Publication details
‚É la vita anche la morte‘. Sen, smrt, znovuzrození a rituály přechodu ve vizuální kultuře, in: Konce (a začátky) časů. VIII. sjezd historiček a historiků umění
| Title in English | 'É la vita anche la morte'. Dream, death, rebirth and rites of passage in visual culture, in: The Endings (and Beginnings) of Times. The 8th Congress of Czech Art Historians |
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Conference |
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| Description | On June 6, 1977, the famous Italian director and screenwriter Federico Fellini, author of La Dolce Vita (1960) and Amarcord (1973), wrote in his diary a sentence that his colleague Pier Paolo Pasolini communicated to him in a dream from that morning in intimate creative harmony against the backdrop of ancient Roman ruins: “E la vita anche la morte”! Which translates: “Even death is life”! Or conversely: “Life is death too”! The phrase’s inherent ambiguity opens the field to several reflections and interpretations. Intimately personal and at the same time radically timeless, supra-individual and enigmatic, this unconscious message of one of Europe’s greatest filmmakers brings us back to the original centre of gravity of artistic creation which finds its imprint across centuries and millennia in perhaps all known media and cultures. The theme of life and death, or illusion and dream, which is also a kind of “little death”, or a window to another dimension of reality, the possible ambiguity, fluid permeability of these categories, or the various rituals and artifacts of transition associated with them, creates one of the essential areas of human experience and artistic creation, inherently tied to the paradigm of “new beginnings”. Thus, we are inviting to grasp the phenomenon comparatively across space, time, and a vast variety of media (from ancient sculpture to film and performance), an inspiring and colourful account of the possible forms of 'endings and beginnings' of both individual and shared time can emerge. |