If cinema has relentlessly played with the promise of what Chris Marker called a ‘free replay’, it has also often portrayed—sometimes in the course of the same film—its dark reverse-shot: the impossibility of fulfilling such a promise. Here, I will sketch the three basic scenarios involved in the representation of this desire gone wrong, as well as some of the particular structures, strategies and motifs of a group of films that fit this idea especially well.
Laugh Motel 