„It goes beyond discovery […] It only brings the nebula closer.“
Alan O’Leary „Nebular Epistemics“ (2023)

„The phantom limb follows its own laws. When the arm is moved towards a rigid object, the phantom goes into the rigid object. It may even go through the patient’s own body…“
Paul Schilder: „The Image and Appearance of the Human Body“ (1950)

I came across this film by accident. I was looking for something else. Shots of clocks and watches in particular. But by browsing through its images also other moments stuck with me. An empty chair in a living room like from a doll house. Water stains on a carpet. A glimmer under water. And always the sickly tones in this colorized version of a film which is originally in black and white.

What would be the result if I cut out all the things this film is supposedly about, I wondered. Cut out its story, cut out its people, cut out all dialogue, and, most of all, cut out the phantom of which the movie title speaks. 

Not much remained. Just tiny bits and pieces of a broken torso. Like a gallery collecting all that which the other galleries tossed away. The crumbles no longer form a whole. Yet they are weirdly affecting in their intense, isolated presence. And much more mysterious than the original film could ever be.

It was done. I was mystified. And this made me want to go through the film a second time, looking for images of my surprise. I started collecting reactions only. Silent faces, reacting to things we do not see or hear.

In his video essay „Nebular Epistemics“ Alan O’Leary argues that dismantling a film based on very concrete parameters and constraints (such as in my case excising from a film all shots with people) does not so much result in an analytical distance to the studied object but rather in the experience of getting lost in it: „The parametric or constraint based approach is the corollary or the method of this immersion in the phenomenon.“

And so too is my video essay. Cut away from its original film body, cut away from the story and context in which they were meant to serve a role, the shots in my video form a different body, a nebular existence, a phantom, much more common and yet more uncanny than the one in the original movie.

And like with a phantom limb I feel strongly that which is not here. A mysterious presence that never was in the original. Only the phantom exists. It is right here. Present in absence.