Ontological Mystery and Spiritual Availability in Nanni Moretti's The Son's Room
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.65828/zy2ra630Keywords:
Ontological mystery, spiritual availability, existential guiltAbstract
The purpose of this paper is to show how Gabriel Marcel's existential philosophy may be used to understand film narratives. The author demonstrates this possibility through an existential reading of Nanni Moretti's award-winning film The Son's Room (2001), using Marcel's concepts of disponibilité and the ontological mystery as the primary hermeneutic tools. The existential reading of the film is furthermore supported by phenomenological analyses of the film protagonist's mode of existence, using the phenomenological categories of materiality, temporality and being-with-others. Though film analyses that make use of Sartre's and Beauvoir's ideas have appeared in recent years, this is the first time a distinctly Marcellian approach to understanding film has been attempted.
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