"Nothing is as it seems" : Venice and its spectral other in Nicolas Roeg's 𝘋𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘓𝘰𝘰𝘬 𝘕𝘰𝘸

Abstract

A city of ghosts, revenants, echoes, doubles, and untrustworthy perspectives, Nicolas Roeg's Venice hovers between the world of the living and the world of the dead and functions as a powerful metaphor for the return of the repressed, the uncanny, the unheimlich, defined by Freud as "that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar." Venice is depicted as a city of labyrinthine entrapment not only of space where it is impossible to physically map oneself but also of time where boundaries collapse and mysteries are resolved only to yield yet more mysteries. To be lost in this spatial and temporal lab)'Tinth raises the spectre of the ultimate loss of the ability to differentiate between past, present, and future, between the real and the hallucinatory. Reference will also be made to the film's elliptical and irregular montage, its elaborate narrative structure which eschews linearity and forces its viewers to ponder on time in unaccustomed terms, and on its broader themes of blindness and sight in a world of psychic visions.