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  Julien Donkey-Boy (1999)  In its earliest days, the superimposed image was used mainly as a special effect, most notably in Victor Sjöström 's 1921 film The Phantom Carriage , where it created the illusion of ghosts in the afterlife. These days, the superimposed image is almost everywhere, from an editing dissolve that suggests a continuation in mood (e.g. the transition from a saddened Don Corleone in bed to his home country of Italy where his son Michael has sought refuge in The Godfather ) to a literal visualization of a character's inner psychology (e.g. the face of death on Norman Bates in Psycho ). For me, I find the superimposed image to be one of the most powerful visual strategies for conveying an idea or a feeling. In fact, last year I created a video essay on the works of Wong Kar-Wai that heavily relied on the use of superimposition to demonstrate the filmmaker's trademark visual fervor. Below, I've curated some standout superimposed images from ov

Pawel Pawlikowski 's Ida tells the quietly haunting story of a young nun named Anna ( Agata Trzebuchowska ) who sets out to find her family origins in 1960s Poland. At the beginning of the film, the once-orphaned Anna learns that she still has one living relative: her aunt Wanda Gruz ( Agata Kulesza ), a revered court judge in the city. As Anna sets out on her journey of self-discovery, Pawlikowski, and cinematographers Ryszard Lenczewski and Lukasz Zal , announce their visual strategy for conveying their protagonist's hopeless and essentially powerless role in the world: by dwarfing the screen figure of Anna with a maximum amount of screen headroom. Look at how the following shot makes Anna look insignificant against the towering institution of the convent. In the city, Anna meets her aunt Wanda and there Anna learns that her real name is Ida Lebenstein. After Wanda tells Ida of her parents' horrific death during WWII, the pair set off to find out what exact