Becoming Vera

Reasonable Doubt

Various works of contemporary art

Introduction: Think Again!

When three-year-old Vera sits on the knees of her father Germain and tells him a story of witches she had seen, Daddy answers: ‘Oh, like Snow White’. This happens in the kingdom of Bamun, a traditional nation within the modern republic of Cameroon. What is Snow White doing there? Vera is silent for a few seconds, looks sideways, and then she sets her father straight (Figure 5.1). This is the literal dialogue, entirely improvised by the two figures:

This is the moment, in making the documentary film Becoming Vera, that Michelle and I realised the power of fiction. It happened during the editing, and it was a decisive realisation. The child had set not only her father but also Michelle and me straight. Germain had too quickly counted on the children's canon of Western fairy tales; we had counted on documentary as the film genre to image-think in, reckoning its truthfulness was what mattered most. So, let's think again. To end this first part on general concepts of major importance for image-thinking, and for intermediality, the interaction between words and images leading up to the figural, I return to thinking in images but now explicitly beyond the truth–fiction binary. For, the primary topic of this chapter is a circling back to the beginning, this time with fiction taken in the literal sense of making. The Latin verb fingere means shaping and contriving. The imagination as the primary tool of that making cannot be over-estimated.

For some time, I have doubted the common conception of thinking. Forget the study, the books and the armchair.