Wide Sargasso Sea

Everything in this film is operating simultaneously on three registers. The material register: what is literally present, the dialogue on the page, the object in the room, the body in the space. The spiritual register: what the scene holds beyond its surface, what is being enacted at the level of belief, protection, power, and ritual. The ancestral register: what the moment carries from what came before and what it carries forward to those who will come after. The ancestral is not only past. It is also the ancestor we are becoming for those who follow.

These three registers are never separate. Christophine's mortar is a kitchen tool (material), a site of Obeah preparation (spiritual), and an object whose form and use carry West African knowledge across the catastrophe of the Middle Passage and forward into a future that has not yet arrived (ancestral). Antoinette's white dress trailing in brown mud is a ruined garment (material), a crossing from one world into another (spiritual), and an image saturated with the history of racial categorisation in the Caribbean and with the futures it forecloses and opens (ancestral).

A musical analogy: the material is the drum, the spiritual is the bass, the ancestral is the vocal carrying across generations. The drum is the first telephone. The vocal carrying across generations is the message it transmits. Every scene has all three playing at once. Every piece of research you bring back should be able to speak on all three registers. If it only speaks on one, keep digging.

The Caribbean landscape in this script is not backdrop. It is participant. Rochester looks out of the carriage window and sees green that is "too green, too dense, too vivid." Antoinette walks through the woods and "plants and trees yield to her passage." The forest swallows a road whole. The pool is "blue-black water surrounded by silver rocks." The garden at Coulibri is "every shade of green growing wild." This landscape has its own agency. Research it that way.

• The density, saturation, and sensory pressure of the Jamaican landscape. Overgrowth, heat, soil, decay, and bloom as simultaneous and inseparable states. Excess as its own form of consciousness.
• The botanical specifics of what grows in this world. Royal palms, flamboyant trees, jasmine, octopus orchids, tree ferns, mango, guava, sargassum. The spiritual and pharmacological resonances of each beyond their names.
• Colonial cartography and the violence inside it. How land was named, divided, surveyed, and represented. What gets erased in the act of making a map. The relationship between naming a place and claiming it.
• The plantation landscape as psychological space. How the built geography of slavery persists long after its formal end. Ruined great houses, overgrown cane fields, the road that disappears back into forest. In Scene 31, Rochester finds a paved road with orange flowers that vanishes when he turns around. That image is doing something important spatially and spiritually.
• The tropical sublime as a contested aesthetic category. Who is permitted to find this landscape beautiful and what that permission costs. The coloniser's gaze on Caribbean nature as both desire and terror operating simultaneously.
• Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock (1960). The Guyanese rainforest as interior journey, historical haunting, and consciousness expanding beyond ordinary perception.
• Derek Walcott on Caribbean landscape as wound and source. The Sea is History in particular. The sea as archive, as the place where the unrecorded dead are held.
• The Sargasso Sea as a physical and metaphorical space. An ocean with no shores. A place of entanglement. A sea named for seaweed whose mass beneath the surface enormously exceeds what is visible above. This is the film's central image: what appears on the surface is always the smaller part of what exists.

There is a consistent argument running beneath this entire script about knowledge and who is permitted to possess it. Antoinette knows things. Christophine knows things. The land knows things. The ancestors speak in Arawakan before the film begins in any European language. Rochester arrives with law books and a framework for understanding the world and the film systematically dismantles that framework while demonstrating that other forms of knowing were operating all along. Knowledge is in lockstep with freedom and power. Who gets to know, and whose knowing is recognised as knowledge, is this film's deepest political question.

This applies across registers: intellectual knowledge, spiritual knowledge, ancestral knowledge, material knowledge, emotional knowledge, bodily knowledge. The body that has lived in this landscape knows things the mind cannot articulate. Christophine's hands know things that Rochester's law books cannot accommodate. Antoinette's so-called madness is a form of perception that exceeds the diagnostic category applied to it.

• Glissant's concept of Opacity as a right. The refusal of total legibility. The insistence that not everything must be explained or made transparent to the coloniser's gaze. Antoinette's opacity is not pathology. It is a political position.
• Sylvia Wynter on the colonial construction of the Human and who is placed outside it. What forms of knowledge become possible from outside that category. What is seen from the margin that cannot be seen from the centre.
• The relationship between Obeah and knowledge. Christophine's practice is not superstition. It is a system of knowledge developed under conditions of extreme violence and preserved across generations. The colonial state criminalised it not because it was false but because it was effective and it was theirs.
• Ancestral knowledge as a distinct epistemological category, moving in both temporal directions. What it means to know something because those who came before knew it. What it means to make something now that becomes ancestral knowledge for those who come after.
• Saidiya Hartman's wake work and Tina Campt's listening to images as two methodologies for recovering forms of knowledge that were never permitted to be archived in their original form.

Possession is freedom's twin and its antagonist. Everything in this film is in tension between these two poles. If freedom is Antoinette airborne above a clear sea, possession is Rochester naming her Bertha. If freedom is Christophine riding into the forest regal and soaked, possession is the Obeah Act and the magistrate who takes the money. If freedom is the Atlantians rising from the sea with second eyes opening on their closed eyelids, possession is the colonial archive that recorded them as cargo.

Possession in this film operates on all three registers simultaneously, and what makes it so rich as a research territory is that on each register it means something completely different.

At the material register, possession is legal and economic. Rochester possesses Antoinette through Coverture. He possesses the estate. He possesses the name. He tries to possess Christophine's right to be in the house. Empire possesses the land, the labour, the bodies, the future. This is the most visible form of possession in the film and it is relentless.

At the spiritual register, possession is something else entirely. In Vodou and related spiritual traditions, possession by the Loa is not a theft of self but a form of visitation, of alignment, of being chosen as a vessel for something larger. The Loa rides the person the way a rider rides a horse. This is not violence. It is a relationship with the ancestral world that the coloniser's framework cannot accommodate and therefore calls madness, or witchcraft, or both. Christophine's practice lives in this register. Antoinette's expanded perception lives here too.

At the ancestral register, possession is the most complex. Empire as a possessing force that inhabits its own agents. Rochester possessed by the structure that made him, carrying it into the Caribbean against his own deepest interests. His subconscious reaching for liberation while his conscious mind is occupied. He is, in a precise sense, haunted by empire in the same way that Vodou theology would say a person is ridden by a Loa they did not choose and cannot easily refuse.

• The naming of Bertha. Rochester's renaming of Antoinette is one of the most precise acts of possession in the script. To rename someone is to claim them. To replace their name with yours is to make them an extension of your identity rather than the holder of their own. Research the history of colonial renaming, of enslaved people stripped of African names and given European ones, and how this act of possession persists in the language of the Caribbean to this day.
• Coverture and the legal possession of women. The legal architecture through which Rochester possesses Antoinette. Not just her body but her property, her legal identity, her name, her future. Marriage as a mechanism of total possession under English law in the 19th century. What it meant in the Caribbean colonial context specifically.
• Spiritual possession in Vodou, Candomblé, and related traditions. The Loa, the orixá, the spirits who ride the living. The theology of possession as visitation rather than invasion. What this form of possession offers that the colonial form destroys. Maya Deren's documentation of Vodou possession in Haiti as primary visual and written source.
• Antoinette's name as a site of possession. Called Antoinette by those who know and love her. Called Bertha by Rochester as an act of possession and erasure. Called "mad" by Daniel as a way of making her possessable by the psychiatric system. The name is the battleground. Research the politics of naming in colonial and post-colonial Caribbean contexts.
• Empire as a possessing force inhabiting its own agents. Rochester is not simply a possessor. He is also possessed. The structure of empire enters him, occupies his consciousness, makes demands of his body (the corset, the neck scarf, the formality in tropical heat), and requires him to refuse what his body and subconscious are reaching toward. Research what colonialism does to the coloniser's psyche. Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks addresses this but the literature goes further.
• The possessed landscape. Colonial land possession as an act of spiritual as well as legal violence. The plantation as an occupied space that was not empty before it was claimed. The land that carries the memory of possession in its very soil. The forest that refuses Rochester. Bachelard on space as possessable and on the spaces that resist being possessed.
• Possession and the archive. Colonial archives as instruments of possession. To document is to claim. To classify is to possess. What it meant for the colonial state to build archives of its territories, its flora, its enslaved population, its indigenous peoples. And what it means now to move through those archives as a researcher.
• Possession and the body. The enslaved body as legally possessed property. The colonised body as possessable space. The woman's body under Coverture as legally belonging to her husband. And the forms of possession that resist all of this: Christophine's body moving slowly and deliberately through every room she enters as if she is the one who decides where she goes and when. Antoinette's body at the end of the film, airborne, belonging to no one.

Colour is working on multiple registers in this film simultaneously. It is chromatic, it is racial, it is thermal, it is residual. The Caribbean saturates. England drains. The script calls for a "deep red" that momentarily fills the screen at the moment of Antoinette's psychological rupture. Colour in this film is not decorative. It is diagnostic.

Alongside colour, I am increasingly interested in the concept of residue. What colour leaves behind. What memory leaves behind. What spirit leaves behind. What an emotion leaves on a body, what an ancestor leaves in a place, what an indigenous presence leaves in language and rain after the people who spoke that language have been physically removed. Residue is a way of thinking about what remains when the original is gone, and how that remainder continues to act on the present. It is closely related to dub's logic of the echo, to THE MISSING (which gets its own section below), and to the indigenous thread. Worth holding as a thinking line throughout the research.

• The history of racial colour taxonomies in the Caribbean and their British colonial origins. The lexicon of classification (mulatto, quadroon, mustee, sambo, and the finer gradations beneath these) as an administrative violence. What it meant to be Creole in Jamaica in the mid-19th century. What it meant to be neither.
• Fanon's epidermalization of inferiority in Black Skin, White Masks. The skin as the primary site of racial inscription. And then the deliberate inversion in Scene 78: Rochester digs in the forest with such force that the earth creates a black mask on his white skin. "White skin, Black mask." The coloniser wearing the face of what he came to dominate. This is one of the most precise visual arguments in the script.
• Colour theory as racial theory in Western visual culture. How whiteness and blackness accumulated moral, aesthetic, and hierarchical meaning over centuries. The ideology inside the colour wheel.
• Hand-coloured photographs of the Caribbean from the late 19th and early 20th century. The politics of adding colour to colonial archives. What the addition reveals about what the original suppressed. See for example An Evening Party, St Thomas, Jamaica (1905) and Arrival of the Royal Mail Steamer, Dominica, Roseau (1905).
• Residue as a research line. The trace of memory in objects. The trace of an absent body in a room. The trace of a language in the place names of a colonised land. The trace of a sound in the silence after it. The trace of an emotion on a face hours after the moment passed. Research artists, writers, and thinkers who have worked with residue as a concept.

These are not superstitions. They are sophisticated systems of knowledge, relation, and resistance, developed under conditions of extreme violence and criminalized by colonial law precisely because of the threat they posed. Christophine is an Obeah practitioner. Her knowledge heals, protects, and disrupts colonial order. Daniel calls her dangerous. Rochester tries to have her arrested. The magistrate takes the money. The system responds to her power with its full legal apparatus. That is not coincidence.

• Obeah in Jamaica. Its history, practice, and criminalization under the British Obeah Act. What the Act reveals about what colonial power actually feared. Obeah as a practice that refused to be fully surveilled, classified, or contained.
• Obeah as resistance technology. Its role in maroon communities, in planned rebellions, in the preservation of African spiritual knowledge across the catastrophe of the Middle Passage and into the post-emancipation period. See Edward Brathwaite's Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica as a starting point.
• The female practitioner specifically. The mambo, the Myal woman. What their authority represents in a context of patriarchal and colonial domination simultaneously.
• The material culture of Obeah practice. Plants, substances, vessels, assemblages. The large African mortar in Christophine's kitchen, the calabash of blood-red pulp, the tincture she rubs into Antoinette's cut. These objects have genealogies worth tracing across all three registers.
• Taíno zemis, sacred objects, and ancestor figures. The indigenous spiritual material culture that pre-existed Obeah and Vodou and that fed into them. Zemis as objects through which the living communicate with the dead, with spirits of place, with ancestors. The continuity and the rupture between Taíno spiritual practice and what arrived from Africa.
• Vodou in the Haitian and Francophone Caribbean tradition. The Loa, possession, the relationship between the living and the ancestral dead. Christophine's practice has Francophone roots alongside Jamaican ones. That geographic crossing matters.
• Comparative study across Obeah, Vodou, Candomblé, Santería. Divergent traditions from shared African roots, shaped differently by British, French, and Portuguese colonial contexts. The differences matter as much as the continuities.
• Haitian Vodou flags, the drapo Vodou. Sequined devotional objects of extraordinary visual and material complexity. Not illustrative. Presences.
• Katherine Dunham's anthropological and artistic work in Caribbean spiritual practice. Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse. Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. Research from inside rather than from above.
• The sync between sound and spirit. The sonic dimension of Obeah and Vodou practice. Rhythm as a technology of spiritual contact. What happens to the body when there is frequential alignment between sound and spirit, when the two vibrate on the same frequency.

Sound is not illustrative in this film. It is structural. The script is explicit: dub baselines punctuate chapter title cards. A "deep heavy baseline, dub vibration" moves through the pool water in Scene 21. A "long dub bassline drop" follows the love potion in Scene 61. Christophine submerges in the river and screams underwater "like whale song" above a King Tubby deep dub in Scene 76. Dub is this film's nervous system.

Dub operates on all three registers simultaneously. At the material level: bass, echo, reverb, the physical architecture of the sound. At the spiritual level: the sync between frequency and spirit, the way certain bass frequencies arrive in the body before the mind can process them. At the ancestral level: dub as a practice of making something from what remains after what was taken, of building presence from absence, of carrying forward what cannot be named. The Strangeness of Dub on Morley Radio is a useful entry point.

• Dub as philosophy and compositional method. King Tubby, Lee "Scratch" Perry, Augustus Pablo, Prince Jammy. The studio as instrument. The cut as presence. The version as a form of reinterpretation that preserves the original's ghost while transforming everything around it.
• The bass frequency as a specifically physical phenomenon. Felt before heard. Moving through bodies, through walls, through water.
• The in-between as dub's philosophical territory. The space between source and sample. Between material and spirit. Between earth and whatever is beyond it. Between what was recorded and what was felt. Dub lives in all these in-betweens simultaneously.
• Michael Veal's Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae. Essential grounding.
• Dub as architecture. How do you turn dub into a spatial structure? What would a room built on dub's logic look and feel like? The echo as a dimension of space. The bass as a foundation. The cut as a doorway.
• The acoustic ecology of the Caribbean. Wind, water, insects, birds. The hum of insects on the veranda in Scene 9. The bird that answers Antoinette's call in Scene 16.
• Silence as a sonic element. What dub withholds. In Scene 58, when Tia throws the stone, "all sound is sucked from the scene, a vacuous, dead tone."
• Jamaica as a specific sonic site beyond dub. Reggae, mento, nyahbinghi drumming, kumina, revival Zion. The deep sonic landscape of Jamaica that dub emerged from and that the film's world is soaked in.

The film is set in the aftermath of the Emancipation Act but the script makes clear this is a legal fiction. "These new ones have letter of law instead of chains," Christophine says in Scene 49. "They got magistrate and fines instead of lashings. New ones same as the old ones, more cunning, that's all." The architecture of slavery persists in its social, spatial, and psychological forms. The film is not only about that period. It is about the continuous present that period created.

• Post-emancipation Jamaica. The "apprenticeship" system. The persistence of plantation economics. The Morant Bay uprising of 1865 and what it revealed about the limits of legal freedom.
• The Creole subject in post-emancipation Caribbean society. Belonging to neither the coloniser's category nor the formerly enslaved. The specific social violence of that permanent in-betweenness.
• C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins. The Haitian Revolution and its reverberations across the Caribbean. The first Black republic won in blood and then systematically punished for its existence.
• Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother and Scenes of Subjection. The afterlife of slavery in everyday life and subjectivity.
• The collapse of time the film is actively performing. Past, present, and future are not sequential here. They are simultaneous. The archive footage in Scenes 99 through 101 places Tacky's Rebellion alongside the Haitian Revolution alongside Patrice Lumumba alongside 2Pac 1994 alongside Antoinette burning Thornfield. Expressions of the same continuous fact about power and its refusal.

The script contains a scene that stops everything. Scene 87. Black screen, silence. We hear a language we do not recognise. Then, subtitled: "Our rain knows all the songs. And all the tears. Listen." The language is Arawakan. The voice is an Ancestor. This is the film's deepest temporal register. Before the plantation, before the colonial encounter, before the category of Caribbean itself, there were people whose relationship to this land was of a completely different order. The film gives them the last word before the final movement begins.

• Taíno and Arawak presence in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean. Their cosmology, material culture, place names, agricultural practices, and the specific genocide that erased their physical presence while leaving traces in the land and language that persist.
• What the Arawakan language actually sounds like. What survives of it. What linguistic traces are embedded in Jamaican place names and Caribbean vernacular that people speak every day without knowing their origin.
• Taíno zemis, sacred objects, and ancestor figures. What they looked like, what they were made from, where they have ended up. Research them as objects operating on all three registers.
• Taíno iconography, petroglyphs, and cave art found in Jamaica and across the Caribbean. Images made before the European encounter, now largely held in institutions far from where they were made.
• The meeting points between indigenous Caribbean spiritual practice and the practices that arrived from Africa. What Obeah and Vodou absorbed from what was already there. The palimpsest of spiritual knowledge on this land.
• Indigenous residue. The traces in language, in place names, in agricultural practice, in the bodies of contemporary Caribbean people who carry Taíno DNA they may not know about. Connect this to the residue thread in the colour section.
• Cosmic Archaeology as a framework for reading indigenous traces. The excavation not just of material remains but of what was removed from the visible record and continues to transmit at a different frequency. The Arawakan language that sits inside Jamaican place names. The spiritual practices that fed into Obeah and Vodou without being named. The rain that knows all the songs. What Cosmic Archaeology makes possible is the recognition that erasure is never total. Something always remains, active and transmitting, waiting to be heard.

The relationship to Rhys's novel is context and backstory, not the film's living argument. This film uses the novel as a jumping-off point for something that has its own velocity, its own contemporary urgency, its own visual and sonic language. The deeper research question is not how this film adapts a book. It is what it means to take a received form, a received story, a received history, and push it past its own logic. Mal-adaptation as a creative methodology. The refusal to translate cleanly as an artistic position.

• Aimé Césaire's Une Tempête as a model. Taking Shakespeare's The Tempest and rewriting it from Caliban's perspective. What it means to take a canonical text and make it account for what it erased.
• Caribbean writers taking back European canonical forms. Walcott's Omeros, Condé's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, Danticat's engagements with Haitian history and its distortions.
• The remix potential of space. A term I have been working with across my practice, drawn from architectural thinking but functioning as a wider framework. The remix as a form of mal-adaptation that preserves the source material's traces while transforming everything around it. Not just music: film, visual art, literature, architecture, the built environment. Dub as the sonic enactment of this logic. Sampling culture as its wider expression. The remix potential of space is about what a place can become when its received use is refused and its underlying material is reactivated. This film is, in many ways, a remix of the architecture of Wide Sargasso Sea, of the architecture of Jane Eyre, of the architecture of empire itself. Research artists, architects, and thinkers working with this kind of recombinant logic.
• What the contemporary lens specifically demands. How the post-emancipation story resonates with present-day structures of racial capitalism, displacement, and the ongoing administration of Black life and land. The film is not using history as allegory. It is arguing that this history is not past.
• The achronological approach as a formal argument. Sound that crosses decades. References that collapse time. A visual language drawn from multiple periods simultaneously. Not anachronism for its own sake. A position about the nature of time in communities shaped by colonial violence.

Research each thinker first on their own terms. The connections will be more useful if they are earned rather than assumed.

• Aimé Césaire and Négritude: The reclamation of Blackness as creative, philosophical, and political force. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.
• Édouard Glissant: Creolisation, the Poetics of Relation, Opacity as a right, the Abyss as founding rupture and source. Antoinette's opacity is a Glissantian position.
• Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks. The Wretched of the Earth. The inversion in Scene 78: Rochester's white skin masked in black earth.
• Sylvia Wynter: The colonial construction of the Human and who is placed outside it.
• Stuart Hall: Cultural identity as produced in enunciation. Caribbean cultural identity and diaspora.
• Christina Sharpe: In the Wake. Wake work as a practice of mourning, maintenance, and witness.
• Saidiya Hartman: Critical fabulation. Scenes of Subjection (1997). Lose Your Mother (2007). Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019). The afterlife of slavery.
• Tina Campt: Listening to images. Reading vernacular and archival photographs against the grain.
• W.E.B. Du Bois: Double Consciousness, addressed in detail in the next section.
• Fred Moten: In the Break. The undercommons. Fugitivity. Black life as exceeding the categories imposed upon it.

The film's central proposition, held by Christophine in Scene 75: "You just always saw more than she wanted you to." This is what the film means by madness. Not a departure from reality. An arrival at a reality too large, too clear, too uncompromising for the social structures around it to hold. Antoinette is not broken. She sees too much.

Alongside madness sits Du Bois's concept of Double Consciousness: the sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of another. Of being two selves at once because the dominant gaze refuses to see you whole. Antoinette experiences this from multiple directions. She is white but not white enough, Creole but legible to neither the British nor the formerly enslaved. Her madness is the pathology of knowing too much in a world that requires her to know less. It is the sickness of seeing what cannot be unseen. Double Consciousness, in Antoinette's case, is not only racial. It is the experience of being constituted by competing gazes that refuse to allow her a single integrated self.

Rochester carries his own form of Double Consciousness, and this is one of the most important things the film is doing with him. He is not simply a villain. He is a representation of social construction beyond his own pitfalls. Early in the film, before the weight of empire pulls him fully back, there are moments where he could plausibly walk Antoinette's path. He almost does. The arms of colonialism are heavy and they pull him back into the structure that made him. Antoinette represents his true inherent freedom, and he is tragically at odds with her because being with her would mean leaving the architecture of empire that gives him his name, his money, his standing. His subconscious knows this. His body knows this. His body keeps trying to reach freedom through undercover routes: the moments at Granbois with Antoinette in the pool and on the hammock, the lovemaking, the strange twerk in the Master of None scene. These are freedoms surfacing sideways through a man whose conscious mind cannot acknowledge what his body has already understood.

• The historical pathologisation of women's perception and emotional expression. Hysteria, neurasthenia, and the gendered dimensions of psychiatric diagnosis. What these categories were designed to manage.
• The Coverture laws. The legal structure by which marriage transferred a woman's property, legal identity, and personhood to her husband. Rochester does not just stop loving Antoinette. He legally erases her.
• The specific double bind of the Creole woman. Neither white enough nor Black enough, legible to neither world. The permanent liminality of Antoinette's social position.
• Annette's arc. Not mad in any psychiatric sense. A woman who knew what was coming, said so, was ignored, and was broken by the event she predicted. Her "madness" is a response to being right in a world that punished women for knowing things.
• Stanislav Grof and Christina Grof's research into non-ordinary states of consciousness. Spiritual Emergency (1989), co-edited by both, as a framework for distinguishing between breakdown and breakthrough and for understanding the systems, and the ideological positions of those systems, that cannot accommodate expanded perception as a valid form of knowing.
• The figure of the woman in the attic across literature, feminist theory, and film. Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic.
• Rochester as colonial subject. His twerk in the Master of None scene as a freedom surfacing sideways through a body that has been trained to refuse it. His corset as empire constricting the body of the man who carries it. His nervous knee shake. His inability to finish writing a letter to his father. His inability to climax alone. Bodies that cannot lie even when minds insist on lying. Research what colonialism does to its agents, not just to its victims.
• Double Consciousness as gendered. Du Bois's original formulation focused on race. How does the concept extend or transform when applied to gender, to colonial position, to a Creole woman who is being rewritten by every system she passes through?

The script is precise and obsessive about objects. Rochester's law books dragged through rain. The calabash of blood-red pulp. The gold earrings on Christophine's lobes. The silk turban elaborately tied. The large African mortar. The portrait of Annette in a gilded frame. The children's learning flashcard. The male corset Rochester laces himself into in Scene 81. The knife Antoinette takes from the table. The ginger sweets from home. These things have material lives worth researching across all three registers.

Think also about what should burn at Thornfield. Scene 99 calls explicitly for archival material to appear on screen as Antoinette moves through the house with her candle. What are those documents? What would a house built on colonial wealth actually have contained? What should be in that fire?

• The architecture of the Caribbean great house as a building type. What it was made of, how it was organised, what it felt like to move through its rooms. How it decayed after emancipation. Coulibri is "past splendour and present dilapidation."
• Bachelard's Poetics of Space. The distinction between the nest (a space that holds and protects), the lair (a space of concealment), and the corner (where the self retreats to become itself). Every significant space in this script is one of these or transforms from one into another. Granbois begins as a nest and becomes a lair. The attic is a lair until Antoinette transforms it. The forest is the corner Rochester keeps trying to enter and that keeps refusing him.
• Objects as carriers of the three registers. Christophine's gold earrings: ornament (material), weight as authority and grounding (spiritual), gold as a form of wealth preserved and carried through generations of displacement, with specific roots in the Gold Coast (Ghana) and Akan goldsmithing traditions, where the metal carried sacred and political meaning long before it became colonial commodity (ancestral). The earrings on Christophine's lobes are gold the colonial economy could not fully extract.
• The neckerchief Antoinette removes from Rochester's neck in Scene 6 and ties around her own wrist. An object that transfers from his body to hers. A restraint that becomes an ornament that becomes a claim. Track this object.
• Hems as meeting points between body and ground. What different women's hems collect says something about their relationship to the land they walk.
• The portrait of Annette as "the Creole imitation of the English lady of the manor." The Miller's Daughter painting that watches Young Antoinette throughout her childhood. Portraiture as colonial technology of legitimation. What happens when those portraits burn.
• West African and Caribbean textile and material traditions. Christophine's silk turban elaborately tied. The weight of gold earrings. Indigo cloth.
• Archival material that could enter the film itself. Property deeds, slave inventories, maps, natural history survey plates, proclamations, newspaper accounts of rebellions, letters between colonial administrators. Material that would actually have existed in Thornfield Hall as a house built on colonial wealth and that Antoinette could move through and burn.
• Late 19th and early 20th century photographic archives of Jamaica. The Adolphe Duperly and Sons studio.

You know what this means and you know what I am looking for. We have had this conversation enough times over enough years to know the difference between an image that is discovered and an image that is retrieved. I want the discovered ones. The ones that need dusting off. The ones that are in the archive box, not on the archive website. The image that earns its place because it was found, not because it was available.

We are building toward a living image archive. Something to move through, return to, build from. A lookbook and a language reference that can speak to my collaborators across the film. Something I can hand to the team and say: the film lives somewhere in here, find it.

• Daguerreotypes and early photographs of enslaved people in Jamaica and the wider Caribbean. Approach these through Tina Campt's methodology of listening to images. The ethical complexity of engaging with this material is part of the research.
• Medical and psychiatric illustration from the colonial period and the Victorian asylum. The visual language used to classify and dehumanise.
• Spirit photography and early photographic experiments with the invisible. Double exposure, aura photography, Kirlian imaging.
• Abstract aerial and geological photography of Caribbean topography. The island seen from above as body, wound, formation.
• Found footage, home movies, and vernacular photography from Caribbean communities. The domestic image as counter-archive.
• The work of Roy DeCarava. Radcliffe Bailey. Lorna Simpson. Glenn Ligon. Memory, the Middle Passage, and the archive as artistic material.
• Eugene Atget as a methodology. The systematic photographing of what remains, what is overlooked, what is residual.
• Botanical illustration from the Caribbean. Plants surveyed, drawn, named, and extracted by European science.
• Accidental and found images. Photographs where something unexpected entered the frame. Contact sheets with the images between the composed ones. The off-cuts of archives.