Off-Screen Space and the Fold: Ways of Representing the Unrepresentable, Shaped by the Hays Code in Classical Cinema

Abstract

In this article I propose to analyse the off-screen spaces and folds used in classical Hollywood to represent its most lurid scenes under the Hays Code. The first part of this article discusses off-screen space, interpreting the conventional uses and narrative limits that characterised this concept during the period of the Code. In the final sections, the concept of “the fold”, taken from Gilles Deleuze’s studies on Leibniz and the Baroque, is proposed as a way of naming and analysing a new, more elaborate and complex notion which, having grown to maturity during the era of censorship, has carried on beyond it.