DEGRÉS DE LA REPRÉSENTATION ESTHÉTIQUE: PEINTURE, LITTÉRATURE, CINÉMA

Ioan POP-CURŞEU

Abstract:

The matter of this article – originally that of a seminar given at the University of Geneva in 2004-2005, and soon the subject of a book – intends to explore different degrees and manners of representation. I distinguished three degrees of representation, according to the difficulties which the artist finds in working with the specific materials (colours, words etc.): the representation of reality, of feelings, of vacuity. Then, I compared painting and literature: the first one is functioning easier at each level, but the second one has problems even in representing exterior reality through words and sentences. Things become more complicated when it comes about “copying” feelings or speaking about vacuity: the demonstration takes into account various examples: mystical texts of the Antiquity and of the Middles Ages, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Flaubert, Beckett. In the last part of the article, I treat of cinema (Tarkovski, Andrei Rubliov), which combines manners of representation coming from painting and from literature: the profound nature of the representational phenomenon is changing on the screen.

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