Films shock and scare, delight and draw out tears—they're pieces of art that tell stories, but particularly stories that often deeply affect us. Many of these feelings can be preserved through the written word; for instance, when the fear comes from a haunting ghost. But of course, the audiovisuals of film add tremendously to the cinematic conjuring of emotions. So much so that sometimes the visuals themselves can be the unnerving agent, even if the subject matter isn't scary on its own. A loud sound and the appearance of a monster should scare—but even innocuous images can have this effect. As any scholar of film could tell you, often, without knowing what we should fear, the audience can be unwittingly manipulated by the smallest editing choices. So small, in fact, that mere frames can terrify.
The opening credits of Mindhunter uses a device known as a flash frame, a brief appearance of a still image in the midst of an otherwise normal scene. I had to skip the credits upon second viewing. I always watch the titles of shows, but the rapid shots of corpses was difficult to bear.
This is a device that feels extraordinarily physiological. I want to say that it attacks our senses. I want to say that it seems to puncture the otherwise fluid footage. Puncture is perhaps the best word for it, a word, of course, reminiscent of Barthes' punctum, a quality of a photograph that jumps out and seems to prick you. There may not be a better way to see what aspect of an image gets seared into you unconsciously than presenting the image as a flash frame, which lasts, at most, a few frames which amount to fractions of a second. In that tiny moment, your response is immediate and unfiltered. From these flashes of rotting flesh, I can never forget those dirtied fingernails. But in this case, the content of the shots is also disturbing.
In Sunshine, as a crew boards a seemingly abandoned ship, a flash appears of a face, then another one. Otherwise innocuous, these images—in this context, in this format—are bone-chilling. These go on in series, appearing irregularly and inducing one clear, dominant emotion: fear. Building suspense in what we had previously not suspected to be a suspenseful location, these portraits serve a narrative purpose through affecting our sense of place. These shots bridge the gap from calm to paranoia that the characters are experiencing and allow us to enter the mental state necessary for the scary twists to follow. By overlaying footage of an empty, desolate, dark ship with flashes of brief images, the filmmakers confound and confuse the audience.
Part of this confusion is related to the warping of time. Beyond the physiological affect, the flash frame also interrupts the narrative progression. Each of these images cannot be comprehended in the real space of the film, thus they prove difficult to assimilate into the diegesis. Amidst the flowing lights of the famous star sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey are flashes of the protagonist's face as he experiences it. Just as the protagonist flies through unclear space-time, the flash frame disturbs the film's chronological development.
It is no coincidence that they focus on his face to induce this effect. After all, why not memories or brief images of the surrounding landscape? Instead, by featuring his tormented face with its twisted features, the film momentarily reflects the experience of the audiences—in awe at the incredible cinematic effects (and the trip through space and time they represent) but also attacked by these flashes which continue to disorient.
Film still from 2001: A Space Odyssey.