In L’Annonciation Italienne - Une histoire de perspective, Daniel Arasse investigates the perspective technique in Annunciation’s iconography. How could the perspective, a “symbolic form” of a commensurable world, figurate the Incommensurable? In order to answer to this problem, Arasse seeks in the inner of each painting a “perspective disorder” to figurate the divine. The aim of this article is to identify the ways in which cinema faced similar challenge. We will realize that the religious implications are replaced by a media transposition operation: how to rework the spatial dispositive of Annunciation’s painting through filmic means? For this representational dilemma, we will analyse two selected films: The shadows (Jean-Claude Brisseau, 1982) and The strange case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira, 2010).
Annunciation; perspective; The shadows; The strange case of Angelica
