The Construction of Space-temporality through Melancholy and Forms of Desire

Ioana HODÂRNĂU

Abstract:

Starting from a plurivalent theoretical analysis of the Greek term nostos (both as a return to an identity of self, and as a formula for approaching the modern concept of nostalgia), this paper aims to follow the modality in which a literary thinking changes and it is sucombate by a more spatial cinematic thinking. More precisely, from the description of a singular affect (in the case of Thomas Mann’s narrative, Death in Venice, the representation of a nostalgic reality fluctuates into a dilute, synaesthetic exposure (in the case of 1971 Luchino Visconti’s film, Morte a Venezia).
The purpose of this research paper is, therefore, to expand the analysis of Visconti’s cinematic intuitionism. The perspective changes through assembly, activating not the need for a fixed point of observation, but, on the contrary, distinct ways in which the sequences outline their own truth in relation to the eternal precondition (both at Mann and Visconti) of death tragedy.

Keywords: melancholy, desire, imagination, psyche, space, alterity

DOI: 10.24193/ekphrasis.21.18

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