Alice Rohrwacher An Urban Allegory Allégorie citadine Drama • 2024 • 21 mins

A young woman with a child is running: she has to audition, she is a dancer.

In an everyday Paris full of shadows and images, the journey of Jay begins, a curious child who starts asking questions.

Leo Carax is the director preparing the ballet inspired by Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

After the funeral depicted in Omelia contadina, the previous work of Rohrwacher-JR, where images blended with the surrounding nature, here a prohibition emerges: a ban on posting which Jay skillfully breaks.

The sign is actually nothing more than an image posted on a wall, revealing another image that unveils a different reality.

Here is the first clue: Plato asserts that images are an imitation of imitation because the artist does not imitate the absolute and perfect truth found in the ideal world, but rather the sensible reality; therefore, the image is a copy of a copy... very far from the original, from the truth.

So what does Jay discover by breaking the prohibition on posting and uncovering another image?

He remains at the level of the copy of the sensible, and thus of the illusion, which is the craft of cinema and art in general.

Is cinema and art, through this creative journey, incapable of allowing an escape from the cave, or can it begin to unmask the play of shadows that distorts the reality of things?

Among shadows-illusions, sensible reality, and ideal reality, there are three stages, and if someone like a child manages to free their gaze and discover what lies beyond, what can they do once they feel alone and need to share it with others? Would these others listen to them, believe them?

Or would they prefer to remain in the cave, comforted by the familiarity of the illusory shadows?

Surely, it would be the first step towards a revolutionary act, that of breaking the chains that constrain the movements of the body and the mind, to begin moving in a different way.

A Paris immersed in the sounds of everyday life can be violated, wrested from an illusory course, to prompt a different gaze that goes beyond deceitful habits.

So, can cinema and art, built on images of copies of copies, tear through the veil of deceptive and misleading pseudo-reality?

The final question is a true act of philosophical, artistic, and existential resistance:

Why say that images are illusions if the chains are real?