The construction of the visible and the invisible in the film The Others

By Elsa Barreda-Ruiz

What is to see? To see is to approach and to participate in the spectacle of reality. Reality is outside ourselves and participates in the spectacle of us looking at it. Reality exists without us, but we do not exist without reality and it is through our senses that we attain our own existence, as it us being displayed in the wholeness of reality. To see implies a communion with the seen object; to see implies identification, an approach that opens the doors of understanding. We do not just see, we interpret, we obtain things, we acquire knowledge and information, we see textures and see smells. We dont just see, but we enter a given scene of the thing we see, we take part of it and assist and modify it whilst sharing the space with it. The absence of visibility means absence of reality? Can we question the existence of a thing we do not see? These are questions that need many other discourses to be answered, and the theme has been long discussed by philosophy throughout the years. In his book Le visible et linvisible, posthumously published, Maurice Merleau-Ponty reflects about the relationship between perception and truth. He had long time reflected on what could be called reality and how the piece of reality that took part of our gaze was related to us particularly. In this work, he argues that the world of reality does not exist as one strong and unbreakable entity, but as a product of perception that concentrates in itself the many possibilities given by other beholders perception of it. The truth lies then on the world of the invisible, the allure of things that cannot be perceived but that are part of the world of my perception, are thus what is real. Merleau-Pontys discussion objects the deep-stated Cartesian rationality, that implies that reality is transparent and knowable, opposed to the perceiving subject who is considered an active entity entitled to acquire the object of its perception without difficulty or ambiguity. He goes on further arguing that our body, our tool to perceive reality, is not only an objective tool to achieve reality, but also subject to be perceived by others, therefore simultaneously a subject and an object of experience. This ambiguous status of simultaneous perception reverses the idea of an objective reality. Reality becomes a thing that cannot be seen by the perceiving subject, for he takes part of the scene that he

perceives therefore he is unable to perceive its integrity as long as he does not perceive himself as part of it. In what way is the experience of perception raised for discussion by Merleau-Ponty can be transported to a filmic text? How can we halt our browsing eye in order to stay just for a moment with an image that is trying to construct the paradigm of perception with all its parts? With what eye is the narrator of the film looking and what does he let us see? To answer to some of these questions we will concentrate in the film The Others by Alejandro Amenbar because it makes for a very good metaphor of the conceptualisation of perception of the visible and the invisible that Merleau-Ponty explores, since it is a film about the discovery of the other, and because it is a film that deals with the subject of observation and the realization of ones own capability to perceive. The film has also been chosen because it is as very effective genre film that manages to provoke fear in a very pure and classic form, mainly by portraying the thin line that divides the worlds of the natural and the supernatural and by developing the plot in a very intimate and subjective way that engages the viewer directly to the characters and allows for the final twist to be surprising and shocking. Many of the resources used to create the atmosphere and plot of the film belong purely to the genre of horror but also recall amazingly the concepts of the subjective look, perception and the act of seeing and being seen exposed by Merleau-Ponty. We will therefore try to analyse the text on its many levels in order to interrelate this philosophical discussion to the visual level of the film but also to the concept of reality that it expounds. The Others is a very atmospheric film; it is acutely constructed without the use of many especial effects, the smallest details are taken care of in order to allow the spectator to immerse in the plot and engage the perspective of the characters in a journey of discovery of the own self. The key of its success as a horror film relays on the way it portrays a world of uncertainty and despair that leaves many doors open for interpretation. The film is settled in an old Victorian house in the island of Jersey. Grace, a middle aged woman and her two children Anne and Nicholas live there. The year is 1945 and Second World War is coming to an end. Charles, Graces husband and the childrens father, has gone to the front a year and a half ago, just after the surrender of the island to the Nazi occupation

The titles of film open in darkness. A soft candlelight breaks the screen illuminating the images of what seems to be a childrens book, drawings of children, of a house, the beginning of a story. A voice over reads the biblical passage of the creation of the world. God created the world in seven days. And light was the first thing he made. The story sets off as the new service arrives; we learn from Grace that the previous workers have gone mysteriously, without giving any notice or even picking up their wages. Grace welcomes the new service and starts giving orders and indications, she is a tough, beautiful woman, and though we have seen a sparkle of weakness in the opening shot, she appears to be strong. The precarious information we are given starts building up a mystifying atmosphere that is enhanced by Graces unlocking and locking every door she passes through. In this house no door must be open without the previous one being closed she says as she is about to introduce the children to the service and explains their rare condition of photosensitivity, an allergy to light that impedes them to be exposed to any strong light. The first time the children appear on the film we do not see them. We only listen to them saying their morning prayer Dear Lord bless the light of every day and only after they come out half sleep to the dark corridor and greet the new maids Ms. Mills and Lydia. The children are strictly educated by their mother. They never go out and they do not know anybody. The island however is almost empty because of the recent war, so life in the house passes slowly by as the protagonists begin to feel changes in it. The arrival of the new service coincides with the arrival of a strange atmosphere in the house, a strange force that starts disturbing the tranquillity in which they thought they lived. Only the little girl can see the intruders, that is how this foreign presence is called, it seems to be a family and everything seems to point out that they are ghosts. Grace is very strict with the children, she does not believe in the strange presence and she is obstinate with the idea that there cannot be a relationship between the world of the supernatural and the real world, she dismisses all of Annes attempts to convince her that she has seen the intruders and negates any possibility. Towards the end, the film changes its pace; we begin to understand that the intruders are not ghosts as we have been led to think, and that the strange presence in the house is actually the opposite of everything we have thought. The family conformed by

Grace and the children is dead, the mother killed her children and committed suicide and the plot takes the shape of a passage of the characters to the acceptance of their own dead. The Others is fundamentally a film about knowing and not knowing, and about the painful passage from the state of thinking that we know to the state of knowing that we do not know anything. The film is constructed in a way that leads the spectator towards the most subjective of looks, creating an intimate portrait that not only can scare, but that also shows the characters human essence and portrays them in the nudity of their sufferance, despair, solitude and frustration and this allows us for an interpretation of the various levels in which it deals with the topic of perception. The question of perception can be analysed from two main standpoints. One is the link established between the spectator and the events of the film and thus a meta-text relationship in which we can explore the way in which the film talks to the viewer and establishes a significant rapport with him, a rapport in which the spectator is a passive but subjective participant and the film. The other perspective corresponds to the inner universe in the film, thus the way facts develop in the inside of the film and how relationships of perception are built among the characters in despite of us. The reversibility of gaze On the first assertion, I would like to start by exposing the films construction of a subjective viewpoint that involves the spectator subjectively with the characters sorrow and makes him identify with the events that take place within the story. This is a mechanism of identification commonly used in the genre of horror for it provokes a sentimental attachment between the spectator and the characters and opens the sensibility that will eventually lead the former to a state of anxiety and fear. We will set off from the assumption that both the visual composition of the film text and the portrayal of the characters psychology are constructed with the intention of provoking the viewers perception and letting him see the characters as if they were people we know. This mechanism is successfully accomplished and sets off very early in the film, namely in the opening scene when the character of Grace is introduced. The first shot of the film is a close-up of her waking up, screaming with horror. She is lying on a bed in a room full of bright white light. She gets up with a horrified look on her face. The shot widens to

show that she is alone in the bedroom. Anguish can be read on her expression. We know nothing about her, but this short scene allows us to witness a situation of intimacy that exposes Graces inner essence. Close-up shots allow for identification as they present the character without any other horizon but his/her own psychology, they show a close look that gives the impression of a real interaction with the person. Merleau-Ponty suggests that movies directly present to us that special way of being in the world, of dealing with things and other people which we can see in the sign language of gesture and gaze and which clearly defines each person we know.1 Engaging Grace is how we go through her process of discovery and transformation. Within the story we begin sharing her doubts, fears and inconsistencies, and we are placed at her level of ignorance of the things that happen around her, for she is the character who knows less and will have to undergo a drastic change of perception. Thanks to Grace we are introduced to the house and explained the way things are settled, she introduces us to the children and sets up her rules. She locks and unlocks doors, letting enter or blocking the light. She walks around the house with sufficiency, yet we are inside of her viewpoint and the hint of the opening scene is too strong to forget, thus we perceive an atmosphere of insecurity that begins to be built up in the world of what is invisible to her. As spectators we witness the conformation of the presence of the intruders who break into the house (and the film) and who are perceived as a menace. Events slowly develop and the presence of the intruders gets more evident and almost unbearable, especially to Grace who cannot understand its origin, because she cannot believe in it. She has sensed some things: she hears paces, voices, the crying of a child. She is confused because the existence of a supernatural presence parallel to her own natural presence is an aberrance that God could not allow to happen. But her little daughter Anne claims that she not only has seen the intruders but has also spoken with a little boy named Victor and with an old woman who asks her questions. Grace on the other hand struggles within herself. She is impeded to believe something she

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Merleau-Ponty, Senso e non senso, 1992 Un mondo ha delle dimensioni. Per definizione esse non sono le uniche possibili (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 232)

cannot see. And we, as subjective spectators cannot but struggle to understand what there is to see, for our perspective is engaged to Graces and we are banned from Annes viewpoint. The subjective gaze engaged to Graces viewpoint reaches a peak and collapses with our own rationality. Towards the middle of the film Grace goes out desperate looking for the help of the priest. She is firmly convinced that the presence of the intruders needs to be fought back on the grounds of her well-established Catholic rationality. We see her leaving the house and for the first time we are allowed to look from the point of view of other characters and this gives us a hint that the process of deconstruction of Graces rationality (and thus what we have been thinking so far) has begun. It is Ms Mills and Mr Toddles that we see talking about Grace and the dialogue, though extremely cryptic is very revealing -Now she thinks the house is haunted -Is it safe to let her go alone? -Yes, the mist wont let her go too far -Oh yes, the mist, the mist The colour of this dialogue changes drastically the flow of the film. From now on the events develop differently before our eyes and it is no coincidence that Graces walk outside the house is inasmuch cryptic and revealing. She walks a few meters away from the house and finds herself in a tree-lined path. There is a thin mist that thickens as she advances, so rapidly and up to a point that she is in the middle of a thick fog and everything around her is invisible. We are transmitted with her feeling of hopelessness as she is trapped in a white, impenetrable darkness. She moves back and forth without getting anywhere, and without being able to understand what is happening. We are suddenly struck whit a thought of unreality that questions everything that we had assumed so far in the film. The surrounding mist cancels the idea of visibility, there is no visibility outside the house, and there is no visibility in daylight. We can presume now that the reason is that actually there is no visibility for Grace and this feeling adds up to the now firm knowledge that the house is not haunted as implied by Ms. Mills dialogue. This eerie feeling grows when a male figure starts appearing before Grace in the midst of the thick fog; it is the arrival of her long-time gone husband, coming back from war in the most unlikely of situations.

From this point on our engagement to Graces viewpoint breaks, for we have been given the elements to question what she believes. The return of Graces husband raises new questions but at the same time confirms the suspicion that it is the family and not the house, not the intruders, that is surrounded by an unnatural air. In the same way, in the formal level of the film we are given a more open perspective of the events, we are not anymore seeing things from Graces viewpoint but we also begin to presence the chats of the service, the conversation of the children and to see Grace from without, reacting madly to the confirmation of her own fears, negating the palpability of what her senses perceive in an evident mechanism of protection against something that is already too close to be ignored. As the mystery unveils the subjective point of view becomes objective in a way, because towards the end we as spectators are allowed to see the integrity of the film and we experience along with the characters the demystification of reality. We learn with them their own condition, and with them we are surprised of the twist in the end, and moreover, we participate to their downward acceptance of their own condition. As we have argued above, this mechanism of identification is used with the objective of bringing the spectator to an integral cinematic experience that is needed in a horror film. Of course it allows the spectator to make his own conclusions with what he has been presented, though it is always biased by the directors decision of disclosing more or less information to the viewers eye. The ability of the director to create a world that is not flat and purely onedimensional gives the spectator the opportunity to generate her own theories and to break through the curtain of what is left unseen -a curtain that we can identify with the thick mist that Grace encounters when trying to leave the house. In this film the formal structure is well taken care of for the spectator to fall in the traps of the plot. The realms of the invisible and the visible seem to be irreconcilable to Graces eyes, but to us their lose ends and soft limits are subtly exposed, and we are given the utensils to identify them.

The limits between the visible and the invisible In the following part we will explore the second assertion regarding the issue of perception that correspond to the inner universe of the film and the way the mechanisms that we have analysed in the formal structure of the film work to conceptualize the films inner structure. To deal with the issue of perception within the film and relate them to MerleauPontys conceptualization of perceptive actions, we will take the presence of light, its use both in the aesthetics of the film and the plot as a principal element that delimits and helps constructing the realms of the visible and the invisible. As we can see in this brief recount of the opening sequence, light plays an important role as a theme in the film. The childrens rare condition of photosensitivity works as an excuse for the insertion of light as another character in the plot. On the aesthetic level, light is treated as a protagonist. The house, a classic horror film house, is in a perennial chiaroscuro: illumination in the presence of the children is only given by candles, but it enters abundantly from the large windows in their absence. Light has to be contained outside these tall windows that open to a huge, unseen garden and there seems to be no half way between the two extremes. Within the story, the childrens condition impedes them from living a normal life and this condition affects the life of the other members of the family and the life of the house itself. Light is the component from which the protagonists must be protected from, so it is given an attribute of malignity but also of a desired privation. On the symbolic level, light and its dichotomy with darkness help to construct the films conceptualization of the visible and the invisible. The film places the realm of the visible in darkness and the realm of the invisible in the light; the construction of the visible characters is assembled in the dark side of the plot, whereas the invisible characters i.e. the intruders are left in the light. This is a dualistic conformation that appears as a chiasmus, and it is a fundamental premise for the development of the film because it establishes a reversed categorization for the own characters perception of reality. This conceptualization makes up a universe within the film in which traditional beliefs are reversed: light hides things and darkness shows them, just as light means death and darkness means security.

Hence in this reversed dichotomy, it is suggested to us from the beginning that everything that we are about to see is actually the opposite of what it seems to be, and that we are about to watch these characters as if they were the negative of a photograph. In darkness we can see everything. As spectators, we witness the development of the life inside this claustrophobic house and its inhabitants; we identify ourselves with the condition of darkness as normality and take part of the association of ideas that is built up around an intrusive presence of others. The idea of an outer presence is skilfully constructed in the film using as resource all senses but sight. Grace hears the intruders, listens to their voices, their paces on the upper floor, the playing of the piano. Nicholas hears the breathing of an intruder in his room and even listens to his voice talking to Anne, his sister. The realm of the invisible is constructed as something latent but not palpable, slightly perceptible but hidden by the doubt of rationality. Therefore we can assume that the realm of the invisible is built under the premise of the unknown and because of its condition of unbeknown, it is invisible. We should not however consider this premise as a hermetic entity conformed of two parts. Just as the negative of a photograph has an infinite variety of shades and grey areas, we should think of the filmic universe of the house as a world where the grey areas prevail. Light hides in recondite spaces and gives way for the communication between the two worlds, or for the interaction of the different dimensions of what is the whole of reality. One of these grey areas is open to Anne, the girl, who is the only one who not only senses the intruders but also who can actually see them and even talk with them. Anne is, together with Grace, the most complex character of the film. Her character is ambiguously built in between the sweetness of a small girl and the cleverness of a grown woman, and the effect is accomplished in a way that is practically impossible to distinguish in the first scenes whether she is sincere or not when she refers to her interaction with the intruders. At the same time, her presence in the film is used as a counterpart to the character of Grace, who is, on the other hand, a more transparent character, for she displays her motives more evidently. The dichotomy of Grace and Anne is actually another version of the one of light and darkness. Anne and Grace represent two opposite ways of approaching reality and through

them we are able to distinguish the essence of the realms that seem to oppose, but that begin to interweave tightly. On the one hand the character of Grace represents the established rational gaze that negates the realm of the invisible, even though its existence is evident as she can sense it with all the terminals of her perception: she hears them, she feels their paces and their breathing. Anne, on the other hand, represents a multidimensional rationality, which does not negate the realm of the invisible, even without the certainty of its existence, accepting the structure of the world from a plural perspective. The character of Grace is unable to reach what Merleau-Ponty identifies as the worlds other dimensions2 mainly because she denies their existence, therefore fails to think that they exist and does not dare to even name the possibility out loud. According to Merleau-Ponty however, it is through the enunciation of the other dimensionalities of the world that the perception can be enlarged3: Therefore we can interpret that it is her denial what obfuscates her perception. Anne on the other hand is a contestant to the traditional rationality represented by her mother. Her character is reflexive of the state of things and therefore she is able to perceive the different layers of the surrounding dimensions. She is open to perception of her inner self and of the outside and therefore she has access to the world of the invisible as none other member of the family does. Why she is able to see the intruders is a subject we will try to explain under the light of Merleu-Pontys concept of the beholders consciousness and presence as a subject-object of perception. Merleu-Ponty holds that the body or flesh, (chair) experiences objectively but it is at the same time subject to be experienced. He elaborates the example of ones hand touching ones other hand. The ambiguous status of our body resides in the simultaneity of the touching and the being tangible. Therefore the action of beholding implies a merging with the object that is being beheld: I see and the things seen are there. It is due to phenomena that I see, and it is due to my watching that phenomena are perceived. They accord to one another. In this example we can place Anne as the ambiguous element of the household, for she is the connecting element between the two directions of perception: she is able to see
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Un mondo ha delle dimensioni. Per definizione esse non sono le uniche possibili (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 232) la struttura visibile non pu essere compressa se non in virt della sua relazione al logos, alla parola (237).

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the intruders and she is the only one seen by them, in a simoultaneous merging of reciprocal tangibility that affirmates the presence of one another. The exploring eye can be compared with the feeling of the hand touching hand. When my hand touches something it feels from the inside. Yet at the same time it is open to being touched from the outside, for instance when I lay my other hand upon it. Not only is there a feeling in my hand (when the rough or smooth surface of object is felt), but there is a feeling of touching too. This duplicating potential (also called reversibility) holds for seeing as well, since as soon as I see, my vision is doubled with the complementary vison of the other seeing me from outside, or the way in which another would see me, installed in the midst of the visible. In seeing the interweaving of the world becomes clear. For Anne the position of the intruders in the world is clear, for even without knowing exactly who or what the inttuders are, she knows that they are not ghosts and that they occupy a place that is normal in the state of things. She does not question this facts in the terms of her diminutive world (the one imposed by her mother) but accepts them in a more trascendental way. She finds herself in a configuration already existing which has not been set up by her conception of the world, but by a superior entity in which she cannot interfere. In ones body the visible turns into a vision of oneself and in the case of Anne this is made evident, for the visible turns into a vision of herself or what this herself has become after the traumatic event occurred. By recognising herself in the new state of being, she becomes a part of the chair du monde, the mass of the visible. No longer should she hold on to concepts of the body existing within the world and the beholder within the body, for there is no boundary between the world and the body. Anne is therefore the only character that can see the place of her own body in the order of the realms of both the visible and the invisible, and she is aware of her own flesh. It is exactly this awareness what allows her to see the intruders, just as Merleau-Ponty argues that the only way to attain the sensitivity towards the invisible is to relate it to the own flesh4 Annes perception of truth differentiates from the other characters sense of perception in many ways and this is exemplified in the film with the different ways in
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la struttura sensibile non pu essere compresa se non in virt della sua relazione al corpo, alla carne (237). 11

which the members of the family deal with the traumatic episode of Grace killing the children. Anne is the only one of all three family members who accepts that something happened regarding this episode. In a very suggestive scene, Nicholas tries to convince Anne, in an obvious demonstration of negation, that on the contrary nothing happened and that mother never tried to hurt them, Anne on the other hand refuses to negate the truth, for she is against the erasing of the memory of the traumatic experience. She goes even further, daring to pronounce it, to enunciate it. This helps her to preserve a level of consciousness of reality that is lacking in both her mother and Nicholas, and though just as her mother and brother she does not know that they are dead, she is the one who starts noticing the small, almost insignificant differences that have arrived since they died. She knows deep in herself that something has changed, though she does not know exactly what it is. A good example of this is the very simple but important scene of the breakfast, in which she is eating a toast that she does not like because she liked it better before. It is not a coincidence that this is the scene in which she has the argument with her brother about whether or not their mother tried to kill them. The role of logos Towards the end of the film the characters reach the catharsis of their state by finding out the truth about what happened. They come to learn that Grace killed her children and then killed herself. Finding out the truth of their condition proves shocking for the three of them, even for Anne who never denied to herself that something had ever happened. The final sequence begins with Grace and Anne discovering simultaneously but in different places that the servants Ms. Mills Mr Toddles and Lydia are already dead. After kicking them out, Grace enter Ms. Mills room and spies on her things, finding an old photograph of the three of them dead, dated with 1851. At the same time, in a scene presented with parallel montage, Anne and Nicholas jump out the window to go look for their father and come across a burial place with the names of the servants. Anne immediately understands that they are dead and she and her brother run to the house.

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Inside, Grace is already waiting for them, as she has discovered they went out. The servants are coming behind them and Grace tries to stop them unsuccessfully and tells them to go. Ms. Mills tries to explain Grace that it is not a matter of going or staying, it is a matter of understanding, for it is already too late; the intruders have already taken over the house. The children run and hide in a closet in the upper floor. They start hearing the presence of the intruders and go out of the closet. The intruders are now strangely visible sitting around a table performing some kind of ritual. There is the old woman with whom Anne had spoken before as well as a young couple and other man. The old woman is in trance and is asking questions to Anne, questions that she decides to answer so they would leave them alone To the question What did your mother did to you children? Anne tells her to the ear that mother tried to strangle them. The woman continues asking: Is that how she killed you? And the shock is tremendous. We can see it depicted on Annes face as she asks, almost to herself, Killed us? -She did not kill us! exclaim the children and so does Grace who has already entered in the scene. With a skilful cross montage we suddenly understand the fact that Grace and the children are dead whereas the intruders are alive trying to establish contact with them. Suddenly everything makes sense as the realms of the visible and the invisible coexist before our eyes on screen. I have decided to describe this scene elaborately because it is the culmination of everything that has been exposed before. As it had been argued previously, the film depicts the passage of the characters from a state of knowing nothing to a state of knowing everything, mainly about themselves that allows them to understand their position in the world and to be able to understand the others position in the world, and moreover, to see the multidimensionality of the world that moves around them and in despite of them. The final scene is representative of all this as it exposes the way in which the characters acquire the knowledge of their own flesh and bone. This scene also exposes in the importance of the logos and the thought of their own selves, therefore the thought and recognition of their own condition.

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It is through the enunciation of the event of Grace killing the children that the family faces the truth about themselves. And it is only after the attaining of this truth that they become conscious of themselves and can finally all see through the realm of the invisible that had been hiding. The function of enunciation proves then fundamental. The way it is portrayed in the film is of course a literal association of the function of the logos, but in the words of Merleau-Ponty enunciation implies thought, and thought implies knowledge and capacity of seeing. We can relate the scene of the old woman asking Anne directly to the following passage in which the philosopher underlines the contribution of the other to the recognition of ones own self, particularly because this scene refers directly to Annes accomplishment of the knowledge she already had but had not yet understood: Le parole degli altri mi fanno parlare e pensare perch creano in me un altro da me, uno scarto in rapporto a... ci che io vedo e cos me lo designano a me stesso. Le parole dellaltro formano la trama attraverso la quale io vedo il mio pensiero. (237238) The scene that functions as epilogue reinforces this thesis whilst also closing the many questions that had risen throughout the film. After the cathartic scene with the intruders, and once they have decided not to live in the house, we see Grace and the children sitting on the floor, hugging and crying. Grace is recounting the way all events took place, she is confessing the way in which she went mad and killed them. We interpret that with this action of naming the facts she finally becomes aware of her own flesh and of her condition. However, the very act of having reached this point of transcendental understanding makes her see that she still knows very little and that the world of the invisible is still there to be discovered. Where is limbo? asks Anne, and Grace answers with resignation but also with hope: I dont know, I dont know more than you do In this way we are in the position to assume that Grace has finally undergone a process of critique of her own rationality and has managed to substitute her old and obsolete notion of the world as a rigid, mechanic place with a concept of a multidimensional world full of notions that are yet to be known. According to MerleauPonty this is the process that has to be followed in order to abandon the idea of a unique, vertical world.

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Conclusions The act of seeing implies a not seeing of many other things that however exist surrounding a reality that we cannot always attain with the grasp of sight, at least not at once. The portion of the world that is visible to our eyes is a product of our direct interaction and understanding of it, and the invisible is there to be attained and understood, to become visible in other time, on other terms and on other levels, to appear before our eyes when we become ready to see it. Perception interpreted in a film text can be many times influenced by the texts intentionality to create an alternative world. This is evident in many of the films of a recent trend deal with the subject of the conceptualization of a new rationality (namely films as The Matrix or Dark City) and that propose a drastic separation between the realms of the visible and the invisible. In the case of The Others, however, we find that even when it is a film about the supernatural, it invites for a reflection from a more personal point of view, proposing an internal questioning of the categorization of the own sense of perception, and the own sense of approaching reality. After this process reality consequently discloses in a different way before our eyes, becomes clearer and more approachable. The visible world connects with the invisible world through language and calls for the onlooker to add meaning to it. What we see and describe is increasingly complex as the human body as a point of reference becomes more invisible. Reality, even if it does not provoke us to do it, requires our constant questioning and enunciation of it.

Bibliography Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Senso e non senso, Il saggiatore, 1992 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Il visibile e linvisibile, Bompiani, 2003 The Others, Director Alejandro Amenbar, France/USA/Spain 2001 www.imdb.com

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