Abstract
This thesis aims to explore how cinematic images represent the interior and the inexplicable. To probe into how filmic images, with its specificity, work to transcend materiality and embody metaphysical (immaterial, incorporeal or supersensible ) attributes, this research will examine two films: Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Véronique (1991) and American director David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), each noted for being mysterious and elusive in its own way. The two works both delve into the being of woman, displaying female subjectivity from different perspectives. The female subjects are rendered either in struggle (The Double Life of Véronique ) or unsettled (Inland Empire) in “the symbolic order”, to use Jacques Lacan’s term, namely the language system/social field. The relation and interplay between a subject and social reality is at once abstract and concrete. Inspired by scholar Teresa de Lauretis’s use of “experience” to designate the ongoing process of the construction of (female) subjectivity, this thesis deems the two films apt for exploration of imaging woman’s experience, thereby investigating reification of the abstract in cinema. Female subjects in the two films are either alienated from the symbolic, defying the social/ patriarchal control, or compelled to challenge it. The analysis will adopt a psychoanalytic approach to examine the dialectic between the female character and her experiences delineated via the filmic narrative as well as to posit the roles of voice and gaze as possible media to avoid the symbolic (or patriarchal) control. In addition to what is represented on the screen, the exploration also comprises an enquiry into the end of reception in that, indebted to Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of signs, both the representation and the subject are interlocking entities within the process of filmic semiosis (production of meaning). In the end, it will suggest that presupposed division between interior and exterior could be unstable or obscure as the connection between (cinematic) signifier and signified stands. The viewer in a dialectic relation with the cinematic may just find cinematic embodiment renewed in each viewing experience.