Guest
Step by step, delusions escape us like a snake between two stones. The solemn, ritualized repetition of a maiden’s foot stepping on ancient stones has been described as a synecdoche, a trope by which the part represents the whole. The whole in this case is W. Jensen’s novel Gradiva, immortalized by Freud, Bréton and many later French intellectuals like Jean Rouch or Derrida. It is a story about a archeologist who is entranced by the of figure an ancient bas-relief depicting the walk of a young woman from Pompei. Shot with the assistance of Bruno Nuytten (known for his work with Duras), Carasco’s Gradiva is a poetic construction about the fetishization of desire, one that seems to go against Freud’s reading: the gracious movement of the maiden’s foot is seen to be the object itself, not a mere referent, of male desire.
