The White Screen Circa 1900—On the Moving Image as Potentiality of Thought

Abstract

Leonce Perret's 1912 film Le mystere des Roches de Kador presents one of the most beautiful shots in the early history of cinema: the female protagonist, Suzanne, shrinks away from a white screen filled with light in front of her and eventually faints (see Figure 1). In the film's story, Suzanne has fallen into an amnesic and catatonic state due to a traumatic experience of a shooting incident taken place at a rough seashore, where Suzanne's cousin who is jealously in love with her has attempted to shoot her fiance. She is treated by a Professor Williams with a new cinematographic method in psychotherapy, which consists of restaging and recording the traumatic event and then showing the film to the patient. The scene in question displays the screening of the film, after which Suzanne becomes cured and regains her capacity to speak, recollect, and act. Most importantly, Suzanne recovers her of language, a faculty that in the history of Western thought has been approached as that of articulate and meaningful speech essentially characterizing the living being that has logos (to zoon logon ekhon) (e.g., Aristotle 2002, De Interpretatione 16a27-29).