Disappearance
From kidnapping to withdrawal from society, from fantasy comedies to thrillers, this program will explore the mise-en-scene of absence and dissolution.
Georges Méliès' first film, The Vanishing Lady (1896), consists in a fascinating trick: the sudden erasure of a woman by the prestidigitator-director himself. From this founding trick to our own day, cinema has always been haunted by the mysteries of disappearance. This program of twenty films looks beyond the fantastical and illusory territories of Méliès' first gesture, to the political and contemporary legacies of this question of the impossible return, as a timeless capture of our era's mutations.