“And how would you analyze this film?”
“Overall, extreme violence. Concentrate on those areas…”
He pointed his finger to certain places on the electronic depiction of the brain.
“They’re lighting up on and off,” Lucie noticed. “Is that the subliminal imagery?”
“Yes. I timed their appearances. A hidden image always corresponds to when those areas light up. For the moment, it’s just the pleasure centers. You can easily guess why. The actress, nude, in risqué postures. Those gloved hands stroking her.”
Lucie felt embarrassed at penetrating, to some degree, her hierarchical superior’s deepest intimacy. The captain had no idea he was seeing, at that very moment, subliminal images of the actress in his simpler device. He had even less idea that his brain was getting off on them and risked setting off an embarrassing physical reaction.
The digitized film continued to advance. Lucie recalled what Claude Poignet had shown her on the viewer. They were getting close to the other kind of image: the actress’s mangled body on the grass with the large eye sliced into her belly. Beckers moved his finger on the screen.
“This is it. Activation of the median prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortex, as well as of the temporoparietal junction. The really shocking images have just started occurring, hidden behind apparently tranquil scenes. Up until now, everything is coherent. But hang on a bit…”
The black-and-white film was three-quarters of the way through. The little girl was petting a cat, sitting in the grass, still framed by that strange, drooling fog and a black sky. A neutral scene, which in principle should elicit no emotion.
“Here we go… The signals in the brain get excited, even independent of the precise moments when the subliminal images occur. Same thing for the amygdala and parts of the anterior cingulate cortex. The organism is steeling itself for a violent reaction. You must have felt the same disturbance when you watched the film—a desire to run away, perhaps, or turn it off.”
It was well before the scene with the bull that the colors exploded in Kashmareck’s brain. They were lighting up on all sides. A few moments later, his brain activity returned to more normal levels. Beckers shook his notes.
“At precisely eleven minutes, three seconds you see the brain activity reacting to violent images, which lasts for a minute. But this part of the film contains none of the subliminal images that were inserted in the original. Not the naked woman, not the mutilations. Not a thing.”
“So what is it, then?”
“A complicated process of hidden imagery, using superimposition, contrast, and light. I believe both the subliminal images and that white circle at the upper right are just red herrings. They’re the visible element that allowed the film to mask the real hidden message. Unconsciously, the eye is constantly drawn by that distracting spot, which keeps you from concentrating too much on other parts of the image and noticing what’s really going on. The filmmaker took care to thwart even the most observant viewers.”
Lucie could no longer keep still. The film was drawing her in; it possessed her.
“Show me those hidden images.”
“Let’s first let your captain join us.”
Lucie couldn’t help watching the scene with the bull once again, while Beckers sat down at another computer. It gave her gooseflesh, especially when the camera zoomed in on the girl’s eyes: cold and devoid of all feeling. The eyes of an ancient statue.
A few minutes later, Kashmareck returned. He was as white as the shell of the scanner.
“Weird goddamn movie” were his only words. He too had been turned inside out, manipulated, shocked, and was trying to figure out why he felt so strange. Beckers briefly recapped what he’d just said to Lucie, tapping on his keyboard. Video processing software came up. The scientist opened the digitized film and moved the progress bar to eleven minutes and three seconds. Nearly identical images appeared one behind the other, as if on a filmstrip viewed under a lightbulb. With his mouse, Beckers pointed out an area in the first image, at lower left.
“It’s always in the low-contrast areas that this happens. In fog, the black sky, very dark zones, omnipresent at this point in the film. Visual tricks that allowed our filmmaker to express his secret language.”
With his mouse, he rolled the cursor rapidly over the screen, using it to underscore his explanations.
“If you look at this image just as it is, what do you see? A girl sitting in the grass and petting a cat. Around her there’s this fog, and these large dark flat areas, on the sides and in the sky. If you don’t know there’s anything to find, you’ll pass right by it. That’s what happened to Claude, who was concentrating entirely on the subliminal images, which were straightforward and clearly distinct from the rest of the film.”
Lucie came closer, her brows knit.
“Now that I’m looking, I’d almost say there were… faces, lost in the fog. And… and in all those dark patches around the image.”
“Faces, that’s right. A crowd of children’s faces.”
The scene was odd; barely perceptible faces surrounded the little girl, like malevolent succubae. The more Lucie’s eye became acclimated, the more details she made out. Small feet shoved into socks; matching outfits, like hospital pajamas; a uniform floor that looked like linoleum. A parallel, latent world slowly took shape. Lucie thought of optical illusions—the image of a vase, for instance, that turns into a couple making love after you’ve stared at it for a moment.
In the drop-down menu, Beckers selected the brightness and contrast option and opened a dialogue box on which he could play with the settings.
“Let’s suppose it’s 1955 and we’re in a movie theater. And we add a filter over the lens of the projector. A filter that heightens contrast. Then we also increase the brightness. I’m re-creating these manipulations by applying different values, which I’ve already tested. Now watch…”
He hit APPLY, and something strange happened to the image. What was initially invisible came to the fore, while the more obvious scene bleached into white light.
“Because of the increased brightness, the main image—the girl petting the cat—becomes overexposed and fades out. But the image in the darker areas, which at first was underexposed, now emerges fully.”
The two combined images produced a bizarre effect, but this time one could clearly make out a group of children, all standing, and rabbits huddled in a corner.
Lucie swallowed hard. This was it: the rabbits and the children. On the phone, the Canadian had said everything started from there.
Kashmareck mopped his brow.
“This is incredible. How did the filmmaker pull off something like that?”
“Hard for me to explain the precise technical procedure, but I think he mainly played with double exposures, using a series of adjustable masks over the camera lens. There’s one basic characteristic of film—photo or movie—which is that it remains impressionable as long as you haven’t run it through fixative in a darkroom. Basically, you could shoot several movies on the same roll of film; you just have to rewind without opening the magazine. If you do it randomly, it just becomes a jumble and you won’t see a thing. But with a lot of technical know-how and a good knowledge of lighting, composition, and framing, you can get remarkable results. Claude Poignet admired Méliès. He once told me Méliès had used up to nine successive superimpositions to build certain special effects. The work of a magician and a fine jeweler all at once. I have no doubt this film here is of the same caliber, and that your director could easily rival Méliès.”