The ability of photography to make visible the imperceptible has fascinated and nourished a collective unconscious inclined to assign her with a set of supernatural attributes. Taking up the foundations of an ontology based on ageless beliefs to images and their conversation with the invisible powers, cinema has drawn from the register of spirit photography the elements of a formal grammar in which the phenomenon of appearance and disappearance on the screen are the markers of its magical nature. Like Georges Méliès in the role of a photographer making a portrait of a young woman by only using his psychic powers (The Spiritualistic Photographer, 1903), the American artist Rebecca Baron (based in Los Angeles) offers with Détour de Force (2014) an disturbing portrait of Ted Serios, an atypical figure in American popular culture of the 1960s who was able to expose the surfaces of Polaroid film by his thought. If Méliès has exalted through its optical traps the magical aspect of the photographic image, Rebecca Baron explores the mainstream media coverage of Ted Serios and his mental pictures (thoughtography) in which both became the subjects a morbid attraction where the use of imagination is denied. The demystification of photography denounced by Détour de Force seems to find in an industrial film produced by the American Chemical Society his negative reflection.

Emblematic film of the modernity in the cinema history, La Jetée (1963) by Chris Marker has influenced the unconscious of a cinephilia by its revolutionary structure borrowed from the photomontage. Created from still images on which the comment of an off-camera narrator adds its own story, the film draws the outline of a utopian space in which the temporalities of photography and narrative are intermingled through the phenomenon of cinema projection. In his search of childhood buried memories, the Brazilian artist Pablo Pijnappel (born in Paris in 1979) revives in his work Fontenay-aux-Roses (2010) the founding principles of an experience based on memory and poetry that was inaugurated by Chris Marker. By borrowing a selection of 80 still images made in Paris by other, Fontenay-aux-Roses deploys the intriguing beauty of a chronicle nourished by the nostalgia of memories and the desire of a fiction without beginning or end. On the projected images that appear successively on the screen by following the predetermined order by the carousel of a slide projector, the voice of a narrator physically present in the movie theater, delivers one after the other the pieces of a puzzle that each viewer is led to reconstruct.