Analogue Film, Ghostly Ontologies and the Fairy-tale in Bella e perduta and Lazzaro felice
Abstract
As the ecological crisis intensifies, the blurring of boundaries between the natural and the artificial is becoming increasingly obvious. Therefore, the question of the simulacrum, as it was posed by Baudrillard and the postmodern debate, is now being re-opened and signified. In the two Italian films Bella e perduta [Lost and Beautiful] (2015) and Lazzaro felice [Happy as Lazzaro] (2018), the impossibility of establishing a distinction between nature and culture, virtual and real, human and non-human finds expression in a cinematographic form. In these films, the clash is no longer located between reality and hyperreality but in a phantasmatic dialectic that rediscovers the value of the biological body by placing it in a network of historical, social and technological relations. Starting from the organic element, the two films unsettle the epistemological and cognitive frontiers of modernity by addressing the filmic support, the ontological status of the characters and the choice of narrative genre.
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