本論文旨在探討電影影像如何藉其特性，得以超越物質性而表現內在的、難以言述的、形上的領域或特質。本文以兩部當代電影作為分析文本：波蘭導演克里斯多夫·奇士勞斯基的《雙面薇若妮卡》(The Double Life of Véronique, 1991)及美國導演大衛·林區的《內陸帝國》(Inland Empire, 2006)；兩部作品以其神祕與難解著稱。
兩者皆以探索女性本質為主題，以不同觀點呈現女性主體性。電影裡的女性主體，引用拉岡(Jacques Lacan)的理論，或是在符號層裡(the Symbolic order)爭扎(《雙面薇若妮卡》)或是惶惶不安(《內陸帝國》)。學者勞瑞緹絲(Teresa de Lauretis)在其書Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema 裡以「經驗」指稱(女性)主體性不斷建構的過程。主體和外在社會間的相互作用是抽象與具體並存的。爰此，本文視此兩部電影為「女性經驗的影像化」的作品，同時亦符合電影如何將「抽象具體化、影像化」的研究。女性主體在兩部電影中亦或與符號層疏離、抵抗社會或父權的制約，亦或被迫挑戰它。
本研究將採用精神分析的理論，檢視女主角和她在電影敘事裡的經驗之間的辯證關係，並假定聲音(voice)和視線(gaze)作為抵抗符號層(或父權)控制的可能媒介。除了銀幕端的再現，本文亦將分析接收端(即觀眾)。承如皮爾斯(Charles Sanders Peirce)的符號理論指出，再現與主體同為產生意義過程的必要實體。最後，本研究將揭示所謂內在與外在的分野其實是模糊可議的，如同電影裡的意符(signifier)與意旨(signified)的關連性是浮動的一般。電影的意義或許就在觀者每一次的觀看經驗中更新。

This thesis aims to explore how cinematic images represent the interior and the inexplicable. To probe into how filmic images, with its specificity, work to transcend materiality and embody metaphysical (immaterial, incorporeal or supersensible ) attributes, this research will examine two films: Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Véronique (1991) and American director David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), each noted for being mysterious and elusive in its own way.
The two works both delve into the being of woman, displaying female subjectivity from different perspectives. The female subjects are rendered either in struggle (The Double Life of Véronique ) or unsettled (Inland Empire) in “the symbolic order”, to use Jacques Lacan’s term, namely the language system/social field. The relation and interplay between a subject and social reality is at once abstract and concrete. Inspired by scholar Teresa de Lauretis’s use of “experience” to designate the ongoing process of the construction of (female) subjectivity , this thesis deems the two films apt for exploration of imaging woman’s experience, thereby investigating reification of the abstract in cinema. Female subjects in the two films are either alienated from the symbolic, defying the social/ patriarchal control, or compelled to challenge it.
The analysis will adopt a psychoanalytic approach to examine the dialectic between the female character and her experiences delineated via the filmic narrative as well as to posit the roles of voice and gaze as possible media to avoid the symbolic (or patriarchal) control. In addition to what is represented on the screen, the exploration also comprises an enquiry into the end of reception in that, indebted to Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of signs, both the representation and the subject are interlocking entities within the process of filmic semiosis (production of meaning). In the end, it will suggest that presupposed division between interior and exterior could be unstable or obscure as the connection between (cinematic) signifier and signified stands. The viewer in a dialectic relation with the cinematic may just find cinematic embodiment renewed in each viewing experience.

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