Abstract

Why do we link certain movie images in completely different movies, regardless of their authors, countries and time? Because they take us to recurrent visual motifs, akin to the cinema language —the window, the nape, the stairs, the mirror, the duel, the scar, the destruction of the set, the maze, the scream, the horizon and many others included in this book. Through the over sixty motifs analyzed here by so many other international authors and the over a thousand movies that are mentioned, we can track the visual impact of these intense movie images that will make us shudder and that are connected to the iconographic tradition. They are visual motifs that, through their recurrence and differences, stir the watcher’s emotional memory, whatever his classification, and suggest therefore a new way of thinking about the history of cinema through some time-proof insistent forms that intertwine with new ones. The visual motifs developed in this book are universal, plural and ambiguous, which has made the major filmmakers adopt, transform and reinterpret them. One of the main victories of this extraordinary text collection, with texts equally accurate and suggestive, are comparative bridges being established between creators who have faced the same motif, which makes it possible for two aspects to be noticed —their singularities and their clear connection to the common history of movie images.