ABSTRACT
This section is dedicated to constructions of the visual. Here we start from the realisation that images repeatedly confront the imagination with the limits of both word and image, with the unspeakable and unimaginable. Terror and torture are examples of limits that are so unspeakable and unimaginable that word and image fail (Mitchell). Depending on the viewpoint, in terror the divine and the devilish come face to face. In cloning, as in torture, the limits have been dispensed with. There is not the distance required to establish the difference between the other and the self. The imagination anticipates the unspeakable and the unimaginable without being able to get a firm hold on it. Every medium, film included, offers the imagination new ways of creating images. This is evidenced by the following article, which uses films of the Weimar Republic to show how traumatic scenes are processed and how “multiperspectivism” finds its way into everyday consciousness (Koch). In the image world of film the views of the masses and individuals and perspectives of the political and aesthetic avant-garde are superimposed upon each other. The imagines agentes of the film do not simply reflect the external conditions, but take them up, reshape them and lead to contingency experiences. Thus the New Objectivity and the magic of hypnosis merge well: life is a trauma that becomes an event in the hypnosis machine of the cinema.
