ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a method of film contemplation that involves letting a certain image in the film support a view of the entire experience. The movies one saturates oneself with in those early days of falling in love with the medium are the prima materia for what will eventually become an alchemical opus. The essence of the prima materia can be summed up in a single image, which, though static, is numinous, like the ruby slippers in The Wizard of Oz. Trauma, responsible for the excesses with which the characters recall their emotions, has turned their very persons into archetypes. Their stories are too one-sided to be real. Their humanity has devolved into dynamisms of shame, so that one is shameless, one is shamed, and another is shaming. The promise of cinema is that it makes the archetypal which can normally not be seen, visible.
