The Fold

Directed by Hoda Afshar

A visual and psychological investigation of the French psychiatrist and photographer Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872–1934), who took thousands of images in Morocco of veiled Islamic women, and sometimes men, through which he sought to explore his psychoanalytic ideas about covering and fantasy. Through a digital re-imagining of his death — a suicide in front of a mirror —, followed by assessments of clinicians and academics, The Fold explores de Clérambault’s significance as a historical figure while also looking more broadly at the way we understand images. The interviews are filmed within a setting inspired by the house of mirrors in Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and draw on the aesthetic of film noir, a style of cinema that commonly features a crime-centred narrative and morally ambiguous male protagonists.