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  • Ceci n’est pas une chaise: the Treachery of the Real and the Conspicuously Cinematic Self in Mariano Pensotti’s Cineastas
  • Philippa Page

“So the beginning is an impossible place, as meaningless as that dot on my drawing in a class perspective lesson, the spot in the middle of the paper where all lines—roads, streets?—came together at a place called infinity.”

—Dorothea Tanning, Birthday, 11.

“…la nube Magritte estaba exactamente suspendida sobre Cazaneuve y entonces sentí una vez más que la pálida naturaleza imitaba el arte ardiente...”

—Julio Cortázar, La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos, 15.

Introduction: Screen Realities

“The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought,” claims philosopher Jacques Rancière in a statement that clearly points to the epistemological interdependence of reality and fiction. Art constitutes, rather than represents, reality; reality as it is perceived, at least (Politics 34). If, as Julio Cortázar imagines in his playfully subversive La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos (1967), nature pales in comparison to its vibrant and sense-tickling renditions in art, then artistic representations can invariably seem more “real” than the referent that they set out to portray. The importance of sensory organization and stimulation is integral to Rancière’s interrogation of the role of aesthetics in politics. “[A]esthetic acts” defined “as configurations of experience” contain the potential to “create new modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of political subjectivity,” a phenomenon he refers to as the “distribution of the sensible” (Politics 3). One might conclude that in contemporary hybrid worlds the distinction between fiction and reality is nothing more than a false [End Page 23] dichotomy, with little relevance to the way in which society experiences the world—or worlds—constantly navigating back and forth across the apparently seamless frontier between virtual and organic spaces. Does our almost constant mobile exposure to screen media mean that we always perceive through some kind of screen, whether real or imagined?

A variation on this debate translates to contemporary theatre studies in Argentina, foregrounding theatre’s privileged capacity, as an embodied form of expression, to explore and expose the theatricality inherent in intersubjective relations, not least of all in the image-conscious arena of politics; reality must be dramatized, or performed, in order to be thought (stripped of its theatrical artifice, that is). Theorist and theatre critic Jorge Dubatti pays close attention to this phenomenon. During the last twenty years, he argues,

el teatro se vio en la obligación de redefinirse por una cantidad de fenómenos. El primer fenómeno es lo que se ha llamado la transteatralización: todo es teatro. Es más teatro el orden social que el teatro mismo y, en ese sentido, el teatro ha sido “superado” por el orden de lo real.

(“El teatro” original emphasis)1

Such ideas echo the well-established work of the symbolic interactionists, who approach social interaction from a dramaturgical perspective, positing that intersubjective relationships can only be understood in terms of their inherent theatricality. As Erving Goffman argued in the 1950s, in the mise en scène of everyday life, society constantly transitions between what he termed the “front” stage (the role we perform socially and the desired appearance that this creates) (32) and the “back” stage (the space in which this role is rehearsed and considered in private) (127).2

More recently, theorists in the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of performance studies have addressed this issue. Coming from an anthropological perspective, performance theorist Richard Schechner articulates this debate in terms of the boundary between what he defines as “aesthetic” performance and “social” performance (192–3). He describes theatre as just one node on a continuum of performance types—both social and aesthetic—pointing to a certain fluidity between these two categories, which incorporate a range of activities including the categories of “sport,” “play,” and “ritual,” alongside artistic forms of performance (xvii).3

From within the field of theatre studies, it is important to note that this exploration of theatricality at large is coupled with a need to reflect upon and redefine theatre’s specificity as a genre and its relationship to this broader...

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