Georgina Evans

_Desk Set_, a 1957 20th Century Fox studio comedy, made with the sponsorship of IBM, charts the relationship between a reference librarian, Bunny Watson, and Richard Sumner, the inventor of a computer which appears to threaten her job. The film displays a thriving philodendron within Bunny’s skyscraper office, illustrating her organic style of thinking, and implicitly inviting us to see the plant in opposition to the computer. The suggestion that the plant is in some sense excessive, claiming attention beyond the norms of the ornamental background houseplant, opens questions about how we look at plants on film. We find here a reframing of figure and ground, which relates the philodendron to moments where plants become conspicuous in early film and in horror. _Desk Set_ reflects a vegetal landscape characterised by all the commonplace instrumentalising of plants in modernity, amongst which the philodendron emerges as an exception. The plant does not point outwards to a putative wilderness. Instead, our looking at it allows us to contemplate it as an individuated specimen, and to move from that act of looking to recognise its deep entanglement with the urban environment, and with human care.

This article considers the role of the spectator's imagination in their engagement with the sensory world of cinema. I argue that the spectator's mental images, far from being overwhelmed by those on the screen, are an important element of a complex interaction with the sensations offered and indicated by the film. I develop these ideas through a reading of Krzysztof Kieślowski's Trois Couleurs: Blanc, in which hairdresser Karol is himself unusually dependent on the mental image. This preoccupation of the film directs us to question the parallel images generated by the spectator, and the ways in which they both alienate us from his subjective experience and provoke our sympathies.