«The Doorway is Wide Open».

Allusion to the Underworld and Death in Subtractive Cinema

Abstract

The so-called «Subtractive Cinema» (Antony Fiant 2014) encompasses a trend in Contemporary Cinema that reduces story, dialogue, and the number of shots to a minimum. Among its most recognizable directors are Chantal Akerman, Béla Tarr, and Wang Bing. In this style, shots appear with more autonomy than in Classical Cinema and are connected more by mental associations than spatial continuity. Fiant observes that this cinematic mode inherits what Deleuze (1987a) called the «Time-Image,» so we will use his notions of relative and absolute off-screen images to understand how the shots are organized and what they leave out. And although this trend comes after the Time-Image, subtractive cinema revives the aesthetics of Early Cinema, which we call the «Matter-Image.» The examples we will use are the films of Pedro Costa, particularly Cavalo Dinheiro (2014) and Vitalina Varela (2019), and those of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, especially Rak ti Khon Kaen (2015). What we find in these films is an indirect, off-screen reference to Death (Salvadó 2012) and the Underworld. We will call this reference an «allusion» (Harman 2020) when neither Death nor the Underworld are explicitly represented on screen.