ABSTRACT
There is a scene in Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) which is frequently singled out as a metacinematic moment. I Lisa and Stefan, in the course of their extremely short-lived time together, visit a carnival attraction which involves sitting together in a simulated train compartment as a series of painted scenes depicting nationally specific landscapes is rolled by outside an artificial window. At one point in the scene, the forward progression of the landscapes is halted and Stefan is forced to emerge from the compartment and buy more tickets so that he and Lisa, as he tells the ticketseller, can "revisit the scenes of our youth." His emergence from the compartment draws attention to the old man who rides a bicycle in order to provide the power for the image-producing machine. The metacinematic nature of this moment lies in the revelation of an apparatus which simulates not only a train but the cinema as well, in its simple provision of an image which moves. The railway passenger, like the cinema spectator, is subjected to a succession of images mediated by a frame. Similarly, the cinema, in opening onto another space-a new or "other" place-, takes the spectator somewhere he/she has never been before (or, obeying the compulsion to repeat, back to revisit familiar scenes). Whatever its particular fiction, the film produces a pleasure akin to that of the travelogue.2
