Sense-value and the essay film: the speculative dimension of Dónal Foreman’s The Image You Missed (2018)

ABSTRACT This article explores Dónal Foreman’s 2018 essay film The Image You Missed through a trip-partite lens: sense, speculation and knowledge. Foreman navigates a life long relationship with a largely absent father, the deceased documentary filmmaker Arthur MacCaig, using a dialogic framework; an essay in the form of a conversation between Foreman and MacCaig. He turns to the essay to explore the paternal relationship as a conduit for others: sense and knowledge, documentary and reportage, speculation and fact. By exploring these in their various guises, this article argues that an aesthetically rendered image of MacCaig manifests (through audio interviews and texts that maintain the illusion of the father’s presence) as a residual haunting in the film: an affect of the archive. It is not Foreman’s aim, the article asserts, to cultivate a verifiably true image of his father from seen and unseen footage, but to ethically manufacture a dialogical conversation that involves thinking through the relationship itself. The article develops recent scholarship on the thinking of the essay film to explore the disjunctive relationship between sense and knowledge considered formative to the essay form.