Le cinéma américain et le parc jurassique : technologie mystique

Abstract

The American movie industry has undoubtedly lost a large part of its artistic creativity since the beginning of the blockbuster era in the seventies. No doubt Star Wars or Jaws were important movies, but they opened up for the industry an era in which the special effects, the overblown noisy soundtrack and the numerous (and often incoherent) action scenes have become a standard. The question is now to know if there is a way back for American cinema. But such a situation must not prevent an objective analysis of the technological fictions made in Hollywood, those films in which techonology becomes a subject (Jurassic Park) or a power (Mission : Impossible). From Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg has been exploring the connections between technology and the mystical contact with otherwordly forms, the sublime emotion in front of a revelation, revisiting a traditional form of the Hollywood biblical or religious melodrama. Moreover, Jurassic Park takes the dinosaur park as a metaphor for both the power of technology and the power of the image, the power to provoke a mystical revelation. Whether it succeeds in doing so or whether it resolves itself into an enigma, a sign to be decyphered, gives the film its dynamics.