Mimetic Theory and Film

The interdisciplinary French-American thinker René Girard (1923-2015) has been one of the towering figures of the humanities in the last half-century. The title of René Girard's first book offered his own thesis in summary form: romantic lie and novelistic truth [<i>mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque</i>]. And yet for a thinker whose career began by an engagement with literature it came as a shock to some that in <i>La Conversion de l'art</i> Girard asserted that the novel may be an outmoded form for revealing humans to themselves. However Girard never specified what if anything might take the place of the novel. This collection of essays is one attempt at answering this question by offering a series of analyses of films that aims to test mimetic theory in an area in which relatively little has so far been offered. Does it make any sense to talk of <i>vérité filmique</i>?<br/> <br/>In addition <i>Mimetic Theory and Film</i> is a response to the widespread objection that there is no viable Girardian aesthetics. One of the main questions that this collection considers is: can we develop a genre-specific mimetic analysis (of film) and are we able to develop anything approaching a Girardian aesthetic? Each of the contributors addresses these questions through the analysis of a film.