![]() ![]() From the incipit, Sarah Polley resorts to the flashback. The three shots belong to three distinct layers of time, to the past of the diegesis, away from the “tense” of the mainstream narrative, that is Fiona’s first steps into the inevitable “pattern of deterioration” which gradually leads her to a room in the second floor of Meadowlake, the retirement home. Interestingly, the first three shots of the film are memories: Grant driving to Marian’s place for the first time, a close-up of Fiona’s young face on the day when she proposed to him, and a shot of the couple skiing outside their cottage. The text as a pre-textĢ In the cinema, evocation means invocation and memories materialize, become images. ![]() ![]() “Beyond the duration of the experience of film viewing, images do have a power of remanence, of recurrence, which defines the transformation of an image into its mnesic double” (Schefer 120). Schefer in his essay l’Homme Ordinaire du Cinéma: to him, the mental process of re-membering in the literal sense of the term is inherent in the very experience of viewing a film. The role played by memory in the spectator-image relation is also highlighted by J. A retroactive process organises the signified ” (Dayan 450). It does not meet the shot on the screen but only in the memory of the spectator. Daniel Dayan makes it quite clear: “the meaning of a shot is given retrospectively. The process of filmic intellection in itself implies the perception of fragments built up into a continuum, and according to Metz’s concept of the “ grande syntagmatique,” defined as a chain, it sollicits the viewer’s memory to produce meaning. In the case of Away from Her, the medium is particularly well- adapted, since the film is to be read as a reflection on and of memory. How does a filmic adaptation cross the spectrum of the arts? To quote Seymour Chatman, it does so by means of “spoken words combined with the movements of actors that imitate characters against sets which imitate places” (Chatman 403). 1 By nature, the visual field inspires semantic configurations, but is also inspired by them. ![]()
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