The Poetics of Phantom Cinema: Waiting for Harry Dickson

Despite the current plethora of world film encyclopedias and dictionaries of national cinemas, one particular history or archaeology of cinematic art remains to be told or written - that of non-films or off-films which have literally filled filmic annals almost since the invention of the medium and make up what I propose to call "Phantom Cinema." Films that never came to completion or fruition, films that were inherently or constitutively unfilmable, elusive films that haunt us as "(non-)viewers", abortive films that go on to covertly inspire and fertilize the later opuses of their unsuccessful originators. Specific instances and possible paradigms (French and non-French, filmic and literary) are considered in this chapter in an effort to delineate this uncharted territory and examine the mythical, fetishistic aura that these mirage-films tend to acquire over time.