Ricerche di S/Confine (Jul 2014)
Specchiarsi nello schermo. Specchio e cinema come "metafore identitarie" ne La glace à trois faces di Jean Epstein
Abstract
The present study – starting from the analysis of La glace à trois faces (A three-sided mirror, 1927) by Jean Epstein and from several theoretical writings of the same filmmaker – aims to investigate the original function that the French author recognized the camera: not at all a simple mirror of the real, but biased witness. In the film examined Epstein‟s camera rises to the observer, in the same way as it is each fictional story told, highlighting some of the essential issues of modernity: the identity based not on a membership but on a complex game of inter-individual relations and reciprocal, the uncertainty of the gaze and the reality that does not want nor can offer a definitive interpretation. Inevitable so the calls to Pirandello, first, and his conception of character on top of the person. The reflections made by Epstein will be recovered and developed by sociologists and philosophers like Erving Goffman and Christian Metz, who, on the basis of lacaniane theories, proposes in psychoanalytic key the relationship between cinema and the mirror.
