Cycnos | Volume 28.2 - Le cinéma américain face à ses mythes : une foi incrédule | De la machine hollywoodienne

Résumé :

New York, September 11, 2001 : all the cameras of CNN, soon relayed by the channels from all the world, direct themselves on the two towers of the World Trade Center and give a live account of an unimaginable attack, as if America's mythology were carried out under the amazed eyes of a globalized world. Unimaginable ? A strange feeling of déjà-vu seems to haunt however the TV viewer's own memory of cinema and to blur his/her perception of reality. What does one see then on the screens of the whole world ? The unimaginable truth of a reality or the validation of a memory already fantasized in Hollywood ? Just Like the Movies, an 18-minute short film by Michal Kosakowski, uses fifty-two sequences taken from US blockbusters, all released before the terrorist attacks, and gives thus shape to this feeling of déjà-vu. This article aims to study these visual quotations through the prism of mythification, seen as a dialectics between fiction and reality. Indeed, the uncanny effect felt when confronted with this specular and spectacular pieces of fiction questions our vision of what is real and seems to wear out at the same time the renewal of some American eschatological mythology.

Mots-clés : Michal Kosakowski, 9/11 cinema, mythology, the uncanny, fact and fiction

Date de publication : 2015-06-09