form—Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage. While in the mirror stage the «I» appears as an Other, with which the child can narcissistically identify, the «dream work» is linked to a stage in which all consciousness of bodily borders is missing, the child’s body and the maternal breast form an undifferentiated unity. This is why Baudry speaks of an «envelopment of the subject by the screen,» «a mode which is anterior to the mirror stage, to the formation of the self, and therefore founded on a permeability, a fusion of the interior with the exterior.« [16]

Since Graham understands the cylindrically curved projection screen topologically as an «optical skin» like that in «Body Press,» parallels can be drawn to Baudry’s analysis. The cinema visitors cannot clearly recognize themselves in the projection mirror, but instead before and after the film screening they literally experience their own «envelopment […] by the screen.» The spectator experiences him or herself as flowing in space and permeable for other bodies. At the same time, this «permeability of the inside and its fusion with the outside» can be experienced by the exterior observer. This is due to the fact that the

projected image penetrates to the exterior, and simultaneously the external spectator can see through the screen into the audience. By picking up and carrying out the concepts of a metapsychological film theory in a literal fashion—the film screen acts as a mirror and a permeable «dream screen»—Graham creates a completely new situation that had not been envisioned by Baudry: the private experience of the film spectator is transformed into a psychosocial experience. The position of the film spectator as a phenomenological center is not questioned by presenting him or her with the technological apparatus as a quasi-external observer, but by confronting the spectator with a situation that can only be grasped in a one-sided fashion. What Baudry took as a reason for going back theoretically to a state prior to the mirror stage, a state in which the film spectator cannot see his own body in the film screen as mirror, is for Graham precisely one of the reasons why he uses the mirror as a projection screen. At the end of the film, he wants to return to the spectator the consciousness of his or her own body and his or her belonging to a social group in the very location where immediately