Scènes d'esprit

In 1998, Jonathan Demme adapted for screen Toni Morrison’s critically acclaimed novel Beloved. This new cinematographic itinerary proves complex and problematic as the director chooses to reconfigure the heroine’s agonizing journey through memory and to freedom in times of slavery in a violent and non linear manner. His incursion into a haunted territory of African American history leads him to make radical choices such as selecting at once the fantastic genre and structuring his film around numerous flashbacks. The effect is gripping, but also stifling and disorientating for the spectator. His aesthetic approach, at times debatable, seems to redefine the moral implications of Sethe’s murder of her children and the inscription of distress and of the modes of survival on screen

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