new meaning emerges as 'the new predicative meaning' which obtains if we rely on the common or usual lexical values of our words. 'The metaphor is not the enigma but the solution of the enigma'.

This is a tripartite process. In the first slot, imagination is understood as the 'seeing'. Here is to be found insight, which distinguishes good metaphor from bad in the Aristotelian sense of contemplating likeness. 'This insight into likeness is both a thinking and a seeing'. To anticipate objections on the ground that we make, not merely observe, metaphors, Ricoeur goes onto say, 'it is a thinking to the extent that it effects a restructuration of semantic fields.... The assimilation consists precisely in making similar, that is, semantically proximate, the terms that the metaphorical utterance brings together'.

Fascinatingly, Ricoeur goes on to compare metaphor with a Rylean 'category mistake', and if the comparison is valid opportunities for multiplying different possible worlds increase, since category mistakes simply supply inappropriate predicates.[5]

Ricoeur also introduces Paul Herle, author of an article entitled 'Metaphor', who speaks of the iconic aspect of metaphor: 'We are led [by figurative discourse] to think of something by a consideration of something like it, and this is what constitutes the iconic mode of signifying'. And 'if there is an iconic element in metaphor, it is equally clear that the icon is not presented but merely described', for 'What is presented is a formula for the construction of icons'.[6] Ricoeur notes that it is in this way that we can do justice within a semantic theory of metaphor to the Wittgensteinian concept of 'seeing as'. This is the cognitive mode of metaphor. On the referential theory of metaphor, Ricoeur has this to say: 'What happens in poetry is not the suppression of the referential function but its profound alteration by the workings of the ambiguity of the message itself'.[7]

It is from the angle of metaphor rather than reference that one should analyse The Deer Hunter. Like Robert Aldrich's Ulzana's Raid (1972), the whole of The Deer Hunter is one extended metaphor placed in paradigm, and for that reason requiring an audience who will provide the requisite parallels, equivalences, etc., essential to the discursive placement and functions of the text. In the case of Ulzana's Raid we are faced not with a much maligned reaction (with some exceptions) which depicts the no-win situation of Vietnam by dramatizing the clash of two completely different lifestyles, to their mutual incomprehensions of each other's ways; Aldrich judges neither. A single example, when the Apaches (Ulzana and his tribe) mutilate a body, they do it for religious reasons; the Whites, who go on to do the same physically describable actions, do it only for revenge.

This shows that Americans were deprived of films about the contemporary war - with the disgusting exception of John Wayne's The Green Berets (1968), but could be entertained in quasiallegorical terms until 1978. But for a filmic reading of such a text as Ulzana's Raid, the original circumstances and context must be reproduced, else it becomes merely a story, valuable for other reasons.

And in sum: 'Poetic language is no less about reality than any other use of language but refers to it by the means of a complex strategy which implies, as an essential component, a suspension and seemingly an abolition of the ordinary reference attached to descriptive language'. Ricoeur also suggests that 'feeling as well as imagination are genuine components in the process described as in an interaction theory of metaphor. They both achieve the semantic bearing of metaphor'. The place and nature of feeling is then brought out by Ricoeur: '[By] a process of ... predicative assimilation ... we are assimilated, that is, made similar, to what is seen as similar. This self-assimilation is a part of the commitment proper to the "illocutionary" force of the metaphor as speech act. We feel like what we see like'.[8]

Feeling then is a 'second order intentional structure. It is a process of interiorization.... To feel, in the emotional sense, is to make ours what has been put at a distance by thought in the objectifying phase. Feelings, therefore, have a very complex kind of intentionality'. According to Ricoeur, 'they are not merely inner states but interiorized thoughts'. They complement the imagination as schematizing a synthetic operation: they make the schematized thought ours'. Feeling then, Ricoeur claims, 'is not contrary to thought. It is thought made ours. This felt participation is a part of its complete meaning as poem.... The mood is the iconic as felt.... Imagination provides models for reading reality in a new way. This split structure is the structure of imagination as fiction'. It is at this point that Ricoeur says something that is patently false: 'When we read we do not literally feel fear or anger. Just as poetic language denies the first order reference of descriptive discourse to ordinary objects of our concerns, feelings denying the first order feelings which tie us to these first order objects of reference'. Fortunately, on the following page, he writes, that terror and pity 'are both the denial and the transfiguration of the literal feelings of fear and compassion'. Ricoeur closes with the suggestion that this is 'a structural analogy between the cognitive, the imaginative and the emotional components of the complete metaphorical act, and that the metaphorical process draws its concreteness and its completeness from this structural analog and this complementary functioning'.[9]

Yet I am not at all convinced that in works, which definitionally are partially our own making, we do not feel fear or anger; and what would a non-'literal' feeling be like? Ricoeur presumably speaks in that way because art is not the actual and therefore cannot stand in the same relation to it as everyday experience. I find this text centred approach to the arts unnecessarily constrictive, considering all the work that has been done, for example, in reader response theory. In this Ricoeur recalls the early Christian Metz who defined narrative as 'the progressive de-realization of a series of events'. But since all discourse is partly about itself as message, I regard the independent existence of texts sui generis unacceptable and the anatomy of works very much a matter of perspective; after all the work is nothing more or less than one's realization of the text.

In any case, Ricoeur has not mentioned films so far as I know, and I think he might be quite astonished at the power of 'literal' feeling; many people find the cinema a place where their emotions can flow freely, as far from being faded mental 'impressions', like their actual memories - or rather, memories of the actual - achieve a hyperreality in which one commits imaginary acts. Of course we are seeing representation rather than the 'real thing', but the diegeses of films become familiar places, and in any case our everyday perceptions are manifested too, so that for some people it is difficult to distinguish the simulacrum from the actual things, except that the latter are usually duller. The communication revolution has made of us beings who can hardly distinguish one imaginary position from another, and turning the world into a diegesis, a simulacrum of itself, not because it has ceased to be but because our perceptions, with which we impart form in the world, have now become electronic.

I think we have by now paved the way for a theory of discourse as diegesis-generating, if by 'diegesis' we mean the 'created world' of a reading, a viewing, an utterance or other discursive act. If we push this as far as it will go, I think we will inevitably be lead to perception, which is as invariably intentional in at least one of the three senses I have outlined. After all, we have no trouble with its converse, i.e. that filmic discourse depends on selective perception. It is not too fanciful, I think, particularly with the recent resurgence of interest in three dimensional, seventy millimetre film width and Dolby noise-eliminating stereophonic sound, to speak of film as a social mirror for each of us in the required Lacanian sense that through misidentification with the diegetic characters films are re-enacting a scenario from the perhaps not actual but real enough past.

But the notion of diegesis creates stumbling blocks of its own. In fact, it is either so obvious or so obscure that it is not mentioned in the index to Todorov's Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language.[10] Perhaps one of the reasons theorists shy away from it is that they are afraid it will creep in unannounced in a documentary, with all the attendant headaches of the autonomy of the actual world as distinct from the fictional one. Some years ago Christian Metz defined diegesis as the 'scene of the signifieds', but I will have to amend that to 'sum of denotations/extensional-signifieds'.

Diegesis is opposed on the one hand to discourse since they are respectively diachronic and synchronic, and as Robert Scholes advises, 'we are meant to distinguish between the whole text of a narration as a text ... and the events narrated as events [or] diegesis'. And a little later, 'For almost a century research in reading ... has shown that memories stores not the words of texts but their concepts.... When we read a narrative text, then, we process it as a diegesis. If we retell the story, it will be in our own words'.[11] As film is an iconically motivated medium, it is not at first so obvious that what we recall are the enounceds, rather than the enunciations, but a moment's reflection should allay this doubt. Quite often, for instance, a film or televisual image is out of focus, but we always pierce this veil of disillusion and come up with a sharp diegesis, which is also what we remember. Thus the phenomenon known as 'gating' seems universal to texts and readings in any medium, unless the 'noise' is so intense that the intended 'message' cannot be deciphered in the first place. Of gating, E.H. Gombrich has to say that 'Bruner has called this principle of economy in ordinary perceptual situations the mechanism of "gating".... I suppose it could be argued that what we call the aesthetic response in front of works of art involves a certain refusal to gate ... [although] this refusal is only a relative one'.[12]

This raises the awkwardly piecemeal question of filmic diegesis: what do we process films as and does it make a difference diegetically if a film is a documentary, or, worst of hybrids for theorists, a reconstructed documentary? One might then settle for an account of diegesis in terms of what happens in the story (as distinct from the story's plot form) were it not for these remarks of Noel Burch:®EL.25¯

The diegesis must not, however, be treated as a fixed, simple object. It must be studied under two complementary and dynamic aspects. For the constitution of the diegesis is a process, and a more proper term would indeed be diegetic process. It combines a mental process (the development of the spectator's 'absorption'), and a process of 'writing': the implementation on the screen of the 'codes' which catalyse that absorption. Both processes are, to varying degrees, implicated moreover in an ideological process. The resultant is a diegetic effect, whereby spectators experience the diegetic world as environment.... [It] is only incidentally related to ideological categories such as 'realism' or 'naturalism'. The diegetic effect is truly as 'strong', as unadulteratated in Hellzapoppin, The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr T or late Fellini as it is in Ladri de Biciclette. Conversely, it is still intermittently operative for many spectators of Michael Snow's Wavelength or Jean-Luc Godard's Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle. Here, it is true, the status of the diegesis changes, qualitatively and quantatively, from one moment to the next. These films designate the diegetic effect as such, making it difficult or impossible for the reader-spectator to enter 'permanently' into the imaginary space-time constituted through the diegetic process. Films of this sort function as critical texts.[13]

As Burch allows fantastic diegesis, I will include documentary's equivalents, whose authenticity is not even visible on their 'faces', as it were, since the fantastic is normally pretty obviously so. Therefore I will leave out of account the question of the 'authenticity' of film material. More seriously, I think we can accept Metz's definition as long as we remember that diegesis is the sum of denotations and connotations, since they can hardly operate without each other as a matter of dialectical meaning-fixing.[14]

And it is at this point that I must once more invoke the disagreement between David Novitz and Nelson Goodman, as set out respectively in their books, Pictures and Their Use in Communication[15] and The Languages of Art,[15] the former being a reaction to the latter. The bone of contention between them is the denotative function of pictures, which Goodman claims is 'the core of representation'.[17] Their particular feud can be left to take care of itself, but I want to draw from it Goodman's thesis that pictures denote their objects, but that 'a picture of Mr Pickwick and a picture of a unicorn'[18] do not have the same null denotation. However, I cannot possibly accept from Novitz that the pictures depict chiefly the resemblance to their objects. Also, his argument renders abstract painting objectless, and his vaunted 'recognition' must remain extremely selective, since to any artist or art critic one painting will surely resemble another painting more than any possible 'sitter'. In fact, it is this very absence that might be said to characterize modern, postcinema painting. If an artist does have a sitter he is more than likely to regard him or her as actual for potential lines and shapes.

Like Peirce's sign, a painting is an artefact that represents something to somebody, even if only the artist. There is no particular reason, either, to suppose that this meaning will be denotative, as in action painting in which the figures on the canvas are related indexically only to the artist's movements and denotative possibly to someone, somewhere. Symbolist painting can be as arbitrary as its linguistic namesake or perversely may connote its own meaninglessness while denoting anything or nothing.

Further, one is tempted to say that painters paint, rather than denote. However, there is still the problem for philosophy of Mr Pickwick and the unicorns. By way of approaching this issue, I ask the reader to cast her mind back over the arguments and examples I have exploited in the cause of postulating an inner representational system within each of us which stands to its objects analogously to the way in which words stand for theirs - that is, they 'stand for' but never stand in for. Also, I have called some representations intersubjective and real, but not necessarily actual. The Real, I now want to say, is the furniture of our inner diegeses, because it is always partially constituted by the discourses we have woven around them, so much so that the Real often survives the actual which was its particular model. Thus the mode of our existence is always discursive and therefore at one metalevel or remove from the actuality of the world. This is so except for the intersubjectivity of our different discursive systems, in which there is always some measure of indeterminacy for the good reason that there is no utterable 'objective', no relation to the world such that we can say anything about it other than that it must be there making intersubjectivity and individuation possible.

This is emphatically not phenomenalism. We perceive the actual things of the world, not sense data of them, even if we must always register them in one or more of the ways available, but as Ricoeur says, the world is made ours by feeling. Thus if I had to label my position, I would call myself epistemically a phenomenologist and ontically a 'soft' realist.

Now, not only do representations denote simultaneously the actual object and the same object qualitatively as our senses give it, but there is nothing that escapes the net of representation. In a book of eight studies under the general title of The Rule of Metaphor[19] Paul Ricoeur demonstrates the ability of metaphor to denote and refer[20 ]and how most metaphors are made, not 'found', so that the particular aspects seized upon in metaphor's dual reference are teleological. Metaphors, understood as involving redescriptions, may also be true or false, strictly or literally, as they have been taken as referring in specified ways, and their truth is to be taken as nontransitive within a scheme that allows for the appeance of certain contrasts as absolute and others as transitive (cf. Bhaskar), particularly as more often than not metaphor creates the resemblance.

As a medium, film itself is metaphoric of perception, as Steven Spielberg realized in producing/directing his sound and light show, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). It is also redolent of religious 'vision' or 'second sight', and succeeds in its own way, as Bresson does in his, in presenting familiar objects to us as if we were seeing them for the first time. In E T (1982), we see through the child Elliot's ['E....t'] eyes, 'literally', though of course this means 'metaphorically'. Again the language protests at being taken back to its surely metaphorical origins, of which our literalisms are an aberrant outgrowth.

V.F. Perkins points out that, in instruments like the phenokistoscope, there was cinema before there was photography (and Eco's criteria would surely support him in eliding the necessity of the photographic).[21] Texts like Ingmar Bergman's Persona (1966) and The Hour of the Wolf (1968) batter against the confines of representation. In so doing, they sink ever deeper into the gulf between self (alma) and performance (persona), the former always cashed as the latter. When he himself vanishes from the frame at the end of the latter film, Bergman never again confronts the camera but goes on instead to eviscerate the already rotting bodies of personal relationships and in The Shame (1968) makes the impotence of art even do this.

And while on the subject of the film medium itself, it is worth pointing out that both 'persistence of vision' and 'the Phi effect', stalwarts of numberless introductory texts on the mechanics of filmic perception, are not even relevant to it. The two papers I referred to earlier in The Cinematic Apparatus both come to the conclusion that it is our normal perceptions of motion which supply the illusion of it. To the eye and brain, it can be LumiŠre's famed train or a real one that one jumps out of the way of; there is no intrinsic difference, a fact which I hope will not be lost on phenomenologists of the cinema.

Nevertheless, film unendingly manipulates us. Salvaggio, in 'Neglected Areas of Semiotic Criticism',[22] cites some of Goodman's ideas in relation to film, not least because Goodman evidently holds to a transference theory of metaphor. Since he is brief, I will quote the secondary source, Salvaggio:®EL.25¯

In [Goodman's schema] are such terms as labels, the range of labels, and realms. If the word red is a label of colour, then the range [extension] of red is all red things. The realm in this case [intension] would be all coloured things. When we consider that things not only have colour, but size, shape, speed and syntax and many other attributes, then we can appreciate why Goodman holds that there are many realms and all are units of a larger schemata ... According to Goodman's theory, a metaphor takes place when labels or realms are transferred to other labels and realms. In personification, labels are transferred from persons to things; in synecdoche, between a realm of wholes or classes and a realm of their proper parts or sub-classes; in autonomasia, between things and their properties or labels. To see how this might usefully be applied to film we need to determine what would constitute labels and realms. Since Goodman's classification system is one which distinguishes between words which describe in one way from those which describe in another way, a parallel schema should be devised for film.[23]

An example cited by Salvaggio comes from Bergman's A Passion/The Passion of Anna (1970), in which the graininess of his film stock is used as a metaphor for the psychological makeup of one of the protagonists. 'Here the properties of grain, a label of realm two, are transferred to the protagonist, a label of realm one'.[24] Looking at this - and not forgetting Noel Burch's thirty permutations of the shot transition, nor length of shot in relation to 'legibility', plus camera movement, five types of point of view and the use of offscreen space in six possible types - one might excusably despair of listing all of film's possibilities as a means of articulation and communication, expression and thought. Compiling such an inventory would be a millenial task with no predetermined end, since the intentionality of film utterers, active and passive, ranges over it all.

Another contribution to the metaphoric, the monster created by Baron Frankenstein, appears to be enjoying a new if somewhat removed revival in the academic press. For example, there is Daniel Cotton's 'Frankenstein and the Monster of Representation',[25] and William Nestrick's 'Coming to Life: Frankenstein and the Nature of Film Narrative',[26] the latter treating the monster's creation as prefiguring film's own. Not to be left out, the vampiric Count has reemerged (as always) in Dracula as Totemic Monster: Lacan, Freud, Oedipus and History in still more exalted company. Rather belatedly, the two Gothic figures are being treated as the mythic and metaphoric - therefore supposedly alien to fantasy - figures they always were. In the world of film, Dracula, who is iconographically the anti-Christ, was released once more upon the world by Hammer films in Dracula/Horror of Dracula (1958), a film directed by Terence Fisher and the excellent forerunner of a cycle of better and worse films from the same studio. Anyone wishing to pursue the careers of Hammer Films and/or Dracula should look at two books by David Pirie, respectively A Heritage of Horror (1973) and The Vampire Cinema (1977).[27] Dracula is specifically a metaphor for repressed sensuality, while Robin Wood sees in the Frankenstein monster the return of the repressed lifeforce risen up to transmogrify the world which gave him birth and called him monster.[28] Thus on the one hand we have the feared and desired libido released to excoriate Victorian hypocrisy, and on the other Frankenstein, the Promethean blasphemer.

Of the genre and auteurism controversies, V.F. Perkins makes a telling point when he writes, 'Film reviewers have made us familiar with the notion that a director can transcend the limitations of a genre'. Perkins cites the example of Kiss of the Vampire (1962) directed by Don Sharp, where 'as quite often in the movies, we see genre transcending the limitations of the director'.[29]

I stress the metaphorical character of both Dracula and Frankenstein's monster because horror fiction is usually classed with fantasy, yet Rosemary Jackson in her Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion[30] speaks of recent research which has shown fantasy to be nonmetaphoric. Therefore either the theorists are mistaken, or these horror texts are not fantastic. More to the purpose, I think is the question of whether, whatever the figures a text may contain, they are placed in syntagm or in paradigm. For fantasy the choice would seem to be foreordained as paradigmatic, since fantastic metonymy placed in syntagm generates a text that looks simply literal, like pornography: syntagmatic fantastic texts placed in syntagm, and that is most often at the censor's behest. Perhaps it is worth noting here that 'soft' versions of hardcore pornographic films are produced by blowing up some innocuous part of the frame to the exclusion of the rest.

Perhaps the most interesting vampire film from the Hammer cycle is Taste the Blood of Dracula (1969), directed by a young Hungarian, Peter Sasdy. His Countess Dracula (1970), based on the literal bloodletting of Countess de Bathery, is also much admired, although he seems to have exhausted his Gothic resources in these two films, directing nothing of note since. Here it is the amateur diabolism of three hypocritical Victorian paterfamilias which restores Dracula, but in token of his true mission his first priority is to incite the vulnerable young to rise up against their parents, with fatal results for all three. Dracula himself periodically dines on the female children in a more overtly sexual way than Bram Stoker dared write, or for that matter Sheridan Le Fanu, whose much filmed Carmilla became the basis of Dreyer's great film of 1932, Vampyr. Ironically, the title of the collection of stories in which 'Carmilla' appears is Through a Glass Darkly, which may have suggested to Dreyer the extraordinary technique of having Rudolph Mate shoot the film through a gauze filter.

The locus classicus for students of the fantastic is of course Tzvetan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre,[31] and following in its wake Mark Nash's essay on the 'cinefantastic', 'Vampyr and the Fantastic'. Todorov, too, insists on a literal reading as constitutive of the fantastic (-'effect', as he might now add), but this does not rule out the possibility of taking the entire text as extended metaphor. Rather, it is enjoined upon the reader to proceed literally at a first level, finding metaphor if such there be in the deep structures of conjoined signifieds, not signifiers. 'Such is the paradox of literary language: it is precisely when words are employed in the figurative sense that we must take them literally'.[32] In that the fantastic cannot emerge in a figurative reading, fantasy is the opposite of allegory, which has to be brought back to real situations. But once the fantastic has emerged, I see no reason to restrict it to the vacillation between the 'uncanny' and the 'marvellous'; yet if it falls on either side, the once fantastic text can take on tropic meanings. 'Once fantastic', that is, as a work: textually it is still fantasy, and any 'implicit'[33] readers are text bound surrogates, fortunately only heuristic since permanently bemused.

However, Frankenstein, the book and Whale's and Fisher's films, demand treatment as allegory, and metaphor is to allegory as metonymy is to fantasy. The 'scientific' paraphanalia of the laboratory in Whale's 1931 film is wildly expressionist (in the debased sense that word came to have in Hollywood), a mere reminder that this diegesis is at least adjacent to everyday life. Chiefly it enables Frankenstein, the modern Prometheus, to steal fire from the heavens in the form of lightning to animate his creature. Later, pathetically, the monster reaches toward the source of light through the window of his prison only to be tormented by fire, now the agency of his death: he is 'literally' refused enlightenment. Baffled, repressed but eager to learn he can also be regarded as Frankenstein's id released to perform the acts he dare not. Strategically, in Whale's film, his first act of reasoning is that since the little girl who throws flowers into a pond so that they float is beautiful, so will she float. Those who have seen the uncut print describe the creature's inconsolable grief; in the version that remains, the cut from his reaching for her to her father's bearing the child's body into the village, suggest rape and murder, an idea that is consonant with the monster's possession of a 'bad' brain, which was left in from Robert Florey's original treatment, and is just as damaging.

Other treatments of the subject have seen the monster as Frankenstein's Doppelganger, in particular Jack Smight's Frankenstein: The True Story, scripted by Christopher Isherwood, which is 'true' to the extent of coopting Polidori into the plot. Here the monster is born handsome - his first, imitative word is 'beautiful' - but begins to decompose, the initial resemblance to Frankenstein himself falling away … la The Picture of Dorian Gray. The monster's ironic last words, 'Bravo, Victor!' are uttered as a gunshot brings down an avalanche of ice upon them both; Narcissus and his alter ego are destroyed at once.

By contrast, in the Hammer series it is Frankenstein himself who is monstrous, amorally making life wretched for a succession of hapless creatures. 'We must start again', are his final words in the last of the series, already described. Lucifer Dracula, on the other hand, is an intensely charismatic and Romantic figure, while the loosening of censorship restrictions has transformed his depredations from a metaphor placed in paradigm to one placed in syntagm. Although certain directors, like Ronald Young in The Vampire Circus (1971) have missed the point and rendered vampirism as a metonymy placed in syntagm, if not a simple literalism.

Such a hold do these particular fantasies have that they almost inevitably point to a mass mythical appropriation. Reidar Christiansen, in 'Myth, Metaphor and Simile',[34] writes: 'Sun, moon and stars are often given as the solution of a riddle, and similar metaphors may naturally be used for them all'. It is the peculiar blessing of myth in general that, looked at paradigmatically, it forms a synchronic structure, while syntagmatically it is endlessly metonymically variable in a diachronic or perhaps polychronic or recurring way. And so it is with horror films. The typical pattern for both is to be modally iconic and imaginary in register, but some may see them as a symbolic such as a religious reader, and yet others as indexical and real, in which case the viewer is probably a psychopath. At the present moment, I venture to suggest, audiences of fantastic and/or horror films are bent on seeing all filmic modality as iconic and to be registered in the Imaginary: they want not reassurance, which they would not believe, but the pretence of facing the unknown and staring it down. This accomplished, the actual world may not seem so formidable an environment of possible annihilation.

For fictions, Plato to the contrary, do not tell lies, nor even, I believe are they restricted to Goodman's metaphorical truth. Rather, they redescribe what gives us a new insight into it: 'the elevation of feeling to fiction is the contribution of its mimetic use'.[35] One even finds fiction promoted to the distinguishing feature of poetic language: 'literary discourse is fictive discourse, not words the author is saying'.[36] For Goodman, as for me, fictionality by no means belongs exclusively to the literary; nor does the literary depend upon the fictional as either anecessary or a sufficient condition; nor, of course, is the 'factual' free of fictions, heuristic or otherwise.

Bluntly, discourse always denotes, and if the things it denotes are not actual in that form immediately, in all likelihood they will tend to become so. What distinguishes Mr Pickwick from Mr Dickens (deceased) is the fact that the former lacks matter and therefore has at best a borrowed substance in the minds of readers who relate his adventures to other, actual ones, so that any portly, rather pompous middle aged man might be denoted 'a real Pickwick'.

In another terminology, 'Mr Pickwick' lacks indexical correlates of the required kind, except in the sense of being impersonated by an actor, and he has nothing in common with other so-called 'null denotations' except immaculate conception. But the phenomenal Mr Pickwick can be intersubjective when it comes to qualitative identity, and I suggest he is not much worse off in numerical identity than we actual folk.

Or again, Mr Pickwick exists in as many possible worlds as we care to insert him into, and in that case he still retains his numerical as well as qualitative identity, so long as the worlds do not become actual. If we imagined a particular world in which Mr Pickwick wrote The Dickens Papers, we might have what has been called a Trans-World Hair Line. In sum, we must be careful in allocating ontic status, but this by no means prescribes a binary actual/null dichotomy of denotations, much less connotations.

Returning now to horror and/or fantasy films, one reason for my interest in them is that like the Frankenstein monster they dare to tread where we would not willingly go except in peculiarly fervent imagination. It is worth noting that no horror film has ever lost money at the boxoffice; and it has attracted many of the great directors: Murnan and Herzog Nosferatu, (1922 and 1979 respectively), Hitchcock Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963) and Frenzy (1971), Michael Powell Peeping Tom (1959), Georges Franju Eyes Without a Face (1960), Jean Renoir The Testament of Dr Cordelier (1959), Ingmar Bergman The Face/The Magician (1958), Hour of the Wolf (1968) and The Serpent's Egg (1978), even Fellini's Satyricon (1969),[37] and last but certainly not least, Carl Dreyer's Vampyr (1932). Today, horror is sufficiently popular for young American directors like Tobe Hooper, George Romero, Larry Cohen et al. to remain willingly within the genre; but a decade ago, a freedom similar to that Roger Corman's New World directors (Jonathan Demme, Paul Bartel, et al.) enjoy now was given to young British directors, but the movement for some reason reached its zenith at Hammer in the early 70s, and quickly died thereafter.

As the list above shows, the years 1959-60 produced quite fortuitously a sort of trilogy of Grand Guignol masterpieces: Peeping Tom (1959), Psycho[38 and Eyes Without a Face (1959). To my knowledge, the last has never been shown in Australia, one of the major casualties of censorship. Psycho has if anything been overread, particularly by the neoformalists, even if the work derived from it is merely uncanny; for the text's 'implicit' reader it remains fantastic at its point where seemingly contradictory facts begin to emerge - thus Hitchcock's insistence on its being seen from the beginning. Both films were vilified by the tender minded liberal press, but that was nothing compared with the odium heaped upon Peeping Tom and Michael Powell.

The film opens with a shot of a closed eye; the eye opens and regards the camera - (in this case us) - and the remainder of the film is perhaps what the eye in Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou (1929) would have seen had it not been 'opened' via a razorblade in another way. Most of the succeeding shots in this first sequence are seen through Mark's camera, the marks of his viewfinder visible in the frame; yet an exception to this rule not only shows Mark together with his victims-to-be, but Mark's camera is pointing down at the staircase and therefore subsequent viewfinder shots of the prostitute mounting the stairs shown from behind cannot have been filmed by Mark. This is the first in a series of what I can only call deconstructive devices. For whose footage is this, if not Mark's? Either Powell's or our own, it would seem, but are we not innocent?

Some idea of the film's spiralling strategies can be seen simply in Mark's peculiarly horrible method of murder: not only does he stab his victims with the knife inside his camera's tripod (the Freudian 'third leg') and film their terror, but he redoubles that by placing a mirror next to the camera so that the victim can watch her own murder and be caught up in a M”bius strip of multiplying terror.

In a sense, Peeping Tom must be one of the most 'open' films ever made. Just as there are three angles of vision, Mark's, Powell's and our own, there are three layers of reference. We have the intradiegetic, of course; through Powell the fact of intertextuality; but most radically an extradiegetic level aimed as surely at the viewer as the Archer's logo of an arrow hitting a bullseye 'before' the film begins. We have already seen that the 'marked' (by the viewfinder) film is not all Mark's, and we accept the joke of his cover story that he is a reporter from The Observer. But a more curious - and serious - dialectic is set up by Powell in making the heroine's mother blind, and of course the first to 'see' what Mark is, while using an actor who is in fact blind to play the role of director in the commercial film-within-the-film, who obviously is not blind. The screenwriter's name was Leo Marks, a near-anagram of 'Mark Lewis'. And, most devastatingly of all, Powell himself plays Mark's psychologist father in the 'homemovie' footage experimenting on the effects of terror on the young Mark, who is played by Powell's son! Mark is simply completing his father's research with himself as ultimate object, as he films his own self-stabbing-again, need it be said, with the knife in the camera's tripod.

The mise-en-abyme structure of Peeping Tom, greatly enhanced by knowing these actual facts, now faces the audience with itself, and its own members' reasons for coming to see a horror film with such a title. Predictably they were scandalized, and moreover outraged (as also by Eyes Without a Face) at being forced thus to register it in the Real, not the safe Imaginary. To add that the passive Mark's final self-immolation is via a Lacanian phallus is to add further injury to insult, and call up the wrath of Caliban seeing his face in the glass.

As there has been no identification figure but Mark for the audience, the mise-en-abyme structure is doubly ferocious, implicated in his crimes by our first eye-to-eye contact with Mark and enforced participation in two of his murders. Powell is an even more exacting collector of our communal - and individual - guilt as voyeurs for being in that position, even if there is the usual contingent of moralists who have come to be shocked and outraged and will not leave until they are. The peculiar horror of the diegesis we each make out of Peeping Tom is that 'to see' is a factive verb like 'I know', or what Ryle called a 'success word', so that to have seen is to have known in a sense now approaching the biblical carnal. For a veritable roster of such instances in the film, I recommend the reader to Maitland McDonagh's 'The Ambiguities of Seeing and Knowing in Peeping Tom'.[39]

Eyes Without a Face has never to my knowledge been shown in Australia. Given the qualities of Franju's films I have seen, Head Against the Wall (1958) (his first feature), Th‚rŠse Desqueyroux (1962), Judex (1963) and, with Cocteau's expressed approval, Thomas the Imposter (1964) this is a great omission. Yet this is still most of his oeuvre, all of them made before 1967, the date of Raymond Durgnat's highly perceptive Franju.[40] Since then, Franju has chosen to work mainly for television, with Eyes Without a Face as a film spinoff and resuming the tribute to the great Feuillade, so beloved of the surrealists, begun in Judex. This, plus his early shorts, including the notoriously graphic abattoir documentary, Le Sangue des Bˆtes, and another literary adaptation The Sin of Abb‚ Mouret (1971) complete his unfortunately exiguous output.

Interestingly enough, it is Franju's name that appears most frequently by far in John Fraser's Violence in the Arts. As Fraser says of him, 'some images stay shocking ... and are deeply charged with meaning', like the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear and the 'surgical flaying of a girl's face' (from Eyes Without a Face); 'what results in such instances is a powerful, at times an almost unendurable, sense both of the complete believability of the violence and its strangeness, its unnaturalness, its "violation" aspect'.[41] There is also, however, the dimension of the indexical: nothing could be more excoriating than such shots as the basket of human heads in Resnais' Night and Fog, just because one knows it has not been faked, nor The Blood of Beasts, for the same reason. Here is an instance in which the known modality does compel a reading in the register of the Real, if no other. A remark of Franju's concerning Edith Scot, one of the stars of Eyes Without a Face, is germane in this context: 'This unreal character, by her presence, makes real what isn't real. She is therefore a poetic character, endowed with magic, and magic gifts are realistic gifts, in the cinema at least'.[42] It is apposite to compare magic, and thus fantasy, to poetry, as it were its metonymic double, but as I shall be arguing mere fiction is neither necessary nor sufficient to make a text a poetic text.

To return a moment to Peeping Tom, Powell imports a death mask (Bazin), or indexical simulacrum, of the pro-filmic reality into the film, making every shot overtly both iconic and indexical, the latter being displeasing to our imaginary systems. In fact, the more one learns about the film the more intimate, intensive an experience it becomes, and one is uncomfortably aware of that initial eye - Mark's, Powell's, our internalized censor's - unblinkingly but neutrally staring into camera, i.e., at us. It opens the text as it were vertically, making it a strain to control the opposing forces of the Imaginary and the Real while also adding as a corollary the fact that questions of modality and register cannot be understood or correlated without reference to content and context.

Phenomenologically, too, no matter when the film is shown, there is still an indexical (or existential) link between the profilmic actuality and the diegesis (or diegeses) of the film. This is true of all films, of course, but here Powell has not severed the umbilicus between actuality and diegesis, but actually compels us to a kind of monstrous double vision. And since the profilmic actuality is reproduced in the mock disguise of the Real, there is the mise-en-abyme effect of throwing open also the viewing subject (by now his/herself split) to their own extraneous reality, giving the film an effect of interrogation: the Hitchcockian moral that the audience has come to indulge its voyeurism and to be 'put through it' (as Hitchcock defined his aim) by way of penance is familiar enough. But in Powell's hands the opening out into actuality singles out each individual rather than allows even the consolation on the part of each member of it of suffering together. The 'Archer Films' logo of an arrow thudding into a target was never before so appropriate as here.

The important point is that this extradiegetic information undercuts the iconic modal functioning which would yield an imaginary reading. And if there is one defining characteristic, necessary though not sufficient, that goes into constituting the fictive functioning of a fictional text - the question does not arise with nonfiction - it is that disorienting irruption of the indexical, called the 'profilmic reality' in film theory, into the created world of that fiction. We can no longer take our pleasure without admitting liability: Hitchcock builds audience response into the fiction, but Powell tears aside the blackout curtain and shows us the actual, which is not where we relatively comfortably took it to have been.

Nor does Powell's play with ontic levels seem to break the grip of what Noel Burch in a recent article sees as an overall diegetic process, based on 'the fact that [the peculiar effect of the cinematic diegesis] does ... derive ... from the fact that it involves almost exclusively iconic signification',[43] as one might expect, since the epistemic is diachronically prior to the production of the ontic. This use of the actual to problematize the Real is obvious but misplaced, since in Peeping Tom it augments rather than annuls it - thereby supporting my supposition that the Real is a metaregister which passes judgement, relevantly or not, on the other registers.

In short, fictional characters are like shared illusions, not delusions, and that is how we have an intersubjective language to describe them which is that of their actual counterparts. Note also that we can make mistakes about illusion, just as everyday discourse may delude us. They may, of course, delude us, as a mirage may lea