Photography and cinema have changed our vision to the world. Opening windows that set in the permanence of the event, the very contingencies, these two arts, each in their own way, increased the visual resonance in the Western hermeneutical gesture. Images (even of a composition, even of fiction) become irrefutable witnesses that are taken from reality, which attest to a ‘whole process’. The literature critically records the profound changes brought about by the development of an image culture, thereby making a radiography of today’s reality. Thus, many authors find an alliance between simultaneity and repetition, which makes it possible to understand how the image redefined the boundaries of the public and private spheres, the relationship between man and time and the very concept of hermeneutical code. On both sides of the Channel, the requirements, from the 20s to the 1980s, are substantially the same: how, in a world where infinite reproducible and highly credible images are gradually being filled, how can we see the place that the subject can still give itself, which is increasingly exposed to public exposure and prevented from slipping in an individual and subjective time when all points to the order of the common chronology? It will therefore be necessary to give an overview of the extent of the question, respecting both the singularity of the answers (Woolf, Duras, Koltès) and the specificity of a discursive strategy that transcends the language barrier.