Perfumes and miasma: literary and film olfactographies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.1984-1124.v0i16p61-73Keywords:
Cinema, Literature, Perfume, Olfactography, SüskindAbstract
Fragrance is a difficult object to evoke for both literature and cinema. The purpose of this paper is to describe how writers (particularly Proust) and film directors borrow each other’s ruses and stratagems to write or to show fragrances. But, whereas literature’s use of perfumes denotes a kind of optimism (this is at least what appears from some notes of Roland Barthes), film olfactography seems sometimes to refer to the original sin imaginary (that is the thesis that Michael Powell develops in his film Peeping Tom, 1960), as if the motion picture and the film makers themselves were already born guilty. This imagination (which of course is not cinema’s prerogative, and which Baudelaire, for example, foreshadows) is, mutatis mutandis, that of the novel by Patrick Süskind, Das Parfum (1985, adapted for film in 2006 by Tom Tykwer), which tells the story of an involuntarily matricide child, born in filth and who is a future perfumer/killer.
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