Abstract
The chapter ‘Overturning. Upside-down dissimulations’ deals with the
motif of the overturned representations of the human face and body in
contemporary films and its effect on the spectator’s vestibular system.
The argument builds off of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the
phenomenology of the perception of space and Rudolf Arnheim’s discussion
of the artistic potential a film can derive from the relativity of point
of view and movement. The analysis (in particular of Christopher Nolan’s
The Dark Knight) leads to the identification of a dynamic that moves from
the disorientation produced by the representation of overturned faces to
an ‘un-overturning’.
Publisher
Amsterdam University Press