Between Symptom and Specter: A Quest within the Visible in Giuseppe Tornatore’s A Pure Formality
Between Symptom and Specter: A Quest within the Visible in Giuseppe Tornatore’s A Pure Formality

Summary/Abstract: This article performs a close reading of Giuseppe Tornatore’s film Una pura formalità (1994). It examines the ways in which the principle of montage activates a certain reality and visibility in the process of perception, adjustment and orientation in a narrative. Highlighting the difference between the visual and the visible, the article concentrates on the points of crisis in the narrative, where the visible is deconstructed by the visual. These points of crisis in the narrative answer to key points of crisis in the subject, where the unconscious constantly assails, deconstructs and deterritorializes the conscious and its coherent and controlled narratives, through forms of haunting and a spectral presence materialized at the level of symptoms. The article looks at how the deconstruction of this montage, followed by re-montage, renders the specter visible in the stratification of time.

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