La Grande Guerra fra realtà ed illusione: La Grande Illusion e l’immaginario

Abstract

The aim of this brief essay is to focus on the relation between the meaning of reality and illusion in the movie La Grande Illusion (1937) by Jean Renoir and therefore to find how these ideas of the author may be productive in a thought about the imaginary. After a short look on the movies made at that time on the First World War, there is an overview of the French director poetics, which redefines the conception of the realism, contextualizing its work at the point of convergence of two imaginary “technological lines”, the cinema and the aviation. It follows the analysis of the movie and the illusions, as social largely shared imaginaries, described by the author. In the end it is showed the importance and the of illusion in Renoir’s poetics. Beyond the relationship realityfiction, he thought a dynamic reciprocity among illusion and reality: so that the reality is as “illusion” (a ruled horizon in which it is possible to enjoy a world of play) and the illusion as an activity creating contents of “reality”.