Le personnage vu de dos au cinéma et dans les autres arts : esthétique, migrations et imaginaires d’une histoire à revers
This thesis is part of the movement of studies that have developed in recent years in different disciplines (visual studies, art history, film studies, and aesthetics) around the phenomena of image migration. The research topic addressed in this paper is a visual motif circulating widely among the arts: the figure seen from behind. The occurrences of the figure seen from behind being innumerable and extraordinarily varied in cinema, the thesis aims to develop three expressive arrangements carried out by the figure seen from behind and repeated alternately in cinema and in other arts.  The bias does not consist of a careful study of the symbolic games or topos that the figures from behind would carry. Through notions that I have been led to further or develop throughout my research – appearance, inevidence, dorsality, it is a question of examining how this posture depicts a way of inhabiting the image and its world. In making important detours through the history of art, I sought to survey the intermedial imagery underlying the modes of appearance of the figure seen from behind, to account for its implications in artistic practices as well as in the philosophical and social field.  In order to carry out this intermedial survey on the migration of my object, I was inspired greatly by a gesture of Aby Warburg, the creation of atlases of images. By collecting images of figures from behind who constantly echo each other or contrast one another, atlas making allowed me to reveal three expressive modalities of the back running through the history of art and cinema, and which are also found, on a smaller scale, within my boards. I address these questions in the first chapter of the thesis.   The second chapter, titled "Repli (s)", focuses on my first picture board, devoted to figures from behind who avoid and sneak away, conveying a withdrawal of expressive meaning.  The third chapter addresses my second picture board, in which I sought to depict a form of absorption led by the figure from behind. Absorption refers here to a relationship to the world that weaves itself between the dorsal silhouette and the wild landscape, which has been migrating into artistic representations since the Romantic Age. The fourth and last chapter, entitled "Exclusion (s)", will examine a mode of appearance relating to an act of violence committed upon the subject. By focusing specifically on the portrayal of African-Americans in American plantation films and by making important connections in art history, I try to show how a form of aesthetic, social, and political exclusion has been created by the representation from behind.  What are withdrawn, absorbed or excluded characters telling us in view of the frontality of the representations that still prevail today? The figures seen from behind, as presented in my thesis, are introducing another era: that of a reverse tale, of a dorsality of representations and of existence.
motif atlas back figure motive cinema the history of art intermediality inevidence dorsality appearance