Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Kern, Anne Marie

Titel

The sacred made material: Instances of game and play in interwar Europe

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2007

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The dissertation sets into dialogue a theoretical discourse on game and play and an historical moment in Europe between two devastating wars. The introduction presents questions about what is created when cultural productions meditate on and/or engage in ludic activity. It also addresses the many overlapping and competing definitions of game and play, to ask if and how they can be distinguished from one another, and to insist on a sense of play over and against attempts at stricter delineation. The first chapter demonstrates the ways in which French philosopher Roger Caillois's writings of the 1930s already anticipate his postwar interest in play and games, since the use of Caillois by scholars of the ludic is typically confined to his seminal study of Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens (1938) in Les Jeux et les hommes (1958). Both Caillois and Huizinga are remarkable for their discussions of the relationship between play, game and the sacred. The second chapter describes how the French Surrealists reformulate Sigmund Freud's Der Witz und Seine Beziehung Zum Unbewussten (1905). The Surrealists privileged play and game as experiential modes superior to "mere" rational dialectics, and thus the history and interpretation of their collective game experiments are discussed. The chapter closes with redress of the relative lack of Surrealist films, given cinema's possibilities for collective and ludic activity. Nearly contemporaneous with Der Witz, Luigi Pirandello's only major philosophical statement appeared under the title L'umorismo (1908). The third chapter traces the concepts in L'umorismo through several of his fictional works. The chapter ends with Pirandello's ambivalent relationship with cinema, as well as previously unearthed connections between Pirandello and two filmmakers, Jean Renoir and Jacques Rivette. The final chapter explores game and play elements at multiple levels in Jean Renoir's 1939 film La Règle du jeu, demonstrating how Renoir's cinematic method presents his audience with a creative alternative that directly counteracts the mytho-tragical fate of the explicit narrative. In the conclusion, I return to more recent theoretical uses of the ludic to further elucidate the relationship between game, play and the sacred in and beyond the interwar period.