Light and shadow as instruments of literary and visual metaphor in Liviu Rebreanu’s The Forest of the Hanged

Abstract

Starting from their basic role as elements of literary, cinematographic and theatrical description, light and shadow develop a close relation in all these three arts. They exceed their primary purpose and become involved in the process of narrating the events and setting the mise-en-scène. Even more, they are also engaged in changing the atmosphere, visualizing the images, modifying the reader’s or viewer’s attention, increasing or diminishing the dramatic intensity, conferring dynamic effect, accumulating meaning and revealing symbolic, philosophical, psychological and metaphysical significance to literary, cinematographic and theatrical artworks. Transferred from literature to cinematography and theatre, light and shadow have to adjust their means of expression so that to correspond to the specificity of each art. Taking after the techniques in the art of drawing, naming the tree-dimension perspective and chiaroscuro, light and shadow bring new aesthetic values to theatre and cinematography. Regarded as instruments of creating literary and visual metaphors, light and shadow highly influence the perception of the images outlined by them. The study aims to take into discussion the manner in which light and shadow may be employed as instruments of creating literary as well as visual metaphors. At the same time, it analyses the transposition of a metaphor generated by light and shadow from literature to cinematography and theatre as in Liviu Rebreanu’s “The Forest of the Hanged”.

Keywords

• light and shadow
• metaphor
• literature
• cinematography
• theatre