I use a lot of film images, analogies, and imagination.

Taken at face value, Fuentes is describing a creative method: he draws on the grammar of cinema (visual cuts, montage-like juxtapositions, close-ups, shifting perspectives) and translates it into prose through vivid imagery and analogy. The mention of “imagination” underscores that these filmic elements are not mere decoration but a way of thinking—using visual and metaphorical leaps to connect ideas, compress time, and intensify atmosphere. In Fuentes’s fiction and essays, such techniques often serve to make history and memory feel immediate and sensorial, while also allowing rapid movement between realities (public/private, political/intimate). The line reads like a succinct statement of aesthetic practice: narrative as a camera of the mind.