Sublime Objects: the Antinomies of Masculine Sexuality from Fellini to Truffaut

Abstract

When the declared aim of cinema is the sublimation of woman, one can be assured that, at some point, sublimation will fail, and film will start speaking for something radically dissimilar. Directors who hide behind a reassuring fantasy screen so as to avoid confronting Woman, or sexual difference, more often than not end up producing in their films the very deadlock that had initially demanded the intervention of cinematic fantasy. In different ways, European film shows that, as a protective strategy against the nightmarish apparitions of the Real, the investment in sublimation does not necessarily pay off.