CINEMA IS ABOUT creating images in motion. It reflects the essential denotation of an image as an optical reproduction of an object, scene, movement, gesture. It's about visual representations of our perceptions and ourselves. It's a medium through which directors project their visions, actors reincarnate themselves in ever new impersonations, and viewers watch the screen images as reflections of mimetic (or fantastic) reality. So far, it has been technology's greatest gift to the human imagination, a remarkable mirror of life-like illusions. Filmmakers naturally exploit cinema's fundamental reproductive nature, its inherent double-ness, often deliberately exploring questions of identity and reliability of our perceptions and judgements to engage us in fascinating games of visual deception and intellectual manipulation. Those themes typically involve mistaken identities, lookalikes, impostors, and alter egos, as well as incubi and body snatchers in their horror and sci-fi varieties. The protagonists live double (as in, say, Europa, Europa...
