Then we go on to examine the role of the visual images in the journey of memory between interior and exterior, and the way these visual images relate to the questions of visibility and disappearance that animate the book.
How do such non-personal, medium-quality images mediate memory? The article seeks, finally, to account by analogy for the elaboration and the esthetic effects of this trans-disciplinary work. The latter, on which this article will focus, contains 64 pages of black and white images, in total, most of which are photographs, although the visual material includes film and cartoon stills, drawings and painted illustrations, as well as extracts from newspapers and advertisements.
We will begin by speculating as to the ways readers use and peruse the album, imagining their reactions to the visual material, whether or not they approach the album as a unit. Then we will consider how the pictures mediate between an interior and an exterior, and how they relate to the theme of disappearance.
In the next part, central to our analysis and divided into three successive sub-sections, we will examine how the images function as surrogates. By way of conclusion, we will return to our speculations as to how the album is read, and then attempt to illuminate how it is constructed by means of a number of analogies.
At first it seems indeed that the images included in the book were to have just been those of the two films. At first, I thought the book would be what became the first part, the first hundred pages, a little book. But as I was writing that first part, I realized I wanted to write about some of those movies I had seen as a young person, but when I started writing about them the passages became too long, and I would have destroyed the whole rhythm of the first part if I had integrated those other things into it.
