indisputable and disputable proof. But, even when photographs appear
to be undone and revealed as misleading or unreliable, they still tend to
make that first presumption of uncomplicated testimony. To say that
photographs lie rather than tell the truth, however, is, as Stanley Cavell
put it, to ‘replace the village idiot with the village explainer’.^7 Most of the
photographs that surround us operate somewherebetweenfact and fiction,
betweenhistory and memory,betweenthe objective and the subjective.
Since film is prone to overemphasize the evidential in photographs,
it is instructive to look beyond that bulk of films that see it simply as
proof or its inverse. For example, can photography have a relation to
the future? The director Nicolas Roeg once described cinema as a time
machine, far better suited to mapping the convolutions of the mind than
the narrowly linear narratives that dominate. His films are peppered
with photographs, but rarely are they simple moments from time past.
InDon’t Look Now( 1973 ), the most banal of images becomes a dreadful
premonition.The opening scene crosscuts between a couple in their
country house and their daughter playing outside in the garden. The
husband (Donald Sutherland) examines slides on a lightbox of his work
on the restoration of a Venetian church. In the foreground of one slide
there is small figure in a red coat. Carelessly, Sutherland knocks water
over it and Roeg cuts to the daughter in a similar red coat, drowning in
the garden pond. He cuts back to the slide and the red colour creeps out
98 across the image, oozing from the figure like a stigmata or blood under a
86 Jude Law as the assassin/photographer
inRoad to Perdition(Sam Mendes, 2002).
87 Publicity still fromM(Fritz Lang, 1931).
